Here in the UK we have all sorts of benefits for the poor. We have child benefits, unemployment benefit, free housing, free universal healthcare, working tax credit, disability allowance, bereavement benefit, and many others. Nearly all of these benefits can be claimed for an unlimited length of time. A family of three, for example, could quite comfortably live off the state their whole life without ever working. France, Germany and the Scandinavian countries have possibly even more extensive social safety nets.
A person might naturally wonder if such an extensive social safety net also exists across the pond in the good old U S of A. I am aware that the USA has a food stamps program, as well as time-limited unemployment insurance for those who are unemployed through no fault of their own. A person in the USA can usually claim unemployment for 6 months, I think, with time-extensions possible for some people (this is different from the time-unlimited unemployment benefit in the UK, for which every unemployed person is eligible). I have also heard that low-income families in the USA can be granted a small amount of financial assistance for a maximum of 5 years in their lifetime. However, there is no free housing in the USA (other than homeless shelters), and there is no universal healthcare system. It is estimated that about 50 million Americans are uninsured, which includes many children.
Europeans are usually given the impression that the USA has hardly any social safety net at all, and that the poor are left to starve. It would appear to me that the USA does have a social safety net, but certainly a considerably less extensive one than that of most European countries. What are your thoughts on this? Do you think America is lagging far behind Europe in terms of providing a safety net for the poor? If so, what has caused America to have a different attitude than Europe towards taking care of the poor?
Keep in mind that the answer is going to vary, somewhat, depending on which state you’re talking about. And this thread will probably be moved to GD at some point.
A lot of our safety net is voluntary and charitable. It often requires a lot of networking and hard work not everybody is capable of. The services you are eligible for also depend *greatly *on where you live. A cousin of mine was able to live in a free apartment, but she had to join a church to get access to it. And she had to know someone who knew about the program to have heard about it in the first place. And she was single and had three kids under 5. This kind of assistance is often only offered to single mothers or victims of domestic abuse, and generally only on a temporary basis. For my cousin’s program, there were lots of strings attached. She had to tell them her work schedule. There was a curfew. No drugs or alcohol or other adults allowed in the house. If they found out, she would instantly lose it.
This is just a proximate rather than ultimate cause, but Americans have an aversion to anything reeking of socialism. Maybe it’s the vestiges of the whole “frontier pioneer” spirit thing.
Also, there’s a deep-seated notion that American is a land of opportunity for those who work hard enough. Generations of immigrants fled their homelands to escape poverty and lack of social mobility. This is where the concept of the American Dream comes from. “Work hard = reap rewards” has over time been translated into “poor person = lazy-ass good for nothing”. Americans may have compassion for poor people in undeveloped nations, but the poor people in our midst get the stink eye because we’ve been raised to think of our country as the Emerald City of the world, where the streets are paved in gold, where anyone can make it “good”. Social welfare just enables character defects, don’t you see?
One thing the OP missed: there are also housing subsidies in the US, and various programs that encourage “affordable” housing. There are also still public housing complexes, though they’re unlike The Projects of past decades. Most housing assistance comes as Section 8 vouchers – basically the needy family will have a direct subsidy paid from the government to their landlord, capping their housing costs at a reasonable proportion of their income. At its best, this program can allows the poor to live in decent conditions in otherwise expensive cities. But Section 8 programs are in high demand, so the average applicant will typically wait for several years before they receive housing assistance.
(My google-fu isn’t good enough this morning to find stats on the total amount of housing assistance in the US. However, Section 8 which is by far the biggest program provides assistance to 2 million households.
I feel the characterisation of the UK’s safety net is a little, well, inaccurate. I say this as a former staffer at the DWP.
A family of three cannot live “comfortably” on benefits, although they could survive. Also, when you describe JSA as “time unlimited and available to every unemployed person” you do miss out the fact that in order to claim, you must be available for, fit for, and actively seeking employment. Claimants must show up at the local office at least once every two weeks and demonstrate this.
But even with those qualifiers, I think it’s safe to say that for most people, the social safety net is more generous in the UK than in most parts of the USA.
My impression (and admittedly I’m not an super familiar will all of the European welfare systems) is that if you add up all the benefits one could theoretically qualify for, in most big states you’d end up with something comparable to what you’d get in one of the European countries with less generous benefits (although healthcare benefits are hard to quantify and compare). PaulParkhead’s description of the UK system sounds pretty similar to the US one. However, the key difference is that very few of the benefits in the US are available to able-bodied people indefinitely, whereas in most European countries you can continue to qualify so long as you keep jumping through the hoops.
You’re right in part, wrong in part. We have some version of just about every benefit you mention in your post. Our system is more decentralized and generally qualification is more limited.
Healthcare - Medicare provides health coverage for anyone over the age of 65. It is considered extremely good, even well off people typically use Medicare once they come of age as it is so good. Medicaid provides health coverage for people who qualify, qualifying is quite difficult based just on economic issues. Obamacare has expanded the criteria for qualifying for Medicaid, but each State gets to decide if it wishes to implement the Medicaid expansion. I believe the permanently disabled also receive Medicaid benefits, but theirs might be different. I know the Social Security Administration handles some aspects of benefits for the permanently disabled.
After Medicare/Medicaid, there are State level systems as well I know almost nothing about.
Housing - HUD provides different kinds of housing support. In some areas of the country you can wait for years as availability in the programs is limited, but we do have Federal housing benefits. Many cities and States also operate their own “public housing projects.” These are probably the closest thing we have to the UK “Council Houses.” They traditionally were hot beds of criminality and were very run down and unpleasant, and some cities have done away with them or tried to reform them in some way. But there are still older people in major cities who have lived their entire lives in public housing.
