I consider myself a moderately informed voter. I seldom dig for information but stay on top of whats in front of me in the news and internet. I do a little digging but not much.
I feel like the GOP is either grossly out of touch with its own party or I am grossly out of touch with their platform, maybe a little of both.
I am currently considering switching sides. The biggest single issue that has kept me on the right is welfare, I have no problem with the amount spent but I have a huge problem with the way it is spent. I would like to see the money used to rehabilitate and train current welfare recipients to get back into the workforce when and if they are able. Most republicans I know personaly feel the same way but I never hear the politicians even talking about this.
Hopefully with a comprehnesive rehabilitation plan we could eventually reduce the number of wellfare recipients to a level where we could take better care of the ones who never will be able to get off it.
I realize a lot of other issues play into this such as unwed teenage mothers and the urgent need to take care of children Right Now! I believe the GOP is really dropping the ball by not expanding on this issue.
Your concerns sound very reminiscent of the Welfare-to-work debate of the mid-1990s, and oddly, the side you seem to be on won that debate with the passage of the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act in 1996.
Are there things PRWOA didn’t fix that you believe are still broken? Ways you could be more specific of how what you’re proposing isn’t already in effect?
I am a frequent visitor to some of the Los Angeles area welfare sights. They are obviously crowded with otherwise intelligent able bodies people that have for some reason either chosen not to take advantage of these programs or for whatever reason feel they wouldn’t work out well for them.
I would like to see more money invested into motivational activities that might include exposure to lifestyles, arts, crafts, and other things that may seem out of reach. In other words we know a lot of folks are not interested in rehab, do we know why? I say find out why and deal with it.
Are you under the impression that able, intelligent people are able to collect government welfare checks for as long as they prefer to remain unemployed?
This welfare system simply does not exist in the United States. It has been gone for 20 years.
But your interest in education and worker retraining programs is absolutely a Democratic priority, and the Republican Congress has been cutting billions out of these programs in order to reduce the deficit.
As I said I am not very well informed and appreciate the updates. I just don’t hear much about rehabilitation from either party and consider it a major issue I would like to vote on. Under employment is another big issue.
Here’s awebsite that gives the quotes from the GOP platforms regarding welfare.
Basically it seems to be a combination of basic job creation (usually via trickle down), and leaving the rest to faith based charities.
The Republicans often quote the “give a man a fish” proverb, as a reason not give the poor financial assistance but fail to realize that the second half of the proverb is the most important, thinking instead that it is sufficient to just tell that man to “go fish”, shut the door, and leave him to his own devices.
This article is sort of dense reading, but here’s the gist: bills come up in Congress that basically say we should retrain people to get better jobs. Everyone votes for them. When it comes time to fund the programs they just voted for, the Republican budgets cut the funding for them in big ways.
Seems like a curious thing to base one’s vote on. If you don’t mind the welfare budget, then it seems you don’t care because of its impact on the deficit. If the concern is that some of it may go to people who don’t deserve it, then maybe the question you should ask yourself is this- what would upset you more: that some people don’t get help who deserve it or that some people do get help who don’t deserve it. If the former, then you’re at heart a Democrat and if the latter, you’re a Republican.
I don't see it so much as an either or as much as I do as an insidious cancer in our society. It doesn't bother me so much that someone gets something that they don't deserve, it bothers me that someone who could have a much better quality to his life is not living up to his potential or even close. I feel like a lot of the racial issues we still deal with would be resolved quicker and have less impact if we worked harder on catching those that fall between the cracks.
I would like to see kids and adults who for whatever reason were never exposed to mainstream society in such a way that made them believe they could be a part of it, given another opportunity to see society in a more welcoming view.
My most Conservative Republican relatives volunteer regularly at a community food pantry. If someone happens to drive up in a Lexus, they don’t deny them.
Since we’re sharing, my conservative mom opposes welfare programs because she once heard a story about a beggar who wasn’t really homeless and brought home 50k+ a year from his begging activities.
