Iirc, someone upthread wrote $667/month was the most anyone could get from welfare. That’s $8004/year.
Where can I get such a fat rent subsidy? I may want to retire there. That sounds too good to be true… hmmm.
Cousins kid gets child support for one kid (she won’t reveal the names of the fathers of the other 2, if she knows) welfare, and sponges off parents and grandparents. DCFS is involved so I infer the government gives her enough so the kids don’t starve.
Lives for free in a trailer house that should have been condemned 10 years ago. Her brother steals, I suspect when she needs something bad enough she does too. Might ‘put out’ for the BF of the week too for a little $, might explain why she doesn’t name the 2 fathers.
To her credit, one problem (only one, AFAIK) is she has never had a drug problem. However, I\it is hard to imagine someone screwing up her life (and the 3 kids lives) willfully and with the clarity of mind that comes from not being a doper.
Her family is mortified (of course) vet they never do any tough love at all. Neither does the state. If it was up to me, the 2 unknown fathers would be known, and paying, or sitting in jail, their choice.
This is actually a problem, IMO. I know someone who manages to somehow use social security, welfare, government housing, drug rehab programs and God knows what else to survive. He isn’t a queen so far as I know. The truth is that, if you are clever enough and willing to work hard enough at it you can live off the system. Why anyone would be willing to do that is another story. But in the end, they aren’t robbing us hard working people of anything more than chump change, they are really robbing the less clever and less ruthless people who just need some assistance.
On the other hand, I know someone who managed, through some loophole, to get two full government retirements plus full social security. And he complains about welfare queens sponging off the system.
It would be nice to see the huge array of government programs brought under one umbrella so that both of these types of abuse could be better controlled.
To me, that’s an argument for increasing the scope of the federal government and reducing the scope of state and local governments.
That was a claim from some website about averages, not maximums. More importantly, it was about AFDC (TANF) & foodstamps only, not about the total from all programs.
In NJ, last I checked, the HUD rules were that you paid 30% of your income for rent. Anything above that was paid by HUD. How big of a place you were entitled to rent depended on family size (& the gender of your kids).
[As a practical matter, this made people on HUD insensitive to the price of rent, which pushed rents up a lot in places with a lot of people on HUD, so that the people whose taxes paid the rent for HUD renters and themselves were hit with a double-whammy. At some point the rules tightened a bit, so that you could only rent places within X% percentile of rent at that apartment size. But it was still pretty generous.]
What’s of additional significance here is that welfare payments do not count as income. So if you made $1K a month in income, you have to pay $300 in rent and the rest gets subsidized. But if you do no work and get the same $1K a month from programs, you have no income for this purpose and pay nothing at all for rent.
You do realize that subsidized housing is limited, correct? In my area the waiting list is 10 years long. You have to wait 10 years to get subsidized housing - where you live in the meanwhile I don’t know.
See, that’s the thing - not all benefits are equally available. Yes, there ARE being whose housing is being subsidized. If they were lucky enough to get on the list 10 years ago. That doesn’t help someone who falls through the cracks now. It also accounts for how you can wind up with 15 people living in a four room apartment - the apartment might be subsidized for the person on the lease, but the rest of the family - who have grown up in the the past decade or so - can’t get subsidized housing for themselves so they stay home. Or get 8 roommates. Or something else of the sort.
My housing is “subsidized” in that, because I am physically capable of doing maintenance work, and smart enough to be trusted with tools and other sharp objects, my landlord gives me a break on the rent. Not everyone is able to to that. Let’s get real here - he can really only do that with one resident per building, the others have to bring in real money for rent. It’s a privately negotiated arrangement, which may be terminated by the landlord at any time. If that happens, I wind up losing nearly everything I own (what I haven’t already sold to pay bills) and living in my sister’s basement in Buffalo. At least my sister and father have repeatedly assured us that should anything happen to me my husband will be equally welcome to accept the same offer - which beats the hell out of being out on the street - as he is NOT physically capable of doing such maintenance work and thus would not have that option. He would be told, at best, “wait ten years for housing”.
