When people says don’t need the government to help poor people, let charity do it they mean: we will shrink the government and starve the charity to.

Upset with the decision, Sister Mary Scullion, Philadelphia’s nationally known homelessness expert, said cutting the program offers “a short-term gain for the state to save money.”

“But there’ll be long-term pain,” she said, “as more people wind up in shelters, resorting to crime to get money for food, then winding up in prisons, now the largest mental hospitals in the United States.”

Scullion said she did not understand why the state was eliminating a chance for people to access federal dollars that would be spent in the region, aiding the local economy. “It’s counterproductive,” she said.

The money that was cut had been used by the Advocacy Project to administer SOAR, a national program that streamlines and significantly speeds the SSI application process, which can normally take as long as two years.

SSI recipients can get as much as $698 a month, often enough to help a person get out of a homeless shelter and into an apartment, experts on homelessness say.

source: Pa. cuts funding for Phila. program for the disabled homeless – Philly.com.

It’s about fiscal sanity as much as voter id is about voter fraud: it’s not. It’s about f*cking people in Democratic voter bases and redirecting federal money towards their voting base.