Food - Food stamps are available based on income. Additionally, there is a program called “WIC” that gives additional food benefits to mother’s of young children. I believe WIC is automatic to anyone already on welfare, food stamps, or Medicaid.
Income - We have TANF, which is “traditional welfare” in that you receive a government check each month. There are State programs as well, TANF is limited to I believe five years of total benefit. Your description of unemployment benefits is fairly accurate, although unemployment has a State and Federal component, some States have longer benefit periods. Additionally, people like the blind and permanently disabled receive income benefits.
In general the benefits for the disabled meeting certain criteria of disabled can be robust enough to live on when you finally get into all the programs available. I have a friend who is a quadriplegic (he has limited use of his arms, but his paralysis affects all four limbs.) He works as a computer programmer and has since the 80s, he has mentioned before that the benefits available to him if he had chosen not to work would have been enough to scrape by but in a much reduced life style. He has a car that he’s had modified so he can drive it, something that you really can’t get any help in doing. He also owns his own home, has a caregiver who comes to his house to assist him in getting into bed and out of bed each day, and goes with him on weekly shopping trips. He also has basically the top of the line wheelchair for someone in his condition. Some of this stuff the government would help him with if he didn’t work, but much of it would simply be unavailable and he’d have to deal with a worse situation. He knows other quadriplegics who do not work, and he says some of them are cared for by their families and are basically shoved into a small room and washed/fed but don’t have much of a life.
There are other random benefits as well, for example if you’re poor and have children you can get government subsidies for daycare and such.
I find it difficult to believe that the US could not afford whatever the UK can afford. If we wanted a social safety net comparable to the UK’s – and I agree that most Americans do not – we’d find a way to pay for it.
You also don’t have been “below the federal poverty line” poor to get WIC. Or at least this used to be the case. My family was able to get WIC back in the 70s not because of our income (which was meager but not poor), but because my twin sister and I were anemic. So lots of Cheerios and gubment cheese for us.
America is a nation heavily divided by class, race and geography. Any attempts to help our fellow citizens is usually promoted in the media as a zero sum game pitting people against each other. Working white people who feel they make good decisions and are responsible are told they will have higher taxes and lower quality health care so that non-whites, poor, single mothers and irresponsible people can have their tax money and higher quality health care. That sums up the majority of our political debate in this country WRT economics and government intervention. Rich people paying rich people to tell working people to blame poor people.
So I would assume that is a big part of why. I have no idea how cultures vary in Europe, but in the US we are a very divided nation by class and race (middle class vs poor with the rich pulling the strings to play divide and conquer; white vs non-white). All attempts at social safety nets are presented as zero sum games taking from the ‘good’ americans and giving to the ‘bad’ americans. When welfare is brought up, the usual image people get is blacks, latinos and people who made bad decisions getting government subsidies funded by hard working white people.
However in nations which do not have these divisions like the northeast, that isn’t the case. The northeast (and west coast) is probably as close to Europe as America can get.
The reason we do not have UHC in the US is because of race. In the 1940s FDR and Truman wanted to create a UHC system. But southern politicians were afraid it would lead to integrated hospitals (and were probably afraid it meant white people would subsidize the health care of black people). So they gave up on UHC and settled for medicare and medicaid in the 1960s.
Krugman said we spend several % of GDP less on wealth transfers than europe. I don’t remember his exact number though, I think it was something like 3-6% less in GDP.
Most of our social safety nets are relics from the time of FDR and LBJ. I don’t know what social safety nets have been created lately. Aside from medicare part D and Obamacare, what else has happened in the last 30 years to promote redistribution and a social safety net? The Earned income tax credit? That is what, $500?
I don’t understand these statements. I can’t speak too much about the west coast (though I will remind you that some of the worse race riots happened in California), but the northeast is definitely divided along racial and class lines.
Thanks for all your answers guys. I realize there were a couple of errors in my original post. Thank you for pointing them out.
I think the difference in attitude between America and Europe is in part to do with people’s definition of what the role of Government should be. A European person would be more likely to believe that the Government’s role is to “care for” its people and ensure they do not fall into poverty, whereas an American would be more likely to believe that the Government’s role should be to ensure an environment in which a person can help themselves.
I think that there’s also a difference in attitude towards the poor themselves. In America, there’s more of a belief that a person is poor through their own fault. They have made themselves poor, and its up to them, not up to the taxpayer, to provide an income for themselves and their family.
In Europe, on the other hand, there’s more of a belief that a person has been born into poverty, and it isn’t easy to escape from poverty. It isn’t their fault that they are less fortunate or less able to achieve than others, and so, the Government’s role should be to give them a helping hand to create a fairer society.
Obviously, not all American and not all Europeans fit these two stereotypes. I know one American man who’s a very big supporter of a generous welfare state, and I know some quite anti-welfare British people. However, I think that on the whole, there is a very significant difference in attitude between America and Europe, which is reflected by the more generous benefit systems of European countries.
My impression is the northeast tends to have a more unified concept of their fellow citizens rather than an ‘us vs them’ mentality than other parts of the country. For example, GLBT rights or UHC were pioneered by the northeast, long before they were promoted on a national level. Vermont and MA passed UHC a while ago, and Vermont passed meaningful UHC recently, the first in the nation to do so.
I think that’s a bit harsh. I think the idea is that we cling to the hope that a poor person can take some action to turn themselves into a productive member of society through hard work, a “hand up not a hand out” (and I hate that phrase, btw), and as a society we refuse to throw in the towel and say that Person X is hereby declared “poor” and needs government assistance.
As you said, we like the idea that in America, anyone can succeed if given the chance and therefore look with disdain on a government program, especially any new government program, which might give a moral disincentive against that.
