People on welfare and who have any financial government support should have to work for their money

Pro's thesis is predicated on the assumption that welfare recipients are "lazy" or disinterested in work to a degree sufficient to require a change to current welfare standards. Although I am confident that such individuals exist, the data demonstrates that this characterization does not represent the majority of welfare recipients or even a minority of sufficient size to warrant policy change. $91 out of ever $100 spent on welfare goes to the elderly, disabled, or working households. . http://www.cbpp.org...; />Of that final $9, 50% goes to Medicaid or $4.50. Only 20% or $1.80 goes to cash programs like Earned Income Tax Credits and the Temporary Assistance to Needy Families. Out of that $1.80, 60% or $1.20 goes to children under the age of 18. Of that final .60 cents, 90% or .55 cents goes to single mothers, the majority of which have children under 6 years and a third of whom have a child under 3. Most cash programs already have some work requirements and/or expiration dates. TANF, for example, expires after 5 years and in 2010, only 1.3% of TANF recipients left the program because of expiration, so only a tiny minority of recipients rode out that program to the end. . http://en.wikipedia.org... "In FY 2010, work participation was mandatory for three of every five adult recipients. Overall, 41.6 percent of all TANF adult recipients participated in some type of work activity during the reporting month. Eleven percent of TANF adult recipients met work activity requirements by either being a teen parent attending school or being a single parent with a child under 6 participating for 20 hours per week (parents with children ages 6 and over are required to participate for 30 hours per week). Additionally, ten percent of adult recipients were disregarded from work participation because they were single custodial parents with a child less than 12 months old. 1.6 percent were exempt because of a sanction, 12.6 percent were exempt because of a good cause exception (e. g. , disabled, in poor health, or other), and two percent of adult recipients were exempt from the work participation requirements because they were single custodial parents with a child under age six who did not have access to child care. ". http://www.acf.hhs.gov...Under present benefits, then, roughly 1/20th of 1% of entitlements go to non-elderly, non-children, non-disabled, non-unwed mothers. There don't seem to be good statistics on what portion of that last scrap are too mentally-ill and/or drug-addicted and/or homeless to be readily employed, but my expectation is that would account for sizable majority. So, my first argument is that the amount of money going to actual "moochers," while ultimately an unknown statistic, is demonstrably such a small percentage of welfare money paid out that any government program instituted to track down and force employment would almost certainly be more expensive to taxpayers than the cost of status quo. Further, I would guess that most of the population we would characterize as "moochers" would be generally undesirable as employees for most work, including community jobs like picking up trash, as well as expensive to supervise. Pro's argument is also predicated on the notion that there is always a need for labor, but this is not always so and proves less and less true as technology replaces many labor demands. As Jaron Lanier puts it in "Who Owns the Future? "“Here’s a current example of the challenge we face: at the height of its power, the photography company Kodak employed more than 140,000 people and was worth $28 billion. They even invented the first digital camera. But today Kodak is bankrupt, and the new face of digital photography has become Instagram. When Instagram was sold to Facebook for a billion dollars in 2012, it employed only 13 people. Where did all those jobs disappear? And what happened to the wealth that all those middle-class jobs created? ”Google's current expectation is that privately owned driverless cars will be available in the U. S. by 2017 and commonplace by 2025. When a self-driving 18-wheeler can be operated for $30,000/year without ever having an accident or needing to sleep is available, what jobs will available to the 2 million truck and taxi drivers in the U. S. ?Worse, robotics typically replace the jobs of the least skilled and least educated portions of the work force. Thomas Frey predicts that half of all the current jobs in the world (that's 2 billion) will be replaced by technology by 2030. . http://jobs.aol.com...So my second argument is that there is not enough need for labor to employ every citizen now and the problem is about to get dramatically worse. In the next 20 years, the U. S. is going to have to figure out how to provide basic substinance for huge sectors of the population who may never have a chance at a job. Absent some kind of massive increase in the current welfare program, the U. S. is going to have a sizable, hungry, desperate core of citizens that could destabilize the basic guarantees and comforts of American society. The burden of proof on Pro will be to show that the current incidence of "lazy" welfare recipients represents a significant social problem, that increasing the already significant work requirements for welfare recipients will do more good than harm, and that increasing work requirements is realistic in the face of oncoming labor shortages anticipated by technological advancements.