How America treats the poor

Great Debates
1

A recent thread on the possibility of war in Syria got derailed into a debate about whether many Americans are going hungry. Several posters asserted that hunger due to poverty is a major issue in the USA, and more generally one often hears claims on this board to the effect that the United States is stingy towards the poor. Generally missing from this debate is hard numbers about exactly what the the U.S. government provides for the poor. Many people probably don’t know all that much about anti-poverty programs.

A recent study by the Cato Institute has found the following:

[ul]
[li]The federal government operates 126 anti-poverty programs, 72 of which provide cash or benefits directly to poor individuals and families.[/li][li]While not everyone in poverty is eligible for every program, it’s possible for one individual to get benefits from many different programs. The report focused on a typical single mother with two children and examined how much benefits she could get from a full package of welfare programs, computing totals for all the states[/li][li]The highest number was in Hawaii, with a total of $49,175. The median was Michigan ($28,723) and the lowest was Mississippi ($16,984).[/li][li]“Welfare currently pays more than a minimum wage job in 35 states, even after accounting for the Earned Income Tax Credit.”[/li][li]“In 33 states, the equivalent wage value of welfare has increased since 1995.”[/li][li]“Indeed, in 11 states, welfare pays more than the average pre-tax first-year wage for a teacher. In 39 states it pays more than the starting wage for a secretary. And, in the three most generous states, a person on welfare can take home more money than an entry-level computer programmer.”[/li][li]In eight states, welfare benefits exceed the median salary. It’s also worth noting that welfare benefits are not taxed, while salaries are. When this fact is taken into account, it makes welfare benefits look even more generous in comparison to salaries. [/li][/ul]

Given these facts, it seems that the US government is actually pretty generous to the poor. Of course this report looked only at federal anti-poverty programs, and only at a portion of those. There are also state level programs. And city and county programs. And private charity.

We’ve had a number of threads looking at statistics about income inequality. What’s often left out of such discussions is the fact that welfare benefits, food stamps, housing vouchers, Medicaid, and so forth are usually not counted among “income”. If those things were counted, then the income of the poor would look a lot higher.

In the thread that I mentioned up top, there were links to studies about people going hungry in America. But there’s no automatic link between a person being hungry and the government not providing them money for food. $133 is enough to buy food for one month. Some poor people may choose not to get the benefits that the government offers, while others may be unable to do so due to mental illness or drug addiction or some other reason. But plainly the government in this country is hardly leaving the poor with nothing.

2

[quote=“ITR_champion, post:1, topic:668598”]

[li]“Welfare currently pays more than a minimum wage job in 35 states, even after accounting for the Earned Income Tax Credit.”[/li][/QUOTE]

If true, that seems to be an argument for raising the minimum wage, not an argument for cutting welfare.

3

Did Cato find any individuals in any of those cited states who actually received benefits at the levels they claim are possible? Or are those purely theoretical numbers?

4

I should note that, living in Wisconsin, my unemployment benefits ran out after two years. No one at the local, state or federal level could point me toward any other programs that would offer any amount of cash toward paying bills.

I was unemployed for 3 and one half years. I cleaned out my pension savings, borrowed from my family and as of this July when I found a jub, I had a total of 7 dollars in cash, and had just had forclosure papers filed against me.

I suspect that virtually none of the programs CATO refers to put cash in anyone’s hands. They may pay for, or or reduce certain things like utility bills. There is even a program I heard of, but didn’t use, that would provide a cell phone and 500 minutes a month of airtime. If you add all those things up to a theoretical cash value, I suppose it would sound impressive. But if you can’t afford to buy tooth paste or toilet paper, believe me, you don’t feel well provided for.

As a further example, the state in its wisdom decided that childless adults do not need medical coverage under what locally is called “Badgercare” – the local version of Medicaid. So having saved the state from supporting any dependents, my reward was being told I was ineligible for medical benefits.

5

How do you go unemployed for 3.5 years? What did you do before, and what do you do now?

6

Right there’s the slippery thing about “studies” from think tanks with a political agenda. The Cato Institute has a libertarian orientation and as such places all government programs into three categories: wasteful, ineffective or both.

I call shenanigans to the assumption that ANYONE in poverty is eligible for a “full package” of Welfare programs, unless you can find me a blind (additional tax deduction) woman over 65 (additional tax deduction and Social Security) with an infant child (WIC) who managed to have just been laid off in the last six months (unemployment compensation) and in a retraining program (non-cash subsidy) while simultaneously being disabled (Medicaid) and utilizing the Earned Income Tax Credit (only available to those who are employed.)

7

I was the coordinator of a health education center at a hospital.

I now am an admin assistant for the state of Wisconsin – a substantial pay cut, but I’m able to pay my bills on it so at least I’m not falling any further behind.

