In a perfect world, this wouldn't be a political subject -- but this is not a perfect world, judging by the trending hashtags we're seeing. So when everyone hates taxes and budget deficits, people getting "welfare" (the generic term for government assistance, food stamps, etc for the poor) become political footballs. And that is a polite way of saying that they get treated like shit to serve somebody else's agenda.

But in a world full of stories about freeloaders buying lobster with food stamps, the implications seem to be that the poor are actually living better than the hard-working folks in line with them at the grocery store. Well, we're going to confess a bias here: we're fairly certain that being poor actually does suck quite a bit (and being homeless sucks even more). This honestly doesn't seem like a radical position to take.

Still, to try to get some perspective from within the system, we tracked down three welfare office employees -- Kyle, Melinda, and Rhys -- to try to get to the bottom of this whole thing. They said ...