Are you proposing that we somehow force family members to provide financial support to those who aren’t their dependents? And somehow prevent them from spending money on non-essentials? How much do you think that will cost to implement and police?
I mean, it’d be nice if they’d help Grandma with essentials before luxuries. But tell a person that they can’t take Grandma on a cruise, and that doesn’t mean they’ll give her the cash to pay her electric bill. The two forms of charity are entirely unrelated. (Especially if Grandma won’t admit to them that she needs help with her electric bill.)
It actually won’t cost me much to take Mom on a cruise since they charge exactly twice as much for a single occupancy cabin as they do for a double. Actually, since she doesn’t drink the only reason it would cost me anything is that I’m not stingy with tips.
So I guess now the conservatives, the people who believe in freedom and small government and lack of government interference want to tell me how I can spend my after-tax money and who I can buy gifts for and what I can buy for them. Unfreakingbelivable.
The last time I lost my job I sold my TV set and other possessions to pay my bills.
As for your opinion about high end food items I don’t see the relevance of the legality of it. If we’re going into debt to fund unnecessary luxury items then someone down the road is literally going to have to pay for it at the expense of people in real need of public assistance. Your husband may find himself on a waiting list for medical attention.
All Kansas did was make it harder to buy items with cash which is the easiest way to abuse the aid. They didn’t take a single penny away from recipients.
Nice even a very good rant and it has zero to do with the topic. Worst case scenario is that granny can’t cash out her welfare payments to buy margaritas on the cruise.
Oh, absolutely. And I’m not a person who believes that we need to make people suffer to encourage them to get a(nother) job. I mean, really, what’s your mom going to do? The world only needs so many greeters at Walmart (many of whom are on TANF and SNAP, so, um, not a solution). She’s not exactly in a highly employable demographic.
I think it’s wonderful that you’re including her in your family plans and bringing a little pleasure to her life, I really do. And I don’t think it’s your responsibility to pay all of her bills before you do something nice for her, I really don’t. The reason we have social safety nets is to help people like her survive, so that you can help her do more than survive. You can give her the gift of experiences with you that will make her life worth living. You’re doing a good thing. And, really, when the posturing and knee-jerking is set aside, I think most people would actually agree with that. Even the evil conservatives.
If I suddenly found myself in a poor position, I’d probably do this too. I would sell everything except for my car and my laptop.
:doing the math in my head:
That would get me about $300, tops? .
Of course, it’s just me and a couple of furry cats. I don’t need toys to keep me occupied and distracted from life’s worries. I’m also mature enough to handle a little embarrassment over not having anything. But my imaginary kids probably wouldn’t be so stoic. It’s bad enough I can’t feed or clothe them well, or take them places. Do I really want to snatch away the only pleasurable things they have?
The thing about being broke is that it’s really really hard to get out of the hole. Let’s say you sell your TV to turn the electricity back on. The next time you get a spare $100 to spend, you could high-tail it back to Walmart and buy another set. Or you can give it to the babysitter, who’s been nagging you for months for that money you owe her. Or you can use it on some new shoes for the kids…or coats for the kids or the deposit for the summer camp for the kids. You’ll never get that TV back.
I will never forget when my oldest sister was in her early 20s–struggling financially. She had a bunch of wine bottles full of spare change perched up on the mantle. As a teenager, I was fascinated. I asked her why, since she was so poor, she didn’t just take them to the bank and cash them in. Surely that was more dignified than food stamps.
“Because I know I’ve hit rock bottom when I get to that point.”
Selling your life’s possessions is a “rock bottom” move. It’s what you do when you have no hope. It’s the rare individual who has the balls to do something like this.
Been there. And you know what happens when the post office loses a package with your grandmother’s fur stole in it? Paypal won’t let you sell your possessions on ebay any more. :mad:
(Yes, I shouldn’t have spent the $60 until the person left feedback and I knew they had it. Hungry kids had other opinions about holding onto the money…)
Unfortunately, no one wanted my 20 year old TV that required the conversion box to work at all with digital TV signals.
Really, I did sell off everything I could, but a lot of stuff you can’t sell for love or money, no one wants to pay for it.