In case anyone wants to know, I received $1133 per month for unemployment compensation, $870 of which went straight into my mortgage. Everything else including food, had to come out of the rest. And that level of unemployment income made me ineligible for food stamps.

And in fact, food ended up being the only thing that wasn’t problematic for me. The benefit was up to $200 a month for me as a single guy with zero income, which was more than enough. But I couldn’t use the benefit for anything at else at all, like clothes or toothpaste or any other routine household items.

So I would have to agree that hunger, in and of itself, might be overblown as a problem. But I can’t say that for sure. F’rinstance, I don’t know what the cap would be for a single mom with several children would be.

But I do know that once your income exceeds $930 month, you’re no longer eligible.

8

Starting on p14 of the paper, we see that Cato is assuming their “profile family” receives all of the following: TANF, SNAP, Medicaid, Housing Assistence, Utilities Assitance, WIC, and TEFAP.

Based on Table 14 Housing Aid was the largest single contribution (generally nearly half of the total) for all states that don’t bar TANF recipients from receiving it. As CATO acknowledges, very few people actually receive housing subsidies (<10%).

Here is their quote:

If you only include the “near universal” benefits (TANF, SNAP, and Medicaid) the numbers look a lot different.

9

I believe you misunderstood what the study’s author, Michael Tanner, referred to as a “full package of welfare benefits”. He explains that the study “calculated the state-by-state value of this typical welfare package for a mother with two children participating in seven common welfare programs — Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), food stamps (SNAP), Medicaid, housing assistance, WIC, energy assistance (LIHEAP), and free commodities.”

Since he also noted that there are 72 programs that provide direct assistance, that means that the ones considered in this study are a small portion of the total. If the study had included that a person can get for cell phones and much more from the government, the final figures would have been even higher.

Medicaid, by the way, is not exclusively for the disabled; it’s for the poor.

10

Generally speaking your situation does not surprise me at all. Most of the benefits for people who are just really poor but not in any way disabled aren’t really designed to pay a mortgage for a home someone who was middle class purchased while employed.

Your unemployment benefits represented enough income that you weren’t a “poor” person on paper, at least not poor enough for various benefits you would have liked to have received–but that doesn’t mean the government is saying they expect you to have an $800+/mo mortgage. I’d assume most people earning $1100 a month do not, and would have to live in an apartment, probably with roommates. Even still, you wouldn’t be expected to live on $1100 and pay rent and buy your own food. You might not have qualified for food stamps but that income level absolutely qualifies for housing assistance from HUD, and is pretty close to the “extremely low income” level where you get the maximized hub subsidy–and probably is for many counties. But having a home you own would complicate receiving a rental voucher, but I am just pointing out that without that mortgage you probably could have received significantly subsidized housing and then the $1100/mo, while not low enough to receive food stamps, could probably have comfortably paid for $200-250 a month in food since your housing costs would be subsidized by the government.

There are also HUD loan modifications but I don’t know anything about them.

11

This is the problem. How do you expect a homeless person to keep track of, apply for, and receive the benefits of 126 programs that they may or may not be eligible for?

Take the current entitlement expenditure, divvy it up into cash payments to every single citizen, no questions asked. Preferably weekly or bi-weekly. If that’s not enough for a person to eat and obtain a bare minimum of shelter (healthcare is a separate issue, but everyone should be able to obtain that, too) in the parts of the country where the cost of living is lowest, tax the rich a few dollars more until it is enough.

That way, the democrats win because they get to protect the poor from ruin, the republicans win because they get to eliminate bureaucracy while the lazy stay poor and the hard-working still have incentives to produce value. We all win because there are fewer beggars and criminals. Also, you know you can still scrape by even if your business fails, your job gets outsourced, your degree turns out to be worthless, or you get injured.

Of course that eliminates wage slavery, huge wasteful armies of bureaucrats, cuts down on the “crime” boogeyman, mentions the word “tax”, and generally makes too much sense all around. So the bullshit we have now will remain in place, for fear the other side might be seen as “winning”.

The problem isn’t that the government isn’t generous. It’s that they’re generous to the wrong people (big businesses, bureaucrats, and lobbyists). The current entitlement programs we have are gifts to them, not the poor.

12

They addressed that directly in the memo (page 34). Summarizing, “extreme outliers exist, therefore we can pick them and throw out the rest of the data”. I saw an elephant once on a trip to Africa, so clearly the species is doing just fine…

(bolding added…)

“A Prebuttal to Critics
Critics of Cato’s 1995 study pointed out, correctly, that not all welfare recipients actually receive all the benefits to which they are entitled. That is particularly true of housing benefits, as we have discussed above. Similar arguments can be made regarding utilities assistance, WIC, and free commodities. Still, with the exception of housing in states with less than a 10 percent participation rate, we believe it is proper to include the full package of benefits in our calculations because at least some recipients in every state do receive them.”

13

And I believe it’s proper to include zero benefits because at least some eligible people in every state receive nothing.

