Um… it seems pretty obvious to me, although I hope that others chime in. “Minimum wage” is not a living wage. It’s not that welfare is so great, but that the amount of money many people are making is so very inadequate.
Those figures are pretax figures - so that isn’t the benefits they are receiving, but what they would have to earn to get that level of benefits.
It appears those benefits include housing assistance. It is my understanding that most people on food stamps aren’t section 8, but I could be mistaken.
Also, “welfare” in the sense of ongoing cash payments for nothing other than being poor by and large does not exist any more in the US. What those statistics seem to be doing is counting up all of the individual food, housing, healthcare, etc programs available in those states. The vast majority of people are not going to qualify for all or possibly even most of those benefits.
1st point was simply (and I think they are admitting this - and I’m not saying it not fair) that they are taking the value of the benefits - lets say $20.00 an hour - and figuring out what income you would need before taxes to net that - so maybe $25.00 an hour.
Also
Healthcare isn’t cheap. They are using 2 kids and one woman as their standard “family” in that one paper I linked. That in and of itself is expensive. Combine that with section 8 housing - and your starting to talk some real money. I believe their stock family made no money - and section 8 takes a portion of your income (not 100% sure) - so in this case - the subsidy would be counted 100%
This can be over $1000 in some areas and almost - maybe even a tiny bit over $2000 a month in some others.
Of course I’m sure our thoughtful and caring friends at the Cato Institute are saying that this shows how luxuriously the lazy leeches on welfare are living, but some others might interpret it as a shocking example of how poorly teachers (and minimum wage workers) are paid.
So what is a starting teacher’s salary in some less-than-union-friendly states? A relative once told me (in the 90’s) that Idaho started not much over $20,000. That’s the equivalent of $10/hr for a year-round occupation.
The problem is that “welfare” is a collection of programs, each with different eligibility requirements, often based on more than just income or assets. And people don’t even have the same definition of which programs should be called “welfare.” So this entire collection of “stats” is absolutely useless.
The CATO-sourced numbers actually come from this analysis, which was written in 1995. So, they’d be out of date no matter what, but they predate the Clinton welfare retrenchment of 1996, which narrowed welfare entitlement and benefits significantly, so now they’re hopelessly out of date. The recipient-by-race statistics also appear to be out of date, but that may be because they’re counting Hispanics as a separate group.
For a full-time 12-month job, $27,500 is about $13.22 an hour.
Mind you, that’s “average” - Boise is apparently about $31,000 which means some other districts are significantly below this.
Politicians buying votes. Plain and simple. One of the rallying cries of the Democrats in Illinois is that the Republicans will cut your welfare while we’ll increase it.
Which is odd because there is welfare in almost every country that can afford it, even ones that don’t know about democrats or republicans. It basically comes from the “well of general human decency” which every social movement from Christianity to socialism subscribes to - that a rich, well off society can spare some of its riches to ensure even the most wretched of its members don’t freeze and starve in the dark. There’s a quote somewhere in there about camels and needles, especially when you hear people complain about tax levels for people making over $400,000.
Basically, there is a certain practical logic to this too - it’s never a good idea to have poor and desperate people roaming the streets looking for food or whatever they can grab. The Victorian era demonstarted that locking up the poor in poorhouses, and hanging them for stealing pennies or loaves of bread (or an extended cruise and Australian holiday), did not solve social problems.
Of course, teachers only work about 10 months out of the year. In some schools/districts, you have a choice between getting 12 equal monthly paychecks or 10 checks only during the months you work. And if teachers are working for the cash, they’re in the wrong job. The real money is in the benefits and retirement. The box 12 DD code on 2012 W-2s is a real eye-opener for a lot of people, who are just now realizing that their health insurance often costs as much as their wages.
I don’t mean this to de-rail the thread in any way, except to illustrate that it’s not so simple to compare income and benefits. If you reduce “welfare” to an hourly rate the way the original statistics have, then also have to increase teacher salaries dramatically, to reflect all of their non-taxable benefits.
They usually also include the EIC in those amounts. Not sure if that is one of the things they are counting in these statistics but it is probable they are.