And how many of these obvious fraudsters did you report to the appropriate authorities?
We already have measures in place to report, investigate and determine if fraud is taking place. If everyone who sold these welfare queens lobster tails and steak would use them, it would make a bigger difference with halting actual abuse instead of making innocent people’s lives more difficult.
First, cracking down on alleged welfare abuses isn’t going to save anyone any money. There just aren’t enough of them and the cost of enforcement is going to be more than the money saved. Now if saving money was really the agenda, the governments might consider not throwing buckets of it out the window and into the military industrial complex’s outstretched arms every time someone screams ISIS or Ebola.
Secondly, look at why so many state and local governments ended up cash-strapped in the first place. Back in 2008, many of them fell for a widespread mortgage security scam perpetuated by large banks and investment firms. State and local governments were among then biggest losers. The budget shortfalls aren’t happening because the money is being stolen by dishonest poor people who use it to buy takeout Kung Pao chicken and the occasional six-pack of Budweiser. It was stolen by investment bankers who used it to buy multi-million dollar Manhattan townhouses and Aspen vacation homes.
And Im not outraged at that people on public assistance own TV’s and occasionally buy takeout meals and alcohol. What outrages me is the mentality that you can’t give poor people the opportunity to have a moments of security or even pleasure now or it will rob them of the incentive not to be poor. I think that’s just reprehensible.
I once was in the grocery behind a woman with small children who was nervously watching her groceries being rung up, holding back that carton of ice cream for last. I saw the look on her face when she realized she couldn’t afford it. I bought it for her. It was the best 5 bucks I’ve ever spent.
In 2013 Kansas spent 16% of its TANF money on Basic Assistance, compared with 28% 2013 national average and more than 50% in 1997. Note moreover, that this is mostly Federal money, rather than Kansas money. In other words, of $174 million total TANF spending in Kansas, only $27 million was for Basic Assistance; of that less than $12 million came from the Kansas budget, or about $4 per capita – that’s less than the price of one BigMac™.
And
[QUOTE=Center on Budget and Policy Priorities]
… over time, states redirected a substantial portion of their TANF and MOE finds to other purposes, with some funds being used to substitute for (or “supplant”) existing state spending and thereby help plug holes in state budgets or free up funds for purposes unrelated to low-income families or children. When the recent recession hit in late 2007, many states were unable — for fiscal or political reasons — to reclaim those dollars to address the substantial increases in need for cash assistance among the growing numbers of poor families; instead, facing budget shortfalls, many states cut already-low TANF benefit amounts further, shortened TANF time limits, or took other actions to shrink caseloads or keep them from rising much in the face of mounting need.
In 1995, for every 100 families with children living in poverty, 68 received cash assistance through AFDC to help meet basic needs; by 2010, for every 100 families that were poor, only 27 families received such assistance. Moreover, for families still receiving cash assistance, median benefit levels have plummeted — falling 20 percent since TANF’s creation (after adjusting for inflation). Benefits for a family without other cash income now fall below 30 percent of the poverty line in the majority of states. As a result of these two trends, TANF now lifts a far smaller fraction of deeply poor families and children out of severe poverty than AFDC did. A recent study finds that the number of U.S. families and children living below a standard the World Bank uses to measure serious poverty in third-world countries — living on less than $2 per person per day — has doubled since TANF’s creation.
[/QUOTE]
Combined state and federal spending on TANF totals in the $30 billion ballpark – just where it was 18 years ago. For comparison, $230 billion is spent annually for interest on the national debt, and even more than that is “spent” annually subsidizing the rich with the GWB tax cuts. The F-35 Joint Strike Fighter is expected to cost $1.5 trillion over its life – that’s Trillion with a T.
TL;DR summary: Those whose plan to reduce the burden on American taxpayers is to prevent the poor from buying beer are … [checks forum] … confused.
Well I guess we can close the thread then.
If the thread were about your misapprehensions regarding people on welfare, we could. I for one am glad it is not.
We could do this like WIC, where the permitted items are extremely specific and at checkout each item being purchased must be checked by the cashier… oh, wait, time and human labor, that would definitely drive up costs. But hey, it’s only cost on private industry, not the government, so that’s OK, right?
At a certain point more enforcement is not cost-effective. Accept no problem will be perfect.
And if you spot welfare fraud report it. Or quit bitchin’
And accept that “I don’t like what they’re buying,” is not proof perfect of fraud. Sometimes it’s evidence of different prescribed diet, different values, different education, different storage and/ cooking facilities or many other things besides this person is scamming the system.
anybody who thinks there isn’t serious welfare fraud is delusional.
All Kansas did was make it more difficult to abuse the system. Find your cigarette/gambling/booze money somewhere else.
But they also made it more difficult to use the system for its intended purpose, and “cutting fraud” by making an existing program inefficient and less effective is not particularly good public management.
Where is the study examining the impact of this change? It would be trivially easy to produce one, and if it is as effective as you claim it is, the results should be clear right?
Surely government decision making based evidence is better than decision making based on gut feeling, right?
Well, yeah, we know there are abusers. The government even publishes information on percentage of bad people caught. But “serious welfare fraud” and “most people on the program are honest” aren’t incompatible. One highly publicized or noticeable case of fraud is going to stand out more than a thousand poor families complying with the rules.
