... or the belief that someone they know requires it for survival cuts off greater support for cutting back the largesse.
This is what I've found most often, and I'll tell you why: because such people do not want to have to pitch in for those -- family? -- who require survival assistance if/when the gummint check stops coming.
And the Leftists call us selfish! What a crock! Nothing is more greedy, more envious and more depraved than a Leftist!
I agree, however, in the cases I reference, they're not leftists; they're usually mostly decent people who just do not want to have to make the necessary and unforeseen sacrifices to their own comfort and that of their children in order to care for another.
Case in point: my uncle, former GM-employee, pension, health insurance bennies, and privately saved retirement money, with an always wayward daughter; drunk/drug addict, he'd had to go collecting her in the wee hours of the morning from the worst places in the heart of Trenton (NJ). After a time, and rehab, she'd gotten some of her act together and married another just like her -- and then they bred. Twice.
They have no future-orientation sense, are very bad with money, have been back on the sauce periodically and have been collecting from the taxpayers in one form or another for the past 25 years. He's thrown them money, helped them get a house ::rollseyes:: but despite his grandson's pleas to let him come live with my uncle, and his mother's okay, Uncle wouldn't take him. And he's perfectly fine with the idea that his daughter always has her hand out for OPM, as long as it isn't on him in the main.
Well, he's more worried about taking care of himself -- his daughter isn't going to and can't -- but he was too selfish to do what he could for his grandson, thus throwing away a possible improvement in his own chances of someone who could and would tend to him when the time came.
Maybe I see it wrong, or I'm too judgmental, or don't know the whole story, I don't know. What I do know is I see too much of this type of thing coming from otherwise "decent" people.
I've already written on this board that we're willing to deal with whatever comes up regarding my parents, knowing there's no younger generation at hand to back us up, but I don't know how many folks have resolved themselves to the same.