" Harrington never worked in a place like this, a system where ‘underbudgeting’ is designed to arbitrarily keep costs down while acting as a defense against public attack. The city and state thus appear magnanimous, politicians fair-minded regulators of the public good . . . until the closed cases lead to starvation, child abuse and suicides at rates so great they arouse the public’s conscience. Then it all starts again— bigger budgets, closer supervision, more MSW programs . . . while the poor are blamed because according to our Puritan tradition of self-reliance those too weak or stupid to contribute get pushed aside, deserve not to survive "

― Philip Schultz , The Wherewithal: A Novel in Verse