The US government should end welfare

Thank you Strikeeagle84015, for making this a challenging debate. Now, on to your arguments... R1: Pro claims that welfare money is being spent on having fun, because there are other programs which pay for things like food and healthcare. This is not necessarily true. First of all, owning a car is very expensive, and in most states, there are no programs to aid people in paying for gasoline, car insurance, and maintenance costs. Second, food stamps only pay for food. They are not allowed to be spent on things like soap, laundry detergent, toothpaste, cleaning supplies, diapers and other miscellaneous items.[1] R2: Pro dismisses my second argument as a red herring. He says that subsidies to business are irrelevant. This is a strawman argument. It's a distortion of my true meaning. The only reason I mentioned subsidies to business was to strengthen my point about equality, which was: "Ending welfare would violate the equality principles that the Declaration of Independence and Universal Declaration of Human Rights are based on." R3: Pro compares the crime rates and percentages of people on welfare in California and Utah. This is comparing apples and oranges. Utah and California are culturally different, have different rates of gang membership, one is more urban, one is more rural, etc.[2] They are not comparable. California has higher crime rates for reasons besides welfare. D1: Pro begins by trying to separate justice from morality. He contends that "Justice is the quality of conforming to the law". This is unconvincing to me for two reasons. First, there are many ideas about what justice means. His interpretation is not the only one. There is also an idea that justice is fairness.[3] So, I was not wrong to say that ending welfare could be more unjust than continuing it. Second, I believe laws are just a set of rules based on our collective morality. We believe it's morally wrong to murder, so we make laws against it. It's impossible to separate laws and justice from morality. D1a: Pro continues to insist that welfare is equal to theft. I've already explained that they are different. People do not consent when they are robbed. They do consent (as a collective) to taxes and welfare spending. Pro also says that welfare violates peoples' property rights. Again, he is ignoring the role of consent. If I give someone a gift, have my property rights been violated? No, of course not. D1b: Pro asks whose morality the government should use when writing laws. As I've explained above, law is based on morality. There is no way to separate the two. Throughout his whole debate, you have been saying that your version of morality is the one that should control what the government does. You have a belief that it's always morally wrong to violate property rights. I don't share that belief. If a starving person stole some food from a store I owned, I wouldn't have a big problem with it. In my opinion, that person's right to live is more important than my property rights. D2a: Pro says that welfare is a large part of the budget, so it contributes to the deficit. Again, I disagree that welfare is the main cause of our budget deficit. The main causes are: 1. Low tax revenue. 2. Mismanagement of social security funds. 3. Constantly increasing healthcare costs, which make Medicare and Medicaid more expensive. 4. An extremely bloated military budget. 5. Bailouts to banks. [4] D2b: Touchï¿½. But the point was that there is no danger of a permanent welfare class developing. The checks are just not big enough for people to want to do that. 1. http://www.gettingfoodstamps.org... 2. http://www.statemaster.com... 3. http://en.wikipedia.org... 4. http://upload.wikimedia.org...