Interesting discussion by Larry Elder, nationally known talk radio host that welfare actually encourages the poor to stay poor.
He even quoted FDR who stated that chronic welfare inhibits desire, ambition and encourages the poor to stay poor.
Admittedly, truly disabled and truly ill people cannot be expected to work and should be entitled to welfare benefits. But how about the millions of people who did not seek education or a trade who are on the welfare rolls not to mention the healthy cheats in this country.
If an able bodied person no longer could be dependant on a welfare check, would n’t he/she be more likely to learn a trade and find work?
The New York Times and the LA Times have pointed out that the number of poor in the US has increased in the past few years. But they fail to emphasize that it is not the Black or the Hispanic or the Asian who has caused the increase…it is the Caucasian.
You’d have to eliminate medicare and social security as well since those encourage laziness too. Welfare as we know it makes up a small part of the budget.
Besides, what about all the working poor, those who have jobs but who earn too much for welfare but too little to survive comfortably?
Larry Elder got into college on an affirmative action scholarship, and has collected over 100k in educational welfare throughout his life. We all have, our education was payed for by the state. It bugs me when people (like me or Larry Elder) sit around collecting 6 figure educational subsidies then turn around and get angry over $50 in food stamps.
I think this idea was tested under Clinton and I think it led to the working poor class. So in a way it worked, but it also failed. We need to raise the minimum wage, offer subsidized housing and universal healthcare to decrease the number of poor people, not eliminate welfare.
People probably aren’t getting more poor due to welfare. Thats not something I think there is a corrleation on, esp. considering how much hatred there is for welfare. Its probably a mix of a slow economy, elimination of manufacturing jobs, growth of low paying service and temp jobs and an increase in price on life’s basics like rent and healthcare.
You can’t turn welfare off like a light switch because it is thoroughly embedded in the social psyche of too many people. It’s relevant to how people perceive their situation. When my parents went through the Great Depression it was socially unacceptable to go on welfare. They led a minimalist lifestyle in every respect. Times have changed and we have to react to social conditions of today.
I would try to replace welfare with a workfare program designed to teach new skills. I never understood people who said the WPA system was a failure. I still driver over bridges made by this program. You could build houses for the poor and teach those same people a marketable skill in the process.
Here in Arizona, people are no longer allowed to live indefinitely on welfare. There is a 5 year limit. Also, if your children are over 1 year old, you must work or be in a job-training program to continue receiving benefits. Is it not like this or becoming like this in other states as well?
Again, these welfare queens you guys talk about really don’t exist. They are just a stereotype. If you read the book ‘freakonomics’ the author talks about why some issues make it to the public psyche but some do not. His equation was
outrage + risk = public response
As a result issues with huge levels of outrage but almost no risk (flammable pajamas) are well known but issues with little outrage but high risk (falling down stairs) are not really considered risks to the public.
You guys are condemning welfare based on outrage, not risk.
Middle class people get more handouts than welfare people. The elderly get more handouts, so do corporations. You guys are letting your outrage at leeching welfare queens get in the way of adressing this situation as it exists. We (probably) spend more on tax breaks for homeowners than we do on AFDC and food stamps. Where is the outrage at the middle class?
Also in Indiana we have a 5 year law as well. Our food stamp budget is just plain evil though because if you make more than around $1000/month for a family you don’t qualify. That limit should be alot higher, $1900/month or more.
First all welfare benefits are capped at 5 years under the new rules of Welfare, that’s why it’s called TANF. Temporary Aid for Needy Families, emphasis mine. There is a built in 20% or something similar exceptions for intractable cases, but for the most part welfare in all states are capped at five years over lifetime.
Second, I would wonder wether the OP has read the want ads lately. A google search reveals at least 3 miliion adults receiving it. I don’t know about you, but I seriously doubt that even with job training your going to depelete the welfare roles in the current job market, although I recognize that maybe some jobs may be created just by some recipients becoming entreprenurial. Also since the average recipeint receives less than poverty level assistance, quote:
These people are hardly living the high life, although if I lived in similar circumstances a Miller’s High Life probably would sound pretty good.
I do have a problem with welfare though. In my opinion it encourages absentee parents. If the state gonna pay why the hell should the guy stick around. From yet the same site:
Although it doesn’t say it, it wouldn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that the overwhelming parent recipient is probably the mother. At least personal experience tells me that’s so. At the risk of making an unpopular opinion, this is the real tragedy of welfare. Here’s what I think welfare encourages:
Generations of men who see fatherhood as optional
Generations of women who see children as a means of gaining monies
Generations of wonmen who see motherhoood as ownership
Generations of boys who have no personal role model on which to base behavior.
Men who don’t know how to solve conflicts*, leading to high numbers of murders and other crimes in our inner cities.
Now these are generalities, I don’t claim these are true of all welfare recipients, there’s always the exception to the rule. But I challenge the typical observer to visit a public housing complex and not come up with the same generalizations.
*Again my NSHO, however in my experience women and men fight diferently. I believe that in small ways women are a lot more competitve to their female counterparts thant men are towards theirs. Likewise conflict resolution is different.
There are causes that are higher than teaching people on welfare a lesson.
Those causes are little hungry tummies. There is aboslutely no welfare except for food stamps available to able-bodied non-parents. A child does not choose her parents. A child does not choose whether her parents work or not. And in this nation, with all her riches, our children shouldn’t suffer out of some misplaced sense of punishment.
Most welfare recipients use welfare exactly how it is supposed to be used- to help them and their children through a rough period so that they can go on to become self-supporting contributers to society. The vast majority of welfare recpients want to get off of welfare and do so within a year.
The average California cash assistance is $550 per family- or about half of the rent of my one bedroom apartment in job-friendly Oakland. In the US, cash assistance brings a welfare family up to half of the poverty line. Almost nobody would choose to live that way for long. The “welfare queen” is a straw man, created to villinize the poor.
I am only directly familiar with Medical in Cal or Medicaid in the US. The abuse is beyond the scope of ones imagination. I have seen so many “healthy” women on Medical insurance. Many of these women have confessed that they work under the table, pocket their welfare money and say they looked for a job but “was not accepted”
Undocumented aliens all get free medical care…Many work…the money approximately 10 billion/year is sent right back to Mexico…A wealthy female…father= Dr., lawyer, doesn’t want family to know she is pregnant…and gets Medical at will by giving a girlfriends address.
Certainly there are legitimate welfare recipients…but fraud is rampant.
Thats funny, I grew up on welfare, in a housing project in a depressed town, and almost everyone I knew until the age of eighteen had been on welfare at some point or another. Maybe I the town I grew up in was just some wierd anomoly, because I don’t remember any of my friends being anything but dirt poor.
In any case, your wrong about other things too. Most illegal aliens actually pay more taxes than they are owed. They have no way to recover withholdings on false social security numbersm so the state just absorbs their tax refunds.
If you are actually interested in some facts, check this out. You will learn, for example, that 42% of welfare recipeints have only one kid (and remember those without kids cannot get welfare). The average per-child increase of a welfare check is $70.00, hardly making junior a cash cow. Here is a somewhat outdated rebute the the very topic adressed in the OP.
What then follows is a chart showing percentage of total benefits paid to a salary band, and percentage of total households in that salary band. That, says the author, is “remarkably proportional” distribution.
Er… yes. It’s a remarkably proportional payout to those that are getting the money. It’s not remotely proportional to those that paid into the system. That is, the ratio of money paid into the system to money returned by the system is quite low for the lower salary bands (they pay little and receive a great deal) and the reverse is true at the upper bands (they pay a great deal into the system and receive relatively little).
That’s the way the system is designed.
It’s interesting to see it characterized as “remarkably proportional”.
That is exactly correct. On average, a working illegal alien returns more in tax revenue to the US than legal wage earner at similar wages.
However…
Of welfare recipients, nearly 10% “cycle” - that is, go off benefits and then return to receiving benefits. A higher percentage of those recipients had another child during the sample period. Cite.
You raise a good point, even sven: how can we punish a child whose only crime was being born to a mother that doesn’t want to work?
I have a friend who proposes, quite seriously, that voluntary sterilization should be a condition of public charity. Give 'em a five-year Norplant if they want food stamps, says he. That will solve the problem. There have been similar efforts: a private program offered cash payments to female crack addicts if they’d agree to have their tubes tied.
Those measures strike me as immoral. I acknowledge, of course, that the private program has every right to offer such a deal, and the crack addict every right to do as she wishes with her body. I would not seek to criminalize such conduct.
But it bothers me, because it hints at eugenics. And it bothers me because it takes advantage of people in desperate situations.
On the other hand, I’m not blind to the fact the welfare subsidizes undesirable behavior.
I would say, though, that we’ve reached a pretty good compromise as things now stand. As a general proposition, there is no more “lifetime” welfare: people are required to get jobs within a certain period or lose benefits. This enforces the positives aspects of welfare: a helping hand to those who need help recovering from a setback – and minimizes the chance that welfare becomes a long-term necessity.
I, also, feel a moral obligation to help out the less fortunate. But I also feel that people receiving help should be working to get themselves up off the ground by finding work.
To that end I supported (and continue to support) the welfare to work initiatives that grew up in the 1990s. I also support a certain amount of wage subsidization for employers who employ the unskilled. If they pay someone minimum wage (or whatever) we could kick in an extra buck or two an hour from the federal coffers for those who qualify.
But it has to be limited. No lifetime coverage for those on welfare. To what extent we can we need to avoid perverse incentives.
I can’t speak to California, but here in Missouri a family with children is eligible for Medicaid if their income is no more than 250% of the federal poverty level AND they’re unable to get health insurance on their own (i.e., through their employer.) So if they have a minimum wage job with no benefits, or can’t get health insurance because of a pre-existing condition, they’re eligible.
Now, under those circumstances, if you know that a slight increase in income would make you ineligible for Medicaid, but you still couldn’t get or couldn’t afford private health insurance, would you be tempted to work under the table and not report your true income?
Also, let’s not forget that Medicaid doesn’t put a dime into the recipient’s pocket, any more than private health insurance makes us rich. Medicaid payments go straight to the doctor. And the reimbursements are so low that (in Missouri at least) only a fraction of doctors even accept Medicaid patients.
I’ve heard arguments like that before, and they drive me crazy. Giving people money makes them richer, not poorer. Giving people more options gives them freedom, it doesn’t take it away. What Elder means to say is that they are less able to cope when the benefits are taken away, but then, that means the debate should be about taking the benefits away, not giving them out in the first place.
It interests me that one of the favorite lines re wellfare recipients is that they should be taught a “trade.” Having been taught that “trade,” they will then be employed and will no longer require wellfare. I’ve always been curious as to what “trade” should be taught, since apparently the concept is that people following a trade don’t need to be particularly well educated in areas outside the scope of that trade.
Baby sitters in the Santa Monica area in the Los Angeles area make @ 10.00/hour and speak only a thimbles worth of english.
Wood workers, upholsterers, factory workers, servers’ assistants, masonry, and so on and so on and so on…So many people learn from being on the job and following the main person around.
“In Tennessee, for instance, almost 25 percent of Wal-Mart’s 37,000 employees are covered under the state’s Medicaid program, according to a January article in the Chattanooga Times Free Press.”
Retail giant Wal-Mart tops the list of companies in Alabama whose employees have children on Medicaid…Trailing Wal-Mart employees were workers for fast-food giant McDonald’s, with 1,615 children on Medicaid. There are a total of 1,380 Medicaid children whose parents work for Taco Bell, KFC and Pizza Hut, fast-food businesses owned by Yum! Brands.
How is cutting welfare for people that are already working going to help?
Excellent question and thought provoking. How much education or time devoted to a trade is necessary to rise above hamburger flipping? I would think that most people would have a greater incentive to rise above the fast food employ if they didn’t have welfare to lean on. But your point indicates beautifully that the answers to the welfare problem are not easily forthcoming.