Help this family

Great Debates
21

I know what is missing from this debate.

What are your goals? What is your plan seeking to do?

My goals are, in order of priority, to:

[ol]
[li]Make sure that any children get the best chance possible of becoming educated, lawful, productive members of society regardless of their parents’ situation. [/li][li]Prevent public safety and health problems by providing alternatives to living on the street.[/li][li]Provide the able-bodied unemployed and those in low-paying low-oppurtunity jobs with a chance to better their position and find jobs with a chance of upward advancement through education and training.[/li][li]Encourage those who are not productive members of society and are not working on increasing their employability to seek any employment.[/li][li]Provide aid and succor to the disabled, mentally ill and elderly indignant. Keep them off the streets and in safe places where they have access to the medical care they need. [/li][li]Encourage the public at large to finance as much of this as possible privately.[/li][/ol]

22

Anyone who thinks that a single mom with two kids and a minimum wage job will be okay with the “safety nets” currently in place in the US hasn’t been a mom with two kids and minimum wage job! Said mom *may * do okay until the first time she or one of her kids is sick. Remember, with an hourly minimum wage job, she gets no sick time off, no health benefits, nothing. When your earnings bring in, say, $240 ($6/hr x 40 hrs per week), losing a day’s pay can mean missing this month’s rent, or utility payment, or whatever - and that doesn’t even begin to address the cost of medical care if needed. Once she is behind, things tend to go steadily down hill, as she struggles to catch up. A second job, you say? How is she getting child care during the first? How will she possibly afford it for another?

My solution would be to eliminate transfer payments (excluding Social Security and short term Unemployment Insurance - 6 months max) altogether. Instead, the government provides basic goods and services: shelters, cafeterias, clinics, clothing, child-care. Everything provided is utilitarian - perfectly adequate to meet needs, but nothing more. And - here’s the different thing - anyone who shows up can get these goods or services.

Hey, if you’re a millionaire, and you feel like eating in one of the government-run cafeterias, go to town! Wanna sleep in a shelter? - feel free! Wear the basic clothing the government gives out (sturdy, well made, inconspicuous, blah)? Have a blast!

However, you would have to demonstrate either adult competency or be in the care of a responsible adult (and no, I don’t know the exact standard off the top of my head - but I’m sure there could be a fairly simple mechanism developed for establishing this). Those who lack adult competency should not be roaming free on the streets either, and would either be placed in foster care if they were children, or treatment facilities if they were mentally ill adults.

One other thing - everyone who comes to any of the facilities has a choice of performing, say, an hour (perhaps two) of work that supports this or another service (i.e. cafeteria might be some part of food preparation or dish-washing, shelter might be laundry or guard service, but clinic would probably be something related to some other service since most of what is needed there requires special skills) or paying a nominal amount - not much, but probably enough to cover the marginal cost of what good or service they received. Those who were working but not making much would probably choose to pay (we’re talking about maybe $2 here), those who were unemployed would have the time to do the work.

One other thing. Every shelter would have a social worker or ‘facilitator’ of some sort, who could talk to people about how they might work with one another to meet some of their other needs. For example, transportation or child-care. This person would not actually develop these programs him or herself, just show people ways in which they might do for themselves.

OK, how would this be paid for? Right now we have a large bureaucracy in place to enforce eligibility standards and administer (not administrate, dammit, but that’s a different topic) transfer payments for Welfare, Medicaid, Medicare, Foodstamps, WIC, etc. I suggest we get rid of that and replace it with goods and services as outlined above. Additional funding/support would come from the payments or work performed by the recipients. I don’t have figures here, but I have a suspicion that we’d actually end up cheaper than whet we’re doing now.

You see, I believe that we owe every human being the minimum they need to stay alive. But transfer payments are not working. The administration and enforcement of these is enormous, and people are still not getting the help they need.

