MorahRach, it’s not exactly accurate to say that Obama ended the work requirement. He issued guidelines which gave states more flexibility in deciding upon work requirements. This is a reasonable thing to do, because the strict requirements of welfare were in many cases (based on social-scientific studies I’ve read) making people’s lives miserable.
For example, did you know that women receiving TANF benefits are often forbidden from going to college or taking job training courses? Instead, they’re often forced to take dead-end minimum-wage jobs that will never allow them become self-sufficient or rise out of poverty.
According to Rambam, the highest level of tzedakah is helping someone become self-sufficient. So why should the government prevent poor people from doing the only things they can (getting job training or a college education) to become self-sufficient? Certainly, people who are able to work should do so, but that doesn’t mean that, in every case, impoverished women need to put their 6 week old baby in a low-quality daycare so they can work a minimum-wage dead-end job, in order to keep their (temporary) government benefits.
More generally, Romney/Ryan promise to make huge cuts in social spending, including such things as unemployment insurance, food stamps and health insurance for poor uninsured children. That will certainly make a lot of people’s lives worse. As has been noted by others in the CoffeeRoom, all the gedolim in Israel support parties that always oppose cuts to government spending on the poor. That spending needs to be done intelligently, of course. But Romney’s plan to just slash it like crazy (to finance huge tax cuts for the rich no less!) is just not acceptable, in my view.
About Israel, you may be right, but I don’t think that’s a good enough reason to vote for someone whose domestic policies are so bad. Anyway, there’s so much pressure among policy elites for the president to push Israel around and tell it what to do that I think Romney would still end up playing the same general role (as did Bush).