And while you may disapprove of people purchasing filet mignon or lobster tails with government benefits it actually is not fraud - it’s a lot of other things like stupid or imprudent or what have you but it is not against the rules. You can argue it should be, but at present it’s not. If you don’t like it then lobby to change the rules.
Or as WhyNot said, just because you don’t approve of their choices it isn’t proof of fraud.
Glad you finally get it.
I’ve read the initial article very closely, and there is nothing in there that indicates that the law will result in any cost savings to the state. The maximum benefit for a family of 3 is $429 a month according to the article…more than 4 whole dollars a person a day. There is nothing in the described proposal that reduces the cost to the state.
It still costs the state $429 a month regardless of whether the beneficiary spends the money on rice, beans and fresh healthy vegetables or fortune-telling massage cruises. There is not a cost issue. It’s just a way to whip up moral outrage among the Tea Party idiot faction.
Now, do you think there is any reasonable way to enforce a prohibition on buying thongs or lobsters with cash money redeemed from the TANF program? The thing is, money is fungible and I doubt TANF is the only means of support for most families. Some of them have low-paying jobs and others may get assistance from families and friends. And I bet that the people subsisting only on the $4.75 a person from TANF are spending it on necessities.
I can give you a hypothetical - actually I WISH it was a hypothetical but it isn’t. My mother, brother and his 2 children for several years lived on welfare combined with my mother’s social security benefit. My brother is now on SS disability but after he was injured and unable to work it took many years of fighting to get the SS disability.
And guess what?? They have 3 television sets. And an X-Box. And cable. Not because they are committing fraud or abusing their benefits, but because I bought this stuff for them. And they have friends that take them out to dinner, in real restaurants with tablecloths and everything. Now maybe some busybody that sees them swiping an EBT card in a store one day and sees them in a nice restaurant the next day might get all outraged but it isn’t based in reality, it’s based in their “poor people must be punished mentality”. And if they had a landlord he might get all outraged about them having “multiple TV’s.” And they have 2 refrigerators and a deep freeze and nice furniture because they were purchased when my Dad was alive and my brother was uninjured. And I might even take my family on a cruise next year. Even though they are poor I still love them and want to do nice things for them.
But I digress. Since TANF isn’t the only means of support for most families, how do you determine which of their purchases where made with government money and which were made with their earned money and which were outright gifts? Are you going to launch investigations into these purchases (all which, by definition, are relatively small – the benefits are just not that much, no one’s buying Porsches and condos).
Don’t you see that starting a full scale investigation every time someone poor buys a pint of sesame chicken or a lacy bra will cost more than it yields?
No, your claim of cost savings is nothing but the stupid knee jerk Republican response of “We just simply can’t afford it”, which is the response to every single proposal or program that involves giving money to disadvantaged individuals…as opposed to the knee-jerk “Oh Oh JOB CREATOR, lets suck some dick and throw away some money!!!” response to every proposal that involves giving money to a corporation or an individual that doesn’t need it.
If these are our people, why don’t we take better care of them? And if they are not our people, well, who’s people are they?
We don’t need to determine that - anyone with relatives who will pay their cable bill and take them on cruises and buy them X-Box doesn’t need public charity.
I think you have described a knee-jerk response of giving money to individuals who don’t need it, but I don’t see any job creation involved.
Regards,
Shodan
Uh, yeah. That’s kinda the point.
So, if you lose your job you should immediately throw out your TV(s), games, phone, and anything else of value and if you don’t no aid for you?
Maybe we should prosecute anyone who takes a poor person out to dinner in a restaurant for being soft on poverty? :rolleyes:
Most of the dick suck for job creation is also the reason for the need of government assistance. Check out what kind of jobs are created when states and municipalities suck a corporate dick with tax breaks to have them locate in their area. Most are retail, $10 an hour temp positions without benefits and such. When the tax breaks expire, the corporations either pick up and leave or negotiate to suck more.
The very people who work for them are usually eligible for TANF, subsidized housing and SNAP. Before the ACA, they sucked the life out of our local hospitals because they were uninsured and there wasn’t money to pay both the rent and a hospital bill from a year and a half ago. See where I’m going with this? :dubious:
The whole thing is just so unbelievably mean-spirited. It’s not enough that they are poor – they have to be miserable as well. Otherwise they don’t deserve government support. That’s the bottom line.
That’s an overly simplistic interpretation. Rather, people who can afford luxuries evidently don’t need assistance buying the basic necessities of life. If poor people can find happiness without needing public money, good for them. But conservatives don’t want the government making someone poorer so that someone can indulge in things they don’t need.
My mother is 89 years old. She got some additional education after my father died 12 years ago and she worked part time as a tutor for reading disabled children until 2years ago, when she decided it was too difficult to get around and there were too many days when she just wasn’t up to going to work. So she quit her job.
I love her very much. If I buy her stuff it isn’t a knee jerk liberal response, it’s because I like doing stuff for her that brings her pleasure. I guess in your world she she’s a lazy “taker” that needs to get a job. I’m glad that’s not the world I live in.
Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day, make a man debase himself for a fish and you feel smug for the rest of your life.