Giver

Each of you must give as you have made up your mind, not reluctantly or under compulsion, for God loves a cheerful giver. 

 - From 2 Corinthians 9

It's not so much a question of whether or not people should help those less fortunate than themselves, sometimes known as "the poor." That's indisputable. We should help the less fortunate. In a healthy and functional society, we would be well-acquainted with the reasons to be charitable:

• Because some day you might need help
• Because there is a surplus of resources (cash, food, clothing, housing) that must not go to waste
• Because we don't want people to become resentful against us
• Because charity is actually investments that come back to benefit the Giver
• Because God told us to

There's no question. We should be charitable. When we serve others, we all benefit. The unselfish person receives back many times over, what they gave. We are wired to feel good when we give, (this topic of feeling "good" is something I would like to investigate later). 

So, nobody argues this. At issue are . . . how to give; to whom to give; when to give; how much to give.

The questions that we never ask, but that we should ask, in a society that lauds "science" as much as ours does, in 2020, include the following: 

• What is/are the objective(s) of our giving?
• How do we know that our giving is working? (What are our metrics?)
• What happens when we achieve or surpass our giving?
• Is there an end-game? Is there a point when we say "Okay, that problem's solved, let's move on to another"?

We're stuck in partisan nonsense, because we never ask these questions. This bespeaks a bigger problem - we'd rather be mad at each other. We quite prefer winning elections and lording it over The Other. We think it feels better to be mad and cynical, than actually to help a person that actually needs help. 

If we really cared about God's position on all of it, we would see that He wishes us to give cheerfully. This means that, if a person hates paying taxes for social programs, because s/he can demonstrate that it's wasteful, we should support that person in attaining lower taxes, and then join with them in direct assistance to the needy. 

It seems the height of cruelty and petulance, to insult and degrade a person for preferring direct aid to the poor, over government bureaucracies. 

It's really quite simple.