Handling Poverty with Opportunity

Open Email to Sen. Cruz:

Dear Sen. Cruz,
Thank you for your form letter on welfare. You said there are more than 80 welfare programs including the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). You also said that you have cosponsored a bill to require SNAP recipients to be employed or be actively seeking employment.
This is a step in the right direction, but there are two things wrong with it. First, it's a bill that's apparently going nowhere and second, it would handle only 1-80th of the various welfare programs.
We are all sympathetic with the difficulties of the poor, but long experience has shown that handouts to the poor do not help to reduce the general state of poverty, primarily because those handouts remove an incentive for the poor to improve their situation themselves.
This is the land of opportunity and the granting of handouts pushes opportunity into the background for a simple reason of human nature. Receiving a handout generally requires no work, although your proposed bill would reduce that to some degree. Exercise of opportunity requires effort of independent action. Human beings by nature all prefer efficiency, and they will take the easiest route to a goal. To reduce poverty, it is necessary to have opportunity be the less difficult course to follow than that of receiving handouts.
The best place to teach this, with its attendant detail, is in high schools. It is ridiculous to require the average high school student to learn calculus, when he has not the slightest idea of how to make a living. He should be taught how to obtain a job or develop an independent line of work which would be profitable. In short, he should be taught how to make money. This is presently not done because of the continued inefficiency of the federal system involving the Department of Education which grants money to school boards only if they follow an ineffectual program of education dictated by the department.
I have said for many years that the Department of Education should be eliminated, which would automatically reduce grants to school boards and allow them to properly apply conditions of education which would be helpful to the average student. I encourage you, as a Senator, to call for elimination of the Department of Education or if that seems impractical to reduce its level of funding to a basis where it is unable to make grants to local school boards and thereby stop controlling the education program.