It’s not like the government finds eligible people on the street and hands them cash. It is a baffling array of confusing paperwork, means testing, and eligibility requirements which takes skill, effort and time that many poor/ill people just don’t possess.

And even if you navigate the bureaucracy successfully, you end up with $500 in food stamps you can’t possibly use in a month, and zero dollars for actual bills, like car repairs, utilities, doctor visits and textbooks. Very rarely do we entrust our poor with the autonomy to do what they think is best with our “handouts”. Funny how the “free market” is best for efficiently allocating resources – unless the government deems you unworthy of the privilege, in which case central planning works best!

14

The link says $133 is the average monthly food stamp benefit, per person, not that it will in fact feed that person. $133/mo is about $4.50/day; that’ll buy a loaf of bread and a jar of peanut butter in my local supermarket, if you’re careful to buy cheap brands. I know I eat more than that. What’s your current food budget, Dopers? Think you could make it equal to food stamps?

15

In Missouri, Medicaid is for poor people with dependents or a disability, or over 65. If you’re simply poor, you aren’t eligible.

But that’s a side issue. My main argument, shared by others in this thread, is that no one is eligible for all the programs the Cato Institute lumps together as “benefits.”

16

Welfare (except food stamps, ymmv) is generally not available to childless non-disabled poor people who don’t have jobs.

17

The world’s lottery of birth is often forgotten in my opinion, including myself.

18

According to the CDC, for the year 2010, in their “Deaths: Final Data for 2010” - which is not nearly as entertaining as it sounds, I might add - the number of deaths due to “Nutrional Deficiencies” is .9 per 100,000. That’s the number for both males and females together, of all races together. The deaths due to Nutrional Deficiencies seem to be evenly divided between the genders.

See Table 16, Table 16. Age-adjusted death rates for 113 selected causes, Table 16. Age-adjusted death rates for 113 selected causes, Enterocolitis due to Clostridium difficile, drug-induced causes, alcohol-induced causes, and
injury by firearms, by race and sex: United State Enterocolitis due to
Clostridium difficile, drug-induced causes, alcohol-induced causes, and injury by firearms, by race and sex: United State

“Nutritional Deficiencies” is further diveded into two categories: Malnutrion, which accounts for .8 per 100,000 deaths and “Other” which makes up the rest.

So, if our population is roughly 300 million, that puts us at, uh 1 million is a thousand hundred-thousands, right? So 300 thousand hundred-thousands, means .9x300=2700 deaths, approximately, due to malnutrition. Is that right? If not, someone please correct me.
The earlier report from 2006 claims 2,300 deaths from malnutrion, so 2700 is in the right ballpark, I think.

See page 33, Table 10.

19

Someone find what the average recipient actually gets and maybe I’ll pay attention. Break it down by scenario: adult with children, pregnant woman, adult with no children, disabled adult, etc.

Especially if you’re going to compare a temporary benefit (TANF) with a job.

Two other complaints: using the federal poverty line as a basis for a real discussion of poverty is laughable, in my opinion. The poverty line was a back of the envelope calculation done in, I think, the fifties based on fifties food prices. Yes, it has been adjusted for inflation, but it still uses food prices as the foundation, even as other costs such as housing have far outstripped food in cost increase.

ETA: I only said one complaint! Ack!

In addition, saying that full-time workers aren’t likely to be below the poverty line doesn’t actually give other people a fucking job. That was my other complaint.

20

Just for the record, I went to the local grocery store tonight and bought;

2 french bread-style rolls (sandwich style) at $.25 each. One head of lettuce at 1.65, one tomato at .89, one purple onion at $.85, package of smoked turkey at $2.55, package of American cheese at $1.00. Mayo and Mustard already in the fridge at home.

Not the most inspiring of meals, I know, but the veggies, cheese, and meat will last all week for two, and the total price was $6.59. If I don’t include all the other extravagances I bought at the time, I still think that I and my SigOth could survive for at least 4-5 days on that. Wouldn’t be awesome, wouldn’t be much variety, but it’s doable, even if I splurged and bought 14*.25 rolls at $3.50 total for a whole 7-day period.

Let’s assume you multiply that out by a family of 4 - so you double it and you get… $20.18 give or take. What, one healthy sammich not enough, then double it to $40.36.

That’s turkey, lettuce, onion, and tomato sammiches for 4, twice a day, for 7 days.

It can be done. If you wanna get all crazy up in here and add chips for every meal, then don’t buy Lay’s, buy store brand, and add maybe $6 for the week? We’re edging onto $50/week for 4 people.

It’s not glamorous, sure, but it’s not exactly starvation either. Soda? Milk? Juice? Sure, if you can afford it, but water has worked well since about 3.5 billion years ago or so.

It’s not so much a matter of what people need, it’s what they want, and that’s a whole other discussion.