Again, though, that's a micro level solution that doesn't extrapolate up to a broader scale. We will ALWAYS need more unskilled workers than degreed professionals and skilled tradespeople. The jobs that people talk about as not being worth a livable wage make up a large share of our overall workforce - retail accounts for 12% of American jobs, food service another 8%, home health aids 3% - and these are all growing sectors (and I'm not including those that are hard to pin down numbers on, like gas station cashiers which the BLS lumps in with mechanic in the "transportation service" category or construction general labor which gets lumped in with skilled tradespeople). Isn't it worth considering that maybe it isn't feasible to just write off 20+% of the population as not deserving of wages that will support even a subsistence lifestyle?
Based on past elections it appears that about half the people in this country have a view that the govt should help people that can't take care of themselves.. If those people start giving the same amount to their church/charity as what we could reduce taxes by thats 50% of the welfare needed right there.. Toss in the amount of money the fed govt could save by not needing so many employees running these programs and that the churches/charities are going to do a much better jobs of singling out the people cheating the system, and its now pretty close to a wash..
Does that all look good?
You're missing one key point - many of the people who are the strongest supporters of basic-needs charities (as opposed to the arts, college/private school endowments, medical causes, etc) are those with the least to give. And in times like these, when the middle and working classes are getting hammered by the economy, giving falls while need increases.
And if we're looking to reduce spending, there are other areas that could and should be cut long before basic aid to our own populace both for moral and practical reasons. We give away 30B/year to third world nations. We have the largest military budget in the world - fully six times that of China, ten times Russia's, 14 times that of the UK - most of which isn't devoted to protecting our own borders but rather to enforcing/upholding a sort of corporate imperialism in our "allies" overseas. And on a more worst-case level, I think the anti-welfare arguments lose site of the fact that a hungry, desperate population gets you what is going on in Egypt and Tunisia right now.