I didn’t give you my opinion, I stated a fact: purchasing filet mignon or lobster tails is NOT against the rules at present. You and I may not approve of the purchase (you object to luxuries, I think it’s terrible budgeting) but it is not against the rules. As I said, if you don’t like the rules try to get them changed but people making such purchase are NOT committing fraud.
Yes, they DID take money from recipients by forcing them to make more withdrawals, each of which is charged a fee to the aid recipient.
Interesting that “rock bottom” has the same meaning to different people but the margin can be quite different.
There was a time when I thought I was financially bullet proof. I lived below my means and long ago gave up things like cable so I could make that happen. I had a “Plan B” in case I lost my job. Turned out there was a massive flaw in “Plan B” and I now feel stupid for not having a “Plan C”. By the time I got to “Plan C” I was spent. I’m simply too old and worn out to dig ditches which ironically is some of the things I did to get through it.
Yes I’m fully aware my version of rock bottom was different than your sisters. Like you It didn’t bother me to sell my stuff. It’s just stuff. I accumulated a fair amount of it. It sucks watching your financial life circle the drain.
When I was first laid off I had enough money to cover a friend of mine who was living hand to mouth. I’m not one to just give money away on a whim but I’m also not one to let friends go down without trying to help. And my friends were the same way. One of them sold a car to pay me for work rendered because he ran into financial troubles. Money moved back and forth between us and we got through it.
Not everybody has a support system. I get that people need a helping hand. Seriously. But when people abuse that I’m not not pissed off just because it rankles my sense of decency. I’m pissed off because it’s money we as a society are using to help those who truly need it. If the people are misusing it then then they didn’t need it in the first place and it could have gone to job training or other social safety nets. I see the adult down the road who is gong to suffer because of this. I see the children of this adult sucked down the same hole because nobody taught them basic skills to get them through life.
It’s in the state’s interest to see that money is spent wisely so people aren’t shorting themselves at the end of the month or just plain wasting it. What Kansas has enacted is a minor policy change that encourages the proper use of public funds. It doesn’t require monitoring and it doesn’t cut benefits.
yes they can, what’s your point? It’s the cost of the object that makes it a luxury. If I lived on the coast I’d be out crab fishing every week. that makes it free.
But forcing people to pay lots of petty fees is NOT spending wisely, and it certainly does cut benefits. That’s the whole point of the objections.
Under the old law, if I needed to use my TANF money to pay the rent, I withdrew the amount of my rent in cash from the ATM, paying the $0.85 state fee plus the ATM owner’s fee (usually two or three bucks) and paid my rent.
Now, if I need to use my TANF money to pay the rent, I need to withdraw the money in $20 increments, paying the $0.85 state fee plus the ATM owner’s fee (usually two or three bucks) for EACH withdrawal. If my rent is $300, my fees went from around three bucks to around $45, which is a direct reduction in my benefits.
Alternatively, I can withdraw the money via point-of-sale machines. However, most retailers won’t allow you to do so unless you make a purchase, so I need to buy lots of candy bars or bottles of pop or other useless crap I don’t really want or need just so I have access to money to pay my rent.
Please explain how this is “spending wisely.” Be specific.
(Maybe I can rejigger my financial affairs to use the TANF money for something else; maybe I can’t. Suppose my utilities are included in the rent, as is fairly common in some low-income housing situations, and I have food stamps to eat on. What would you like me to spend the TANF money on, if not my rent?)
I think some of the people taking the position “the poor should suffer as an incentive” are not considering that having an *occasional *taste of something better than bare minimum can *also *act as an incentive to do better.
I don’t think I saw this posted. Apologies if it’s a repeat.
In fighting “abuse”, however we’re supposed to define that, I wonder how this bill compares to the ill-conceived drug testing requirements that other states have implemented.
I sympathize with this. If our domestic food aid program involved just delivery of basic foodstuffs (as opposed to how SNAP works), I’d be totally ok with there being a chocolate bar in the package. And I’m not really bothered by someone using their benefits to buy a chocolate bar or on-sale lobster during glut years when it’s super cheap.