If you want people exposed to more, so they’ll aspire to more, how about helping them to higher education? Lower college tuitions, equalize school funding, programs for at risk (poor kids in shitty schools) youth education, all get routinely denied funding by Republicans. Your president has been begging the country to invest in education for like 8 yrs now. Seems like a no brainer if what you want is people out of the social safety net. Unfortunately your government won’t cooperate, for the greater good. They prefer partisan stalemate.
This is a very difficult problem to solve, because it involves a change in the overall culture of society, something that the government really can’t do much to influence short of an all out propaganda campaign with full media cooperation as was seen in WW2. I don’t think that either party has any plan that will solve this (nor do I think that one exists).
Democrats are doing their best to make more opportunities available, in the form of subsidized education, child care, and health care access. but these can only work if you can get people to follow through on them, and they are properly funded.
On the Republican the idea is that only reason people are on welfare is that they aren’t properly motivated to get off of it, so that cutting them off will give them the kick in the pants that they need to go out and get one of the many well paying jobs that would exist if only business owner’s capital weren’t being drained to pay for welfare. This of course ignores that fact that very few people on welfare actually like their living situation and many are in fact working as hard as they can to improve their life, but given their present circumstances have no way to do so.
Truth be told given globalization and automation, I don’t see a way in which the economy can sustain a 40+ hour work week and living wage for all able bodied Americans. There simply isn’t that much work that needs to be done that people are willing to pay good money for. We are going to have to accept that there will be a certain percentage of the population that is not going to work to their full potential. The question is at what extent do we use resources that others worked to produce to maintain their health and dignity.
Actually, I’ll go further than that and state if you ask about the GOP platform on the SDBM, you will get screeds about how all conservatives are evil. And stupid. And the cause of all the worlds problems, including foot fungus, Rachel Dolezals melanin issues, WWI, WWII, WWIII (soon to be started of course), Clintons dishonesty, etc.
My understanding is that the biggest problem with welfare is the cutoff for receiving it is stark. Correct me if I’m incorrect, but most programs are set up as “If you make less than $X, you get $Y. If you make at least $X, you get $0.”
Making up numbers here, if X = 20,000 and Y = 10,000, a person working at $9/hour for 2000 hours a year (more or less full-time) would receive $18,000 from their job and $10,000 from their welfare payments, for a total of $28,000. If they get a one dollar an hour raise, they start making $20,000 from their job, $0 from welfare, for a total of $20,000. So getting a dollar raise means you lost $8,000 in gross income.
Who would ever try to improve their station under a system like that!? The only way you’d accept a raise is if you got a 50% raise, which is not bloody likely unless you changed jobs after getting a college degree, which is not most welfare recipients as far as I am aware.
Far better would be a system where the amount you get is stepped down by half of the raise you got at work, i.e. a $500 raise means a $250 reduction in payments, for $250 more in gross income. Then you have incentive to improve your station because you’ll actually make more money, instead of being held back in some artificially created local maxima where earning just a bit more at your job causes your total income to drop precipitously.
I actually did try looking over this but since it is a big document I found it hard to cite specific sections of interest and so choose the “On the issues” summary instead. Again looking at the I mostly see is more help to “job creators” with the hope of trickling down, and crushing labor unions (with the idea that this will somehow help workers)
The only thing that looks similar to what the OP requests is the following sentences
I tried finding some unbiased reports on this idea, which basically comes down to giving bonus money to welfare recipients if they find a job, but all I could find was a couple of policy papers from the Urban institute and the Economic Policy Institute saying it was a bad idea, but they may be biased.
Are there any other ideas in that document that I missed?
As the news article I linked to makes explicit, it is one thing to make empty promises and another thing to put one’s money where one’s mouth is.
The Republican platform of supporting worker retraining, etc. is one thing. But cutting the deficit is clearly a higher priority, which is why the Republican budgets passed in the House and Senate cut hundreds of millions of dollars – if not billions, depending which programs you count – out of these types of programs.