One of the biggest problems with government 'safety nets' is that they are inherently 'one size fits all'. In a country like the Netherlands, where there is not a lot of demographic variation, this is fine. But the US is 20% black, 15% hispanic, and 5% oriental (iirc, and very rough numbers) and has people like Jesse Jackson who make a living sowing distrust and pitting the races against each other. This encourages abuses and severely hinders making corrections to any flaws in the system, assuming any one system could be workable across such a diverse population. And that's only by race - We probably have more religious diversity and other forms of diversity that are less significant, but still contribute to our being much less homogeneous than most (all?) other countries studied.