I work 50hrs a week at an elevator and my wife works around 40 as a Coordinator at an assisted living home. Combined we make well under 90k a year. To do this, we have to send our 3 children to daycare 4 days a week which costs around $1,500 a month. Her work pays 90% of her health insurance, mine covers my entire portion plus a little bonus towards our HSA account.
If this snippet above was the only thing you posted, most people would say you have been doing pretty well for yourself. Both having full time jobs with healthcare mostly paid for, is a pretty fortunate situation.
Daycare is hella expensive, but I imagine that within the next couple of years at least one of your kids will be in school, which should be a relief on your bills.
When you started comparing yourself to others, you saw some bigger problems. We shouldn't necessarily look on people receiving government assistance with any sort of envy, just like we shouldn't try to "keep up with the Joneses" in terms of making expensive purchases we can't afford.
I spent a couple of years working in child protective services, which included working with lots of families in poverty. Helping folks get signed up for social services was no picnic, and whatever money people typically get from welfare, not to mention disability or SSI if they qualify for it, or even the big wad of unearned tax returns they get each year, in addition to whatever other subsidies, free legal help, and a whole team of advocates can provide: there is nothing to envy about people in this situation.
I've seen plenty of folks in dire financial straits making extremely poor decisions with their money and their credit. For example, every trailer home I ever went into contained a humongous flatscreen TV that was at least twice the size of what I have at home. Some people need government services due to a crappy hand they've been dealt, because of mental illness or addiction, because of injury, because of children that need to be cared for, etc. And sometimes there is abuse of the system. Those abuses need to be addressed, and there is a lot of other things that you mentioned that are problematic for a lot of Americans (like the health insurance industry and the cost of healthcare altogether). But otherwise consider yourself lucky in most respects. And being educated on the issues and then voting, is important for everyone.
