Who said anything about making it less expensive? If we’re going to continue to throw money at people who can’t find an honest means of making a living after two full years, then by God society should get something for their money. Perhaps some of the women could spend their 20 hours in supervised day care facilities, watching the children of other welfare recipients who are cleaning the heron needles out of the local playground. As we’ve seen, open-ended welfare because “it helps innocent children” breeds babies. There’s no incentive to get off of it and a hell of an incentive to stay on (more babies=more cash) I am NOT proposing throwing anybody out in the street-but giving people money indefinitely does nothing to encourage getting off welfare.
You’re spouting that ridiculous claptrap? Of *course *there’s an incentive to get off welfare: being on it SUCKS. It’s not a high standard of living, and it’s shameful as hell. With the exception of a very small number of cases, people do not stay on welfare because it’s easier than working. They stay on it because they cannot find jobs, especially jobs that pay well enough for them to afford childcare.
And more babies may =more money, but they also =more cost. As you’re about to discover, having a baby is a tremendously expensive and time-consuming proposition. As I hope you do *not *discover, having a baby is sometimes very difficult and dangerous to a woman’s health. Yes, there are cases of abuse of the system, but how many? Do they outweigh the benefit of feeding babies? The fundamental selfishness inherent in attempts to “reform” the welfare system by terminating benefits sickens me.
The point of the welfare system is not to get people off it; the point is to support those who need it. If in the process of supporting those who need it, some who do not need it are supported as well, I can deal with that – just like I can deal with the guilty who go free as the price of preserving freedom for the innocent. Our systems at their best value freedom over punishment and support of the needy over supporting the wealthy.
I have a family member who found herself pregnant at 16 years old. Now 24, she’s spent less than one year one welfare (and not all at once, either), has a full time job, is a full time student at a local technical college (after finally graduating high school earlier this year), and is raising a healthy, happy 7 year old by herself. She stays with a friend to cut down on living costs. The only assistance she gets now is for daycare, but that’s only because the piece of shit “father” in this story doesn’t pay any child support. If he did, she’d no longer qualify for that.
On the other side of the coin, I have yet another family member who had his first child when he was 24, quitting his job the day his son was born. About six months later, his girlfriend was pregnant again and their daughter was born mid-2003. She is attending school to become a nurse, but unemployed. He hasn’t had a steady job since that day nearly 3 years ago when his son was born. They’ve been on welfare (cash assistance, food stamps, medical, etc.) this whole time. She says she’s “waiting” to get a job until she’s done with school so it’ll be “worth it”, and he’s apparently too good to work at McDonalds. They live in an apartment now, but they paid 3 months rent in advance with “leftovers” from her student loans/grants. Without jobs, they’ll be homeless come winter.
There is a limit, at least here, on how long you can receive certain benefits. I think medical and food are both unlimited, but the cash assistance cuts off after five years, which just seems like a really long time to find a job, if you ask me. There are no easy answers; on the one hand, you have stories like my first, a case of a woman down on her luck, needing the system for a couple months at a time. She’s actually been commended by the county folks for using the system the way it’s intended to be used. For doing such a good job (finding a job quickly), she was once given a check to be used to pay for 2 months of car insurance.
On the other hand, you have stories like my second. A couple of totally able-bodied people who are just too god damned lazy to get of their asses and do something. They’ve even had their benefits reduced because they couldn’t be bothered to go to the mandatory meetings. I think the meetings teach people how to fill out resumes and whatnot. I’m not really sure. These people aren’t going to have any “incentive” to get off welfare until the last minute when they know their benefits are going to stop. I’m almost positive they have no shame, because they don’t even TRY. Would $7/hr from McDs afford them a very comfortable life? Hell no, but it’d be a fucking start! :mad:
I can’t think of a solution, but I do know it’s entirely too easy to get, and keep getting, welfare.
Just to clarify that, you are allowed five years of cash assistance in your lifetime. So you can have six months here and there, totalling five years, or you can be on it for five years straight and never get it again.
Hands up, who here pontificating about public assistance has actually been on public assistance?
I’ve been on WIC since my son was born in May 2003, and I’ve been on medical assistance since last summer when my gall bladder decided to produce a stone the size of Venus. My son has medical coverage through his dad though.
I vaguely remember being on food stamps as a kid (when they were paper, like checks, rather than plastic “credit card” looking things). My mom sustained an injury at work (she was a butcher at a grocery and a box of frozen New York strips fell from a shelf onto her face) and we received public assistance for about 8 months.
Does it count if I probably could have qualified at several points in my life but refused to suck the public teat?
