Compassion With Guardrails

Why We Can Afford Our Promises If We Choose To

About twenty five years ago, I relied on food stamps.

That is not a confession. It is context.

Public assistance did exactly what it was supposed to do. It kept my kids fed while I did the work of getting back on my feet. It was temporary. It was purposeful. It worked.

That is why I believe in public assistance and social welfare. A functioning society does not let children go hungry because life went sideways. But those systems were never designed to be permanent lifestyles, nor were they meant to tolerate fraud at the expense of people who also need help.

And yes, that line matters.

Right now, we are hemorrhaging money through fraud, waste, and abuse across public assistance, social welfare, and international aid systems. Billions (likely Trillions) vanish into the bureaucratic ether and are quietly written off as the cost of compassion. Oversight is optional. Accountability is negotiable.

Until it is not.

Because when the conversation turns to military survivors, suddenly every dollar must be justified down to the penny.

For years, Congress has said that increasing Dependency and Indemnity Compensation from 43% to 55% of what a single 100% permanently and totally disabled veteran receives would cost too much. That phrase has been enough to stall progress indefinitely.

So instead, surviving spouses and families are told to absorb the gap. Widows are expected to stretch less into more. Children of fallen service members are asked to live with promises that came with fine print.

That is not fiscal responsibility. That is selective restraint.

And this is where the argument usually derails. Any mention of accountability is labeled heartless. Any push for reform is framed as cruelty.

That framing is lazy.

We can have compassion with guardrails. We can protect safety nets without letting them become black holes. We can care about people and still demand systems that work as intended.

What we cannot keep doing is pretending this is a budget problem.

It is not.

It is a priorities problem.

We find room for waste but not for widows. We tolerate inefficiency but balk at honoring commitments. We talk endlessly about cost while ignoring the debt already owed.

If we can afford dysfunction, we can afford to keep our promises.

And if we cannot manage that, the issue is not the math.

It is the will.