This topic is probably pretty dead until the Democrats regain control, and even then, it is probably still dead: welfare. It's something that crossed my mind recently, though. Being rather young at the time, I don't remember too much of the debate and policy decisions that lead to the breaking up of the system.
At the time, I understood that people were getting money for not working. It made sense that we couldn't let people starve, but it did not make sense to me that people could perpetually be out of work (and lazy?) and still make money. Granted, that money was very little, but still, they seemed like a drain.
Clinton persued a policy of moving welfare to the state level with the caveat that you had to be training for a future job and that the duration that you were on welfare was limited. The states took up the task, and we didn't hear much about it after that.
Later on, I thought that welfare was probably a good thing and that maybe Clinton saw the writing on the wall. He somehow knew that Republicans would continue to gain power and that they would kill the whole thing. Clinton intervened and made it so weak that it wouldn't be worth killing for the Republicans. Imagine Bush and today's congress deciding welfare's fate; it would be even worse.
Still, I can' help but to think that weakening the welfare system was a bad thing to begin with and a wrong decision on Clinton's part. Now, I know that Clinton was not the paragon of economic progressivism, but one might think that he would know better.
Anyway, I came to realize that liberals and progressives never explained welfare to me. They might reference FDR's programs, but when I would point out that there was an unbelievably high unemployment rate (by America's standards) in FDR's day, they have no explanation for its existance today. Racism comes up, but while right-wing rhetoric against welfare uses racism, I fail to see the liberal justification for welfare. Still, intuitively, I felt that welfare was the right thing to do. Intuition, though, is what people use to counter same-sex marriage, and that is unacceptable.
Finally, last week, I came up with a justification on my own. Someone may have used it, but given that I've not read or seen it written anywhere, I have to assume that it is at least not a well distributed reasoning. All major theories of capitalism require some level of unemployment to work. If a government wisely chooses to embrace capitalism as its economic system, then it owes it to its unemployed to support them. It's simple and concise. I need no other explanation. There is a sense of justice and also a promotion of good economic policy.