I'm from the South. I'm also a high school dropout. I won't go into the various vices I've had over the years since, but suffice to say there have been many. After dropping out and putzing around my hometown for a few years, I did a few years in the Army, then a couple of years as a contractor. I traveled the world for a while, and when the money ran out, I decided to go back to school and to get serious about it. For the last few years, I've busted my ass working and going to school full time. I started in remedial math, and last semester, i finished the last of the core math/science classes necessary to be awarded a degree in engineering. I have a very high GPA as a result of all of my hard work, and I'll be transferring to a top ten school next fall to finish up the last few years.

I have an old friend, one I used to share vices with back during our high school days. While I was doing time in the Army, he was learning a trade. After spending a few years in that trade, he felt that he'd become good enough at it to strike out for himself. He focused on making the customer happy, and did the best job he possibly could, every time. Fast forward to today, and he now makes six figures a year.

In five years, I'll be making six figures too. We took different paths to get there, but we will both move up at least one layer on the socioeconomic strata within our lifetimes. Neither of us were lucky. We were both born poor. He's half black, half native American. My parents divorced when I was young, and I grew up in a single-parent household in a bad neighborhood. The common thread between us is that we were both willing to work hard to move up. The American Dream is alive, but you have to work for it. People just don't want to work for it.

I have a few other friends, people I've also known since high school. They're good people, but they have almost zero ambition. One guy still lives with his father, in the ghetto. Another lives in the house his grandfather left him, which is falling down around him due to lack of maintenance. The former has been unemployed for years and plays online poker all day. The latter works and has a decent job, but he spends it all on premium beer, video games, and movies. Neither are likely to move up very far in life. Both are very intelligent, white males. They're just lazy. They just choose to be lazy.

Economists (and others) tend to think that given the opportunity, people will choose to work hard, to get out of poverty, to move up in life, rather than to stay poor and be lazy. Well, I grew up in the ghetto - I still live there, in fact - and my experience tells me otherwise. Most people aren't there because they lack opportunity, they're there because availing themselves of the opportunities they do have is hard work.

I have another friend. She's the mother of some of my old friends. She still lives in the same house, which is near where I live now. I visit her regularly, and she's always telling me about her financial woes. She doesn't have any skills to speak of, but she's worked all of her life. Her husband left her when her kids were young, and she put in a solid 20 years raising them (and still helps them today). She never had much of a chance to move up in life because she was busy with kids, and now that she's older, she's wondering how she's going to be able to afford to retire. She deserves help, in my opinion, and if I ever strike it rich, I'm going to be sure that she doesn't have to worry any more.

The problem is that a government agency cannot separate the people who are or have been willfully lazy their entire lives from those who have legitimately tried, so it ends up having to treat everyone the same. This is the ultimate problem with welfare, and no matter how you reform it, it will always be a problem. In order to help the few who do deserve help, you're going to have to help the many who don't. Such is life.