I’ve had this scheme in mind for a long time. I know it will never happen, but I’d like to hear what’s wrong with it. Just don’t complain that it’s not protecting the dignity of the needy. There’s nothing dignified about starving or living in a cardboard box, and there’s nothing inherently undignified about receiving any of these goods or services.

23

I’m trying to sift through a few things to some actual figures, to try and put some price tags on some of the suggestions being made, but I thought this should be addressed.

Obviously, when we are trying to get somewhere, it helps to know what it looks like when you’ve arrived.

I think this is as good a set of priorities as any, but I wanted as well to put it into global perspective. We are currently in the position of having to “sell” democracy to certain parts of the world (Iraq, Afghanistan, etc.), having disrupted whatever was going on before. Given the existence of global terrorist networks ready to prey on the disenfranchised, one particularly good advertisement for our system would be the ability to show that there is a minimum level below which you can not fall in this country.

I am not a socialist, I don’t necessarily think the government needs to swoop in and rescue you every time you are in danger of falling through the cracks, but the policies should be in place that encourage contribution to everyone’s betterment.

In your “homeless neighborhood”, es , they were not in fact homeless at all, but were merely living in wisps of housing.

How hard would it have been, I wonder, for the city to simply rezone, donate the land to those who had converted it into obviously much-needed residential space, and provide incentives for local merchants and contractors to put some bricks mortar, plumbing, wires, and construction skill into the area to create what would have amounted to instant affordable housing?

I don’t know what the details of the situation were, but based on the info you provided, to stand on the principle of "we’d rather you angrily roamed the streets than let you do that on ‘city property’ " strikes me as about the most counter-productive move that could have been made.

24

So- starving to death, dying of exposures, and becoming illiterate aren’t worse than Foster homes? Some Foster homes are very nice. Other- not so much. None are even close to being as bad as living with a crazy parent in a cardboard box, without food, clothes, shelter, or education.

25

Not sure why the parent is crazy now…
Still, if a child is being abused in a foster home, then the street may well be a better alternative to being raped nightly.

26

Just where does your information come from for making these charges about foster parents? While my wife and I were in the system, we knew of no cases of foster parents acting in this manner. As I said above, such cases can easily be weeded out by supervision by the social workers. Our home was inspected before we got any children and visited regularly. We were interviewed and had to take physicals. There were outings where the foster parents got together and talked about their problems and experiences. The biggest problem facing foster care is attitudes such as the above. Who wants to do something that everyone has been told is abusive to children?

27

Oh, Lord. No real constructive ideas, but at the risk of being flamed, this occurred to me:

Well, there’s what might be termed the “Gorilla Grodd” theory of human population management:
If there are impoverished &/or nuisance humans that live by the effort & tolerance of other humans, culling them from the population is good. Gorilla City needs room to expand. Of course, really, the gorillas would be better off with the human population knocked below 300 million.

Grodd wasn’t human, but he was honest.

:eek:

While that’s being tongue-in-cheek, there’s a point at which that’s the real answer. For “Gorilla City,” substitute any population, human or animal, that you want. We cull deer, but since the rise of Christianity, have rejected the self-interested ethos by which we culled our own kind.
Grodd would say we’re wrong. And logically, he’d be right.
“Grandfather, that’s not human!”
“I’m not human! I’m a gorilla!”
Does this mean I would just shoot them? Nope. It’s just something I ironically consider as I go about my Christianity-informed ethical path.

28

Oh come on- “lifeboat” much? We already know the kids are being neglected, straving and in danger of exposure. I doubt if even in 1% of Foster homes are the kids “raped nightly”, in fact, even including all form of sexual abuse I don’t think the % even gets close to 5%. Just a WAG, but since for a year I helped oversee this County’s foster care program, and there was no proven instances, and only one allegation that year, I don’t think it is very common. You’d read about it in the papers, don’tchathink, if Foster parents *routinely * “raped their kids nightly”? :dubious: :rolleyes: