OK, then, take it further. How about if there are five such moms in your neighborhood, and they all have at least three kids? Do you still think your investment a good idea? Especially since keeping the kids at a subsistence level doesn’t necessarily mean they won’t end up as criminals anyway.
Again, no one is saying that any one person doesn’t “deserve” to reproduce, the idea is that they shouldn’t expect other people to pay for it.
Yes. I believe in investing in society, which ultimately are its people. I believe in fully funded public education (and I think community colleges should be included), libraries, public transportation, elder care centers, food stamps, subsidized daycare and preschool. I believe that if we support everyone, society will net benefit as a whole, including me.
I pay for lots of things in taxes I am troubled by but I don’t get a line item veto. So since I don’t want to be in the position of judging the right to reproduce AND I believe society benefits when kids are fed, cared for and educated, I will happily pay for people who need support.
Why do people keep pretending that telling people on welfare that we won’t pay to raise their new babies is somehow interfering with their right to reproduce?
Do you really think it’s a good investment for society to pay people to raise children in poverty, with the example of a parent(s) who don’t work and get paid to do nothing? How many generations of that do you think it would take before they just assume they have the, well, right to have someone else pay to keep them in food, shelter, clothes, medical and dental care, and pretty much everything their children need? The belief that one is entitled to anything one wants, earned or not, really needs to stop before those who are working just say screw it.
All welfare does is keep the children alive. It doesn’t make sure they get even a high school education, it doesn’t instill any sense of personal responsibility, it doesn’t teach them anything about delayed gratification. Do you really think that the current habit of just throwing taxpayer money at the problem is good for society in any way?
That’s what you took away from what I wrote?
What I am saying is since I beleive it’s better to not leave people in poverty AND I don’t want to restrict people’s reproductive choices the only other solution is to support impoverished people when they have more children. I am unapologetically fine with that. It’s not perfect but it’s a hell of a lot better than the alternative.
Welfare today fails not because it’s inherently wrong but because we don’t do enough and provide the right kind of support, not because we do too much.
I grew up on welfare. Thanks to welfare, my mother was able to attend university and eventually become a middle class tax-paying professional. Thanks to welfare, my brain and body were able to develop healthily because I was able to obtain enough high-quality nutrients. Thanks to welfare, I do not have ongoing health problems because Iw as able to obtain preventative care and fix problems before they became unfixable. Thanks to welfare, I was not placed in an illegal unsafe unlicensed day care. Thanks to welfare, I am mentally sound because I was not subject to chronic homelessness or exposure to dangerous and violent surroundings.
Thanks to the safety, health and nutrition that welfare provided me as a child, I was able to complete a degree and a graduate degree, serve my country for four years, obtain a professional job where I make the world a better place every day, and raise my child in a comfortable middle class lifestyle.
And if your mom became pregnant again either by birth control failure, assault or choice how would your lives possible be improved by not having the right safety net? It makes no sense.
So, if I am reading this right, you want to not only continue to pay people to just sit around, you want to pay to give them - what? - a middle class life? Have you not noticed what tends to happen to government funded housing? Or that no one seems to be forcing kids to go to school?
Meanwhile, because of the much higher taxes, you will be forcing people who are not now poor into that direction. California is a great example of that - what is the stat? We have something like an eighth of the overall population, but a fifth of the welfare recipients. Many, many people in the middle class and up have abandoned the state because the taxes got to be too much. Businesses leave because it costs them too much to be here.
How about this? Everyone who feels that not enough is given to people who have babies while on welfare is welcome to donate all the extra money they want to. Or you can adopt a welfare family and pay their bills for them. Not only would you be saving the taxpayers a bunch of money, you would be able to see first hand how often paying peoples’ way just results in their expecting you to do more.
How often do women become pregnant and stay that way other than by choice?
How much improved is the life of the baby she selfishly decided to have and keep going to be?
I just don’t have it in me to go 10 rounds with you and your excluded middle arguments. But that last one, the idea that every woman who gets pregnant stays pregnant by choice, as if there aren’t parts of this country that aren’t hundreds of miles from a safe abortion is woefully uninformed.
Uh, OK. I don’t know what you think are excluded middle arguments.
Of course I know that there are places where it is difficult to get an abortion, but that doesn’t mean that the woman has to keep any resulting baby either. The whole thing was presented as “if woman have sex, she have baby” as if she had no choice in the matter.
Did you find your cite that “most people on welfare have NOT always been poor”?
No, sweatheart, social security is NOT a “pension fund”. They did not take your tax money (because that’s what is was and is, a tax) and put it into a “super-secret curlcoat account” neatly labeled with your name. They took your tax money and used it to pay for those already retired at the time.
When you retired you started receiving the tax money of those still working.
In other words, thanks for supporting your fellow citizens for 40 years, and you are now currently receiving money raised by taxing your fellow citizens.
Welfare can be and frequently is given to people who have long contributed to society and are only temporarily in need of help. They did not nothing wrong they just had a run of bad luck, and given a chance will get back on their feet. Their ideal life is to be independent citizens their whole lives.
If you genuinely need help and refuse that help when offered it doesn’t make you proud it makes you stupid.
“Pride” that leads to hunger or living in a box or the back of a car is nothing good, it’s corrosive and destructive.
I think it’s more disturbing that you plan to do nothing for those children who are here, living and breathing. OK, cut off all assistance - what happens to those kids? How do they eat? Get vaccinations and medical care?
What is your proposed alternative?
Seriously, do you think human reproduction will simply stop? It never has in the history of humanity. What is your plan for those children who are, in your eyes, the product of irresponsible adults? Do you plan to send them to orphanages - oh, wait, that would be paying for them on the public dime. Well, what? Expose them in the woods like good old times?
