Yeah there are @ssh0les everywhere.
There are also good people going unrecognized everywhere.
There is waste of tax money.
There is also waste of private-sector money.
And waste of charitable money.
And before we scorn tax money too much, we should look around us and imagine our lives without tax-supported infrastructure or services. Some of that $$ gets spent well. (Sure, a /few/ people can live in backwoods self-reliance, but that's not an option for most individuals or for society as a whole.) The trouble with money is you can't /throw/ it, you have to /spend it carefully/, and somehow people in charge of the big bucks rarely seem to manage that.
There are people who just want to feed at the public trough.
There are people who are so damn tired they can't even imagine what they might do if they got a chance.
There are people who have made so many bad choices in a row that bad choices are almost baked in.
There are people who with just one or two good choices could get their feet on a solid good path.
And there are people who have worked so god damned hard for so heartbreakingly long, to better themselves or give their kids a chance, and get slapped down for no reason by oblivious idiots (or worse), and get up and try again, until they can't anymore.
And if you or I think we know which is which just by looking at 'em for a couple of minutes, we are fools.
There is no such thing as a system that works perfectly. There will always be some waste, and some people who fall through the cracks. The goal should be to minimize that, as fairly as possible. In my opinion, you get the farthest the fastest if you focus on actions and consequences rather than speculating about people's inner lives. Yes that will mean some deserving people lose out, but you cannot save everyone and we are not saving everyone now.
As far as what "people" want, I have no clue. We seem to be a mass of contradictions. I'm gonna make one generalization about "people" here, though. I spent the first two years of my retirement trying like hell to find a good volunteer gig working for refugees and migrants. It was a fiasco, and I am now trying to pull my health and finances back out of that vast sucking sound you hear when your plans go south
![Er... what? o_O o_O](data:image/gif;base64,R0lGODlhAQABAIAAAAAAAP///yH5BAEAAAAALAAAAAABAAEAAAIBRAA7)
(no biggie, still better off than most). BUT. What I DID see -- aside from waste and dysfunction and cavalier treatment of volunteers -- during the few precious days/weeks that I actually got to do any work -- was people ready to work their tails off at the drop of a hat. Seriously, any time there was work that a client could do, they jumped at it. Whether it was a question of helping the shelter staff or supporting each other, they were ON it, with energy and flair and focus. I haven't talked about this much b/c I know it can easily get too political -- so please don't take it there -- but I will say this once: these people can be a huge resource.
There are more than enough of the other kind. But there are also people, both home grown and fresh off the bus, who are ready to pay back any handout/hand-up 100-fold.