I know a guy who used to get food stamps from Missouri. Side note: he also got them from Illinois at the same time via fraud for a while, but I digress. He was single, lived with his parents (but labeled himself as homeless when he needed to qualify for certain benefits), educated (senior in college then dropped out), and a hipster (so into food porn). He used to take people to the store, buy them whatever groceries they wanted up to about $200, and then the other person would buy him whatever booze, cigarettes, or drugs he wanted to equal that amount. He’d keep the extra $50 for himself to buy groceries (organic baby arugala salad, lobster, and organic lemons, when I went to the store with him once).
It isn’t hard to “sell” the benefits with the card. I still think $250+ is ridiculous for a single male to receive for food in the midwest.
Regarding the original question of the post - I have met one woman who said she needed to have another kid to bump up her benefits. This was about 6 or 7 years ago and she was in her early twenties. From this thread it sounds like that isn’t the case, but nevertheless some people do still believe it. Keep in mind some people aren’t the most educated in the room and they certainly don’t know how to balance a checkbook - so they may equate a higher tax refund with their kids despite one having nothing to do with the other.
Yes and no. If the benefit stops being universal, then it can slowly be shaved away and the public does not care. Consider that public schools have deteriorated in some areas because the people who care can send their kids to private or parochial schools, so they don’t care if the standards are poor or the money is insufficient.
Similarly, once the child benefit is not paid over a certain income level - then with inflation and cost-cutting, that benefit is paid to fewer and fewer parents and the amount is smaller and smaller. This is fine if you think that families should not get government assistance, but if the amount is too small and irrelevant, why was it created in the first place?
Another issue is that modern cut-throat economies have made it so cost-prohibitive to have children, that modern first-world societies are reproducing below replacement level. To enjoy a decent lifestyle today, the average couple needs for both of them to work full time. The costs of raising a child - day care and maternity leave, medical care, time off work, university tuition - are so high, many people chose to have zero or at most one child. Cutting the benefit to working class families with the argument “your household income is too high” is simply feeding this demographic collapse. it does not take much for a working couple to hit the $100,000 income level - if one has a pretty good job, that can do it. 10 years rom now, when incomes and expenses are higher, will that threshold also be raised - or will bracket creep eliminate many more working couples?
The other issue is what I see as the “Margaret Thatcher and milk for schoolkids” problem. Before Thatcher, the poor in Britain got a lot of interesting benefits - one was free milk for school age children. IIRC they got free or subsidized butter. There’s the usual list, like subsidized public housing. Apparently the list of benefits was substantial. Each of these came with a means test - get a job, get too much of a raise, and all these interesting extras start to disappear. In the USA from what I’ve read, below a certain income level, you get medical care free. What’s that worth? The net result was that although income was low on welfare, the lifestyle perks could be a lot better, and the “common wisdom” was that welfare people turned down jobs that would lose them all these perks. Margaret Thatcher made a point of eliminating these perks, hence she was the woman who stole milk from schoolkids.
True or not, the problem is that by creating a mess of piecemeal and unconnected benefits, you also create the potential that the aggregate welfare benefit could be better than work.
Now that TANF has a 5-year lifetime limit, lots of people are scamming SSI by claiming that their kids have “bipolar disorder” (this is almost impossible to diagnose before adulthood, let alone puberty, and don’t get me started on the people who say their 2-year-olds have it and the doctors who go along with it) or say they have back pain or they’re getting it to feed their alcohol and drug addictions. :mad:
This is why people who need it have such a hard time getting it.
So if they only give enough to cover necessities, then people on welfare probably wouldn’t be incentivized just keep having babies to get more money.
Knowing this, why do they set themselves up for a very big let down and very big setback in life then? Why would anyone do that? What is the benefit? It’s apparently not welfare-- so what is it? To reproduce? Start a family, even if it’s probably not time? Mistake? Intentional, but just bad planning? To say that they have it hard because they’re a single mother working and going to school? What are the reasons? Everyone’s cost/benefit analysis is different and everchanging?
Divorce and splitting up. Is this the cause for most single motherhood? Any statistics out there available?
So if they only give enough to cover necessities, then people on welfare probably wouldn’t be incentivized just keep having babies to get more money.
Knowing this, why do they set themselves up for a very big let down and very big setback in life then? Why would anyone do that? What is the benefit? It’s apparently not welfare-- so what is it? To reproduce? Start a family, even if it’s probably not time? Mistake? Intentional, but just bad planning? To say that they have it hard because they’re a single mother working and going to school? What are the reasons? Benefit somehow outweighing the cost? None of anyone else’s business? Tradition, somehow?
Divorce or splitting up causing single motherhood-- without child support? Any statistics available?
Of course you and I know that, if welfare paid an additional $40/month for each child (for example), it would not make financial sense to have more children. But many on welfare are very illiterate when it comes to finances, and they simply think, “An extra $40/month is an extra $40/month.”
In the county where I live, If you are a childless, homeless person, they put you in a shelter and the nearest women’s shelter is 30 miles away. If you have a child they put you in a local hotel. I can see an incentive for someone to have a baby just to get out of the shelter. I know people with kids who have lived in a hotel for over a year.
On trend seems to be that if one of your children is about to age out of benefits, ie, turn 18, some people on the system will have another child to replace it. I know that sounds callous. There are many people “on the system” in the small southern town where I live. Section 8 housing units are found all over the county.
I don’t have a cite for this situation but I’m just saying this is where that general idea came from. I’m not sure if there is that much truth to it or if it is just a negative stereotype in the form of a Rumor.