This is one of the reasons we have homeless people in this country.
So even if a program exists, even if there appears to be a safety net, there may still be gaping holes in it. That is yet another reason I doubt the existence of large numbers of welfare queens outside of actual fraud - which is a criminal offense, by the way, and not simply “laziness”.
I am just going with the premise of the OP
By definition, the long term welfare recipient that “does” need welfare ISNT at leech. And the one that “doesnt” is.
I’ll leave it to you guy’s to decide what meets that spec…
Though I make the observation that IMO the folks on either end of the spectrum that virtually deny the existence of one or the other needs to get back to the real world.
Assuming you were refering to me, yeah, I guess that is correct. I haven’t fully thought out my master plan yet.
The fact that there are programs at so many levels, especially if you include things like private charities, means the system is open to abuse from the clever and difficult to navigate for the less clever. The less clever are the ones who need the most help.
I forgot to mention that, sorry.
The slots for this program are limited, although it’s not nearly 10 years where I live. More like 5 years or so.
The thing is that this actually means that the program is geared more toward the long term recipient (aka “welfare queen”) versus the person who is temporarily down on his or her luck. The welfare queen waits out the five years and then keeps slot forever. The temporarily indigent person will never get a slot.
Also, your assertion about overcrowded housing due to the shortage of slots is only partially correct, at least where I live.
I imagine it varies by locale, but here’s how it works in my area. Everyone applying for a slot gets a number in the same line, regardless of family size. Now a one bedroom slot opens up. They look for the lowest number on the list who is eligible for a one bedroom slot, and he gets that slot. Now a two bedroom slot opens up. They look for the lowest number who is eligible for a two bedroom slot - and this includes people already in one bedroom apartments, who never lost their old slot. And so on. The higher the number of bedrooms, the slower the line moves, because fewer people are growing out of the larger apartments. So in theory, if your family grows very rapidly, you could end up overcrowded. But generally, the line doesn’t move that much slower than people’s families are growing.
[One thing that’s weird and bureaucratic is that you cannot get your initial subsidy unless you fit the available slot at that time. I know someone who was on line for a one bedroom slot and had a child (thus becoming eligible for a 2BR) while still on line. Then his number came up and he was happy that he was finally going to get the subsidy. But then the caseworker found out that he had this kid. Now he was eligible for a 2BR apt. And the 2 BR line was behind. So he was disqualified and had to wait another year and a half or so until his number came up on the 2 BR line.
Still, once you get a slot, you don’t lose it due to family size.]
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The charities are there to cover the gaps of the official programs, or to tide people over. It can takes months for the paperwork of unemployment to clear (I was twice without work a few months, but the paperwork that my old employeer would have had to fill out, the full accounting of my personal savings and finances, kept me from applying, instead using my own savings till the new job was ready). As Broomstick tells, getting disability approved can take even longer. All that time while the paperwork is stuck in the system, you still need money to eat.
But charities don’t duplicate existing state programs. And most state programs will take into account assistance given at another level. Again, if somebody lies or omits assistance received from program A when applying for program B, that is fraud / abuse, not the normal situation. -
There is fraud and abuse potential in every system. Making a system abuse-proof is an exercise in futility, shows a lack of understanding of the width of human psychology, and a lack of common sense of a 10-year-old.
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Given the German numbers (since nobody has posted official numbers for the US yet) of 1.8 % abuse, compared to an estimated* 20% of people who are eligible for some kind of welfare but don’t apply because they either don’t know they qualifiy or ** because the discussion of leeches has made them ashamed, esp. old women who were independent all their lives, to ask for help that they need**. About 75% of women seniors in Germany are below the acceptable level - they get usually a widows pension because they live longer than the men; this is only a percentage of the men’s pension; because they lived in a society where women stayed at home to raise the children and do the housework, they didn’t earn any pension credits themselves, and now they try to live with less than 600 Euros a month. They are eligible for aid to bring their income up to living standards, or for rent aid, but they rather go and clean floors at age 70 years and over than be thought of as leeches.
