This. For me to receive TANF, I have to go into the Job Center for 30 hours a week. While there, I’d be searching for a job and attending classes about finding a job. Oregon doesn’t allow attending college classes or community service to count towards this. The nearest Job Center to me is 30 miles one way. In order for me to do this, it would cost me almost $300 a month just in gas. I asked them if there was any way they could work with me, since I’d be spending more in gas than I’d be receiving in TANF. Of course, the answer was no.
I’m not saying that I should be able to sit on my ass and receive a check every month, but there’s already so many hoops to jump through, why make it even harder and more humiliating? We don’t WANT to be doing this. As someone mentioned, it’s not the chronically poor who use TANF, as there’s a lifetime limit of a couple years I think. It’s people who suddenly find themselves in an unexpected and unwanted situation.
But surely you can see that your version of acting in a way that respects basic human dignity is not some kind of universal edict direct from Mt. Sinai. So when you say, "We don’t get to…’ you imply something more persuasive, more authoritative, than your personal view of basic human dignity.
If you were to learn that a majority of those surveyed did not share your view that this proposal flouted the dictates of basic human dignity, would you modify your view, or insist that all person obey your vision of “basic human dignity,” despite its inability to command majority support?
A lot of people get malaria, it kills about as many in Africa as HIV/AIDS. The majority of those people are poor. So, to stop malaria, I propose we fine people who get it. Ta-da!
See? It doesn’t work. If you want to actually solve a problem, you have to actually address the cause. And again, we have a significant body of very good research on how to improve parent participation. There is no need to rely on gut feelings or easy one-liners.
I’m not sure Bricker is the one who isn’t getting it. You accept, I imagine, that not everyone is going to agree that it is an offense to “basic human dignity”* to condition a household’s receipt of welfare benefits on not being truant or flunking out of school (where there is no learning disability to explain the subpar performance).
So, what do we do? The first person to make pronouncements as to what “basic human dignity” does and does not command wins?
Where do we learn what subtle policy tweaks BHD requires, permits, or forbids?
Is it not true that in democracies, when the not-at-all clear-cut questions of what BHD commands are raised, they are answered by votes? By the people themselves or by their legislative representatives.
So, if even sven’s contention fails to convince the voting public, which is more likely: It’s not a clear-cut case of BHD as some people contend? Or that most people are wicked and venal, ready to sell out their fellow man, save for the handful of saints who — mirabile dictu! — happen to agree with our politics.
For a board that otherwise sneers at things like “invisible sky wizards,” the enthusiasm for airy-fairy concepts like “basic human dignity” is certainly incongruous. I suppose we all have our own articles of faith…
You don’t think the cost of a bill (or the savings derived thereof) should have any effect on the passage of the bill?
Noting that practicing music improves mathematical performance, I propose a bill that buys every fifth grader in the state a bassoon at $1000 a pop (actually cheap for a bassoon). What, that blows the education budget? No, money is a completely separate issue! :rolleyes:
You don’t think economic incentives motivate behavior change?
You want to argue that there are better ways to do this, I agree with you. You think that putting economic incentives to be involved in your child’s education will NOT change behavior?
If instead you think we should offer a bonus rather than a fine, that is fine, and I would agree that the outcome is likely to be better. However, the money for that bonus has to come from somewhere, which is why I earlier asked if anyone has a way to improve the situation and save money (I will amend to ‘or at least not spend more’). If you want to spend more money, that’s fine, but realize you now have to come up with a revenue source and that increased spending is going to face increased opposition in a state legislation, rather than a bill that decreases spending.
Of course it does. But this is a bill that tries to solve two problems at once, and works against itself. If we want to give kids an incentive to work harder, then great. And yes, a cheaper solution would be better than an expensive one. And if we want the state to save money, great. Another, separate bill for that would be a good thing. But to combine them into one bill? The state benefits when children fail. It’s a lose/lose proposition.
And I want to know where you’re buying your bassoons.
Meh, the origin and meaning of human rights has been debated by much smarter people than us. Why isn’t slavery okay? Just because someone said it wasn’t okay to enslave people? What if we all mostly agreed that slavery is fine? Think about it long enough, and it all becomes pretty damn abstract.
In this use, “basic human dignity” isn’t some massive proclamation of universal truth. It’s more of a strong personal conviction (or hope?) that we should, in general, do the right thing, and that includes not subjecting poor people to pointless humiliation so we can get our self-righteous jollies. That’s not the function of our social safety net, it doesn’t do anything to benefit our nation, and it’s just plain not right.
I’ll make you a deal— There are a handful of things where BHD is, standing alone, sufficient to settle the forbidden nature of a thing: slavery, genocide, suppression of the freedom of conscience.
