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1. Regarding welfare:
Yes, the welfare system *is* designed to turn away all but the most determined (who, in the case of welfare applicants, are the most desperate) -- just as any other government program uses bureaucratic hurdles to fend off idle or casual or insincere or scamming applicants.
2. Regarding the welfare profiteer and those who beg money for drugs/booze, etc.:
These stories are anecdotage, at best; they have parallels in literature going back at least as far as Arthor Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes story "The Man with the Twisted Lip" and even beyond that. To generalize from such stories as a means to justify indifference to the plight of the truly needy, who are not described by these stories, makes no sense.
Moreover, I remember that in the 1770s Samuel Johnson, who knew himself (from his youth) what it was to be poor and to walk the streets of London all night because he was too poor to afford even the filthiest and cheapest "doss house," once gave some coins to a beggar. His friends upbraided him: "Sir, why do you waste your money on him? He will only use it for drink." Johnson responded, "And why, Sir, should he not? Are not the poor also entitled to their pleasures, meager and few as they are?"
3. The debate, such as it is, is premised on a faulty assumption: that those who defend welfare from (i) the well-meant pie-in-the-sky attacks fo grundle and (ii) the equally well-meant and honest exasperation of Tick and (iii) the slimy, dishonest viciousness of X-MAN believe that welfare is some sort of positive good and wondrous thing that everyone ought to have. No. Welfare, such as it is, is the grudging and reluctant provision that society and government (which is us, by the way) make for those who run into serious trouble and cannot get out of it unassisted. Most welfare recipients, as several people pointed out on this and the previous threads devoted to this issue, are temporarily in trouble. The generational poor are a small proportion of those who receive welfare.
4. I'm glad that so far we have not heard the classic anecdotage (beloved of Ronald Reagan in the late 1970s and early 1980s) about welfare mothers whose hair is meticuluosly coiffed and who drive to the supermarket in Cadillacs to buy vodka with their food stamps.
5. X-MAN, you are an irredeemably slimy bastard.
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