Similar, there are many poor families with children who could use several programs to help the children, to help cope with the household and finances, but don’t know that these exist so they don’t apply.
This other side of the coin is rarely mentioned except from the charities and human rights org.
The fact that different areas are different only further complicates the issue. And I already pointed out that that was not the ONLY reason for overcrowding, didn’t I? It’s one factor among many.
In my area, from my understanding (which is not perfect, I’ll admit) the disabled, elderly, and families are given priority. So a certain number of subsidized housing slots went to old people and the disabled who have legitimate reason to never leave the system as they are not getting any less old or less disabled. This only further restrict the slots for everyone else, including families. Which might be why our waiting list is longer than yours (there are likely other reasons as well).
Basically, as our household never had kids, and never will, it’s really pointless to even apply. Even if we could get on the waiting list (and those lists are closed most of the time, meaning even if you qualify you can’t get on them!) by the time our number reached the top of the list we’d qualify for senior citizen housing.
It’s possible that these same preferences exist in my area as well. My comments generally apply to people who have children and qualify as families. As I’ve noted earlier, there is a big difference between what kind of assistance you can get with versus without children. You can’t be a welfare queen without children.
[FWIW, in my area there is also - or least used to be - something called a “federal preference”, which means that over 50% of your income goes to rent.]
New Jersey?! {shudder} I knew there had to be a catch. You couldn’t pay me enough.
Here’s a little taste of what’s happening in Jersey:
“Despite the fact that the city of Camden has the highest crime rate in America, The New York Times reported that Mayor Redd moved forward with layoffs of almost half of its police force last month, eliminating 160 police officers and 60 firefighters in a city that needs more law enforcement and protection, not less. This month, it is the Camden County services that are being slashed in an effort to make up a budget shortfall of approximately $41 million. Thanks to a 2 percent cap on property tax increases, that immense deficit can only be shortened by $17 million, leaving the County to cut services to residents within Camden and the surrounding suburbs.”
From here
How close are you to Michigan? I know for a fact one can get section 8 apartments with a waiting list of a half year more or less here. I think it must vary by state.
That probably just has to do with local rent prices. The federal government gives money to each state based on population, without accounting for the cost of living. Rent in Michigan is dirt cheap. Here in Massachusetts, shitty apartments far away from city centers in crime-ridden neighborhoods cost more than nice apartments in desirable locations in Michigan. Thus, Massachusetts can only afford to give rent assistance to a much smaller fraction of people.
Wake County (NC) — 3.5 year average wait
Where I grew up in Boston, I knew families that were 3rd generation welfare recipients. The cultue in one area was for a teenage girl to get pregnant at 15ish, so that she can get her own apartment in the housing projects and get on welfare. if you think this is rare behavior, then you are fooling yourself, the whole housing project lived like this.
Except that changed in 1996 with Clinton’s welfare reform - no one gets more than 5 years on welfare anymore. Period. At least not the the “cash award” welfare, food stamps are a different matter. So that behavior you observed when you were growing up is going to be impossible to maintain legally these days.
Well, for the UK, benefit fraud is estimated at 0.6%. I
t’s an estimate because they’ve taken all the people they’ve caught, assumed that all those people would have continued with the fraud for another year, and then added a bit because it’s likely there’s some fraud they’ve failed to detect. So it’s a remarkably low rate considering all that. Apparently (in this PDF too) the rate averages 2% in other countries.
The UK government often quotes fraud rates that are either completely false or include errors made by staff. They also include state pensions when talking about the amount of benefits paid out, even though I doubt many people think of them as benefits/welfare.
I don’t think there’s any actual data on ‘welfare queens,’ but if you found data for fraud, long-term claimants and (if available) rates of childbirth amongst either claimants or people with the lowest incomes (which would include claimants), then you could start to make some evidence-based hypotheses about how many actual welfare queens there are.
I’ve heard that the average person knows about 200 persons well enough to know if about their economic circumstances. So the odds are that everyone will knows at least one welfare abuser in his or her lifetime. And not count the other 98 who will not abuse the system. That sounds about right.