You keep saying cut off the funding, OK, how about we make you watch video of them starving to death?
First of all, as you’ve been told before, YOU CAN NOT RECEIVE “WELFARE” ANYMORE WHILE DOING NOTHING. Not since 1996 - hell, this is NOT news! You either 1) have a job or 2) are looking for a job or 3) in school or 4) caring for a child under 5 - and even then you might still be required to do all of the above part time.
NOBODY IS DOING “NOTHING” EXCEPT FOR PEOPLE DRAWING DISABILITY - because, you know they are NOT ABLE to work.
You have this fantasy about what “welfare” is that I doubt ever matched reality and CERTAINLY does not match today’s reality.
And that’s a bad thing? What do you suggest, lining up authorized children against a wall and shooting them? Oh, wait, that would cost society money for the bullets, you’ll just let them starve to death, naked and cold?
NOBODY guarantees that for any child. Plenty of middle-class and wealthy kids drop out of school. Plenty of financially independent parents fail to instill personal responsibility or delayed gratification in their kids. Why should the poor be forced to conform to a higher standard than the rich? What, you think an irresponsible wealthy drunk in a BMW somehow does less damage, maiming, and killing than an irresponsible poor drunk in a beater? You think wealthy people don’t commit crime, do drugs, or anything else of that nature? You think the misdeeds of wealthy people don’t impact society?
Yes, it beats the alternative which would literal starvation for some, increased homelessness, poorer health, less education, more crime, and more civil unrest among those who have nothing left to lose.
People mock the concept of bread and circuses but for 2,000 years it’s been a way to keep the downtrodden from revolting, which I assure you would be far worse than our present situation.
(Note: this “why” was in response to me saying that too many “outs” makes a law inpractical).
The reason is that it would increase administration fees and also increase the chance of administrative error because the more there is to administrate the more errors there will be.
I think you’re right that I’d be given an out due to my medication, but there are lots of medications that prevent women carrying a pregnancy. There are also women who just can’t get pregnant and could prove it.
And would you have an age cut-off ? Where would that age be? 40? 45? 47? 50? 55? Forever?
Would it be reasonable to require a 49-year-old woman to take this medication even though it’s extremely unlikely that she could have children? There have been several cases of women conceiving naturally even after 50. (Wiki link. I think some of the cases there are dubious ((only counting the non-assisted ones - I’m dubious about some of the older ones where age might not be definite)), but a few definitely aren’t).
There would be an awful lot of people who had good reasons not to have to take this medication, even if it were magically OK for every person who took it, like in the OP (unlike every current real-world form of birth control) so the administration of this medication would increase in cost due to processing their exceptions.
When considering whether to introduce a change to welfare you should always, if you’re not doing it for purely political reasons, take into account changes in administration costs and chances of administration error. Of course, most changes to welfare are for purely political reasons, but on this board we don’t depend on the whim of voters.
You are really thick. It has been NINETEEN YEARS since welfare reform in this country, NOBODY is allowed to just “sit around” anymore. How long is it going to be before you grok that?
Have you ever noted what tends to happen to privately owned housing of the poor? Have you heard the term “slumlord”, which predates government funded housing?
Lobby for more truant officers.
And, as I noted, this is NOT a problem solely of the poor. But somehow you’re content to ignore the problem of kids of higher socio-economic classes ditching class or dropping out.
We already did that - we voted in a government that decided to “adopt” poor people and pay to make sure they have the bare minimum to survive. We did this by the mechanism of a tax-supported government funded program. It’s called living in a democracy, thanks for playing.
Yes, please read the ENTIRE article for comprehensive before replying next time.
There is a small group of people who are chronically poor (usually due to a lot of dysfunction), but most people do not remain in the system long.
Not really. Because I think that A) reproduction and childrearing (within reason) are important human goods that people shouldn’t be derprived of merely because they are poor, and B) maintaining replacement level fertility is a critical challenge for developed society, and if we don’t pay people to do it, then they won’t do it. As some of the more economically conservative Asian countries are discovering. Also C) I don’t want to encourage people to have abortions, and I’m happy to pay them money if that means they keep the baby.
I have to say that it is your side that is arguing the excluded middle. The two choices you give are : government support for every kid she has with no personal responsibility to not have kids you can’t support OR restricting their right to reproduce (forced BC).
Our side is the one that has the middle ground. Go ahead and have more kids but don’t blackmail us into supporting it when you KNEW you couldn’t afford it (i.e. already on welfare).
If children are born before going on welfare, then it’s free money like it is now. If you have a child while on welfare, you still get the money but it is not free. It is a low-interest government loan to be paid back once you are off welfare.
May not be perfect but at least it is a solution.
I have a friend (single, female, 30’s, no children) who was between jobs and very reluctantly applied for welfare. She was told she’d have to pay it back. I had never heard of that before.
Back in my darkest days (1991, 17 years old, no children) when I had to apply for welfare to supplement the two part time jobs I was working in order to “make ends meet” you couldn’t just sit around. You had to prove that you were actively working for work by filling out a form listing everywhere you inquired about a job, including the phone number of the business. As soon as you asked the person at the business what the phone number was they knew you were on welfare and usually assumed that you were faking a job search just to fill out that form. It was humiliating. My caseworker did nothing but hassle me and make me feel like absolute dirt. Yet the people across the hall from us DID “sit around all day” smoking dope and playing Nintendo and their welfare cheques arrived each month with no problems.
To address the topic: as much as it’s a nice idea for people to not have babies while on welfare, it ain’t gonna happen. I’m pretty sure I remember oral contraceptives being covered under the welfare drug plan back then but not all women are able to take them. Unfortunately you can’t force people to be responsible about birth control and unfortunately women’s bodies are able to create babies that the parents (one or both) are unable to take care of.