However, I also understand how someone receiving benefits and using them on something I deny myself can rub wrong. E.g. cable TV as mentioned above, which is something I’ve never paid for. Money is fungible, obviously, so maybe a family member is paying for that cable TV and the actual benefits are going to things all us judgy types would approve of. But nevertheless, that’s a household that has the resources to buy a luxury that I don’t have, and I’m being asked to support them due to their supposed lack of resources. I understand the bad thoughts here.
But who am I to say what an ok treat is or is not? Yes, it’s money from me, but maybe it’s better to just fork over some cash and let the adults make their adult decisions. If the program doesn’t directly provide the necessities (food, rent, etc.), then maybe just provide the money and be done with it. I’ve poked around looking for cost benefit analyses of what types of programs give the most bang per buck. They range from cash grants to very restrictive programs, but fuck all if I can make any sense of what works best.
As someone who has been the recipient of both food boxes and SNAP, I’d say both systems have their good points and their bad points.
A downside with SNAP is that, bluntly, people can wind up making really dumb ass decisions. To some extent, it’s a learning experience. I’ve yet to meet someone who really did a good job managing SNAP benefits the first month or two they had them. It is not easy to budget sufficient food on such a limited budget if you’ve never done that before. That is, actually, one reason a lot of churches offer free meals one or two days a week and we have soup kitchens, it helps compensate for those sorts of mistakes.
On the other hand SNAP allows folks to tailor their choices to local availability. In Alaska you can use SNAP to purchase certain types of hunting gear. In more temperate climes you can use SNAP to purchase vegetable seeds to grow some of your own food. If an area has low priced sea food you can purchase that, and if some other area beef or pork is the lower price animal protein you can purchase that. Or you can go entirely vegetarian. People on restricted diets can make choices accordingly (one problem with food boxes and me is that I’ve had the experience of being unable to eat up to half of what’s given to me due to medical reasons. I am not the only one with this sort of issue).
WIC is an case where benefits are very strictly defined. That does lead to a certain consistency and abusing it is extremely difficult. It’s also labor-intensive to administer. The recipients have little choice and while they may comply they also have less opportunity to learn. Then again, since it deals with pregnant women, breastfeeding women, and infants where you only have once chance to get things right maybe that’s for the best. Then again, you can’t stop other ineligible family members from eating the WIC foods once they’re in the home, which is about the only place abuse is going to occur with that program. There are ways to get exceptions to the standard food packages if there are medical issues so that potential problem is off the table.
Every so often you get a celebrity going on a “foodstamp diet” and there is some poo-pooing of the notion (Gwenneth Paltrow is the most recent) but it actually is a good exercise for people to attempt to eat on a budget equivalent to a SNAP benefit. It’s easy to say “eat rice, beans, and potatoes” but quite different to actually do it. You can get pretty frickin’ tired of the same old menu.
Food is an important part of morale. That’s why bread-and-water and prison loaf diets are used to *punish *prisoners. When the household is eating 5-10 pounds of potatoes per person per week finding new ways to fix potatoes can become quite important. (Case in point - today I’m having two baked potatoes for lunch and cream of potato soup for dinner)
Well, what if the cable TV is the major source of entertainment for the household? (Although personally I opt for Netflix and library DVD’s, they’re a hell of a lot cheaper). Maybe the kids have been told “either keep your grades up or no cable” in which case it’s not just entertainment, it’s a reward for doing well at something that will have greater benefits down the line. Maybe grandparents are paying for the cable because they don’t want to hand out money directly but rather give the kids incentive to do well and earn the reward.
Or maybe someone is making poor budgeting decisions after all.
The thing is, you don’t really know the whole situation.
I think it comes down to different programs work for different people. Some folks really do need structure. Others will do best if you just get the hell out of their way. Most fall in between those two extremes. That, and different people value different things.
Maybe for one family access to movies and videos is huge. Maybe another family doesn’t feel a need for cable/whatever but one a month wants to have a steak dinner grilled out on the back porch - and if they can budget their food such that there’s enough SNAP/TANF/other money left over at the end of the month to do that more power to them. Maybe for another family a working computer and internet access in the home is a big deal. Different people have different needs and wants and motivations.
Poverty should not be a crime and it should not be treated as such. Poor people should be given sufficient help to maintain a level of food, clothing, and shelter at least as good as what a convicted felon sitting in prison gets. Anything less is unjust.
