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Re:Norway to track all supermarket purchases? by hutzlibu on Saturday June 04, 2022 @12:09PM (#31622038)
This might be, because the programs are often not helpful. Here in germany I know stories of how asking for help mainly resulted in the children taken away (and cared for badly).

It depends on the area and the people working on it, I also know of good institutions, but I can see, why the so called underclass is sceptical of the common state institutions.

Most help that comes, comes with hard obligations, that mainly keep them down. Give a struggeling person a bunch of paperwork to fill out and he or she will just struggle more. And only once they are down enough, they get a certain label and then they get a more or less competent government helper, putting them totally into dependent state. Most have accepted their state as retarded by then and rarely make it up again.

Re:Norway to track all supermarket purchases? by leksak on Saturday June 04, 2022 @12:43PM (#31622491)
I remember this one time when I had a hard time making ends meet so I got a housing subsidy which made me be able to afford rent at the time. This was more or less the first 6 months of that year. After that I got a job, and cancelled my subsidy the moment I started my employment. I got "back debt" and had to pay back a substantial amount of the subsidy I've gotten (remember: without it, I wouldn't have made rent routinely). Effectively, while paying back that debt, as a gainfully employed person - I had less money at the end of each month (after paying rent that is) than while on the subsidy (after paying rent).

I did feel kept down at that time.