For most other things though — whether welfare benefits can be conditioned on school attendance, the cut-off level for the EITC, how many days of early voting must be afforded and whether you have to bring an ID card, whether your employer’s insurance has to cover contraception or whether that is something people can be asked to pay themselves (as is the case, for instance, with eyeglasses (which are also very important to some people!)) — simply invoking “basic human dignity” doesn’t really get us very far.
I don’t think this particular set of economic incentives will motivate behavior change, no.
If you wanted to use economic incentives, you’d have to address the root cause. It rarely works to provide an incentive for a goal if people do not have the tools to reach that goal. For example, microfinance organizations abroad quickly learned that recipients spent their money on ongoing expenses rather than on starting businesses. So they started incorporating business training in their package, and the concept started to work.
You might address the well-documented communications issues by incentivizing schools to reach out and engage with a broader range of parents. You might want to address time/transportation/childcare issues by providing economic incentives that balance the economic loss poor parents face when taking on yet another commitment. You might find some creative solution for incentivizing schools and parents to bridge cultural gaps. These things stand some chance of working, and any good policy maker can do enough research in a week to develop a sound program.
But even then, eventually, you run in to the fact that you can’t squeeze blood from a turnip. You can threaten whatever you want to the mentally-disabled non-English-speaking mother of three who has a kid with 16 years of problem behavior and school failure, and it’s not going to do a damn thing. If you are serious about improving schoolwork, you can’t expect to turn around the problems of our enormously complex school system by threatening to take away $50.00 from someone. You need to actually build a system that works, not punish the people who it is failing.
Believe it. You think you get to define what does, and does not, offend “basic human dignity” by insisting loudly on your correctness?
Try again. The receipt of welfare benefits conditioned on academic performance is by no means some great universal wrong against human dignity. And you can’t make it so by pretending incredulous surprise at people who don’t think your way.
ETA: Kimmy said it far better than I, in a blow to my self-esteem that seriously has threatened my basic human dignity.
It was a number that floated around for ‘cheap’ bassoons when I played in college.
Looking on ebay, I found two for under $500, but they were the crappiest plastic pieces of junk there. There were bocals more expensive. At the high end they were in the $7-8000 range.
But the worry, I think, is that truancy/poor school performance is resulting from the parent’s low frustration tolerance/over-willingness to follow the path of least resistance.
Raising kids is hard work. And that includes resisting your kids’ attempts at staying home from school; making sure that they don’t skip; making sure they do their homework; being an engaged parent who communicates with the school; so on and so forth.
Now for some parents, there are non-volitional causes for why they have some difficulties with these tasks. But in a non-negligible number of cases, a significant part of the reason is that they don’t want to do it.
We all know it from personal experience. Why didn’t the laundry get done this weekend? Yeah, maybe a couple errands ended up taking longer than you expected. Yeah, maybe you did need to restock up on detergent. But, most importantly of all, you wanted to do other, more fun things, and blew it off.
There is a curious — and unsupportable — resistance to acknowledging that this very pedestrian explanation often explains the deprivations of the poor.
So by clearly, immediately, and unmistakably connecting the behavior we wish to discourage with an outcome that people do not want to suffer, we are addressing the root cause. We are eliminating an old path of least resistance that led to a destination we don’t want them to go down. We are using their distaste for frustration to their advantage. And we are doing it more cheaply than by handing out prizes for minimally acceptable behavior.
You can argue that it may not change as much as we want it to, or that there are more efficient ways to cause that change, but I strongly doubt the effect would be zero.
I agree these would help. But your first two just put the onus on the school. The second would be nice but I have a feeling ‘creative’ would translate to “it’s the school’s problem”. I’m just pointing out that there are few consequences for the parent and lots of consequences for the school if the child fails. When you have an unbalanced relationship like that, it’s hard to change the behavior of the person with no skin in the game.
Now, I’m not sure that TANF is the right place to get this money, both because food and education shouldn’t be at odds to each other and because it doesn’t affect parents that aren’t using TANF. A more fair negative incentive would be something like “If your kid fails a class, your taxes go up X%, with that money slated for a program to improve parental involved with with <issues you brought up earlier”. Parents get involved or the state gets money to work on programs that get parents involved.
Now you can certainly argue that this tax would be regressive, both because it’s a fixed amount and because poor people’s children are more likely to fail than rich people’s children. And you’d be absolutely right - but if the program works, I’m not so concerned about the esoteric issue of “regressive taxes” as I am with the more concrete “our children are improving academically”.
ETA: It doesn’t have to fix 100% of the problem. But if a program (whatever the program) gets a large portion of parents involved, and student’s learning improves because of it, I’m going to call that a win even if Susie McStrawman is still having problems.