Admittedly, it helps if you have family who will provide aid, but the closest I’ve ever come to public assistance was unemployment compensation, despite a few several-months-long periods of no employment whatsoever.
I seriously understand the need to have a social safety net. I also understand that there are whole generations of people who believe that society owes them a living, and that’s not a good thing at all.
And I WORK at my Department of Public Welfare. Go figure.
I personally have not and I have been beyond broke, unemployed, etc., but I was fortunate enough to have friends/family who could let me sleep on a (too short). Many people I love have been on public assistance, especially WIC and ADC, though they are off now. I have no problem with any form of public assistance in and of itself, but the system needs to be much better regulated. I’ve also known the disgusting accounts of women whose children were ineligibe for Medicaid because they (the mother) made $30 too much the year before. My closest friend’s mother is a wonderful lady who has a criminal record (felony no less) that haunts her everywhere she goes because she took a $500 cash-job to buy Christmas presents for her children (whose father owes her $70,000+ in child support she’ll never see a dime of), did not report it, was found out and convicted of welfare fraud. I’ve also known people who desperately wanted to get a job and go back to work but couldn’t afford to lose their health benefits because their medical treatment or pharmaceutical bills were so high that they could not even afford the deductibles, thus they had to remain on public assistance. I have no delusions that most people who are on p.a. are sitting at home eating bon-bons and watching Days of Our Lives.
I’ve also known more multigenerational cases of welfare legacies than I care to recount, including three children I once babysat for- adorable children who, like their mother, ended up becoming teenaged parents themselves. I have personally known millions of dollars in welfare fraud as a former mental health social worker* and the low expectations and sense of entitlement of some of the people I’ve known on a first name basis just disgusts me. In the case of Julie it is not the fact that a young mother is on public assistance that irks me so much as the absolute lack of any semblance of appreciation (she actually bitches about how little she receives from the government) or any apparent desire to get off assistance or the fact that the baby’s father does not pay a dime towards support, has never been ordered to pay support, spends money on videogames and South Park DVDs for himself and his teencubine while public money pays for their child (who would not have been born had he used a condom available for free at any public health center and whose non-birth would have allowed her mother to aquire skills that would have allowed her to be the first member of the family ever to be able to work one job and have money left at the end of the month. Just such a stupid duo and such a horribly unfair thing to do to a child, to themselves and to society in general. Perhaps it’s best they are incapable of grasping the consequences of their actions.
*I SWEAR ON MY TESTICLES THAT THIS IS TRUE: I had a client who was a major hypochondriac and developed any symptom or disorder he heard about; he literally convinced himself he had PMS and received medication for it at taxpayers expense.
It’s not even that. I was working three minimum wage jobs and steadily losing about $50.00 each month, despite the fact that I moved in to a small shared studio apartment and ate one meal a day. If I had a kid (who I obviously couldn’t expect to go without food) to support, and daycare to pay for for the privledge of my $6.75 an hour, I would have been gaining hundreds of dollars of debt each month. Working a minimum wage job can be a losing preposition, espcially if you risk losing health care for your children by taking it.
And a job at McDonalds will not lead anywhere. They don’t even hire their own store managers from in-house. The most you can ever expect to get out of your years of work is to be a shift leader making a doller or two above minimum wage. They do not teach you any skills that qualify you for better employment. Education or a job with oppertunity for advancement is the only way to make these families permanently better.
You don’t read very well, do you? I’ve said twice now that I wasn’t going to terminate benefits. After a certain period of time, you’d have to work for them. Why are you so adamant that people shouldn’t work? See, you’re coming at this from a false premise. You or I would feel shame and a real incentive to get off of welfare, but for millions of people, that’s all they’ve know all their life, and it seems to them to be the way things should be. There is a liquor store down the street that has a fucking Independence card cash machine in it, and you’re telling me that we don’t need to reform the system? You really should spend some time in poorer neighborhoods, you’d be amazed how pervasive the idea that the government will keep you from starving can be. Whole neighborhoods full of people, most of the ones above the age of 15 drunk in the middle of the day. I can take you there any day you care to come over. Selfish? You’re goddamn right I’m selfish when people bend me over and fuck me up the ass simply because I let them, and was decent enough to offer them a hand when they needed it.
Wierddave, I have one minor quibble. I’m pretty sure Norplant’s no longer on the market and hasn’t been for some years. It’s a shame – it was a very good form of birth control, at least for me.
CJ
I have. Not proud that I was on it, but proud of where I’ve come since then.
I didn’t know that. Depo-Provera shots every 3 months then.
If you’re going to put requirements on getting benefits, then you are threatening to terminate them. I’m not saying that people shouldn’t work; I’m saying that feeding babies comes first. I don’t think that babies getting fed should have conditions on it. You, apparently, do.
You have a cite for this? Millions of welfare cheats is a large number; surely it would have been noticed and documented by now. This myth is standard conservative fare; repeating it does you no credit.
I’m not necessarily opposed to reforming the system. Look, I agree with you that welfare cheats are shitty human beings, and if I had the choice, I would not support them. The problem I have is that putting conditions on the system designed to deal with the cheats does more harm than good. The current system of limiting benefits may reduce cheating, but it also deprives children of food. Yes, there are bastards working the system. So fucking what? I would rather support a bastard working the system than let a child go hungry.
And I’ve lived in poor neighborhoods – I spent a couple of years living in a fourplex where the folks next door dealt something out the back door (I never found out what), shots were fired in the entryway (about 3 feet from my front door) and where there were kids shot to death just down the street by the White Castle. The grocery store I shopped in did most of its business in WIC cards. I’ve seen poverty up close, thank you. Do you think that your solution will make less of it? Or will it simply make you feel better about the use of “your” tax dollars, knowing that the recipients are doing something in return, even if the overall cost of the program goes up? And in what way is that different from indentured servitude?
They’re not cheating if the system allows them to abuse it the way that they do. I’m not going to play your word game. If the benefits are still available on condition X, then they are not terminated. Period. You can yammer on about “terminated benefits” all you want, but you’re being dishonest simply so you can play the hysterical “won’t somebody please think of the children?” card.
Okay, so no cite for the millions of people abusing welfare. No definition of said abuse. No response on the difference between conditional benefits and indentured servitude. Accusations of hysteria and dishonesty. Check.
Guess we’re done then, what with you refusing to play the word game and all. Silly me, thinking there might be a substantive issue under the rhetoric.
Have a nice day.
Not everybody can deal with the hormones, though. What if you’ve got somebody who can’t do Depo either?
Depo sometimes causes depression (and suicidal tendencies in extreme cases) in women with no history of mental illness. Anecdotally, I can tell you that one of my best friends in High School experienced excruciating chronic abdominal pain while she was on Depo. It’s not a cure-all or a birth control solution that would work for all women.
The best way to control the population of any species on Earth, including homo sapiens sapiens, is to limit food production. Birth control is just a band-aid.
As for the people who want to yell at those on Welfare; “Take a job - ANY job!” that’s not a one-fits-all solution, either, since in some circumstances taking a minimum wage job (and having to pay for uniforms, transportation, child care) causes more poverty and debt than having no job at all. Look at the calculations done by posters for IDBB when she was pregnant with her son - many posters said that they had crunched the numbers in their own lives, and worked out that it was less costly for them/their spouses to stay home and be a single-income family.
For an example of what happens when welfare restrictions are enforced, I submit the story of Kimberley Rogers. Upon the inquest into her death, one of the recommendations was to eliminate the “lifetime ban” imposed on people found guilty of “welfare fraud” in a court of law. Rogers’ crime was using Welfare money to pay for rent and food while using a student loan to pay for her college education.
Until you admit that you are completely lying about my position and willfully mischaracterizing what I have been saying, I don’t see that we have much to discuss. Why should I discuss this with someone who is going to use intentionally inflammatory terms to discredit what I say not factually, but emotionally? Fine, you’re right, we should give every crack whore in America a million dollars, that ought to solve everything. Thank God cruel old me is not in charge, because I’d be bayoneting babies right and left if the alternative was spending one nickel of my hard earned swag on them.
Weirddave: * If the benefits are still available on condition X, then they are not terminated. Period.*
A lot of people are heatedly discussing this issue while apparently having very little idea what the current welfare system actually permits. To repeat:
That is a 5-year lifetime limit on federal welfare benefits. Period. I don’t understand why everybody still has their panties in a twist about people sponging off welfare for the rest of their lives. You’re just regurgitating anti-welfare rhetoric from the 1980s and thereabouts before the system was restructured in 1996.
In fact, in many states the “welfare clock” has already run out, and many families who have reached the five-year limit have been kicked off the rolls. States have some latitude in applying “hardship exemptions” for a minority of welfare recipients to extend their benefits, but the vast majority of people on welfare get kicked off after five years. No matter how many extra children they have, no matter how much of a deadbeat they are, no matter what; the benefits are terminated. Period.
Argue all you like about how the system should work, but at least get a clue about how it currently does work. Y’all sound like people sitting around bitching about not being allowed to buy beer, five years after the repeal of Prohibition.