This is a bit of a non-sequitor. You realize most people in this thread, including myself, agree with you that this is not the right way to do this? We’ve moved on to discussing better ways to motivate parents.
Splendid, can I count on your support for my plan to direct the SEC’s priorities away from punishing banks and fianciers who violate securities law and more toward encouraging desirable behavior (say, by making bonuses for law-abiding financiers tax-free and having a “Celebrate Responsibile Investment Banks” month)?
I would like to propose marriage. (Even though I am already married and I think I remember you’re a guy. But the heart wants what it wants.)
How about we just use financial incentives to prevent irresponsible people from becoming parents? $500 for every girl who gets an IUD at age 15. An extra $25 a month for people on public assistance who does not get pregnant.
Using to money prevent kids from having shitty parents in the first place seems like a good solution to me. And for those who would accuse me of “poor people genocide”, skip it. Being a mom or dad actually requires you to parent, and no amount of hard times exempts you from that.
Well, I would love to have all forms of Birth Control be free and freely available, but the social conservatives would throw a fit (see last years issues with Obamacare and the Catholics) and the fiscal conservatives would throw a fit (“You want to spend HOW MUCH to let women have the pill or give away free condoms?”). I think both of these are short-sighted thoughts - the long term saving would more than out weigh the problem. But it’s probably political suicide.
Someone’s pandering to their constituency, but it’ll never pass.
I’m behind this one. I don’t really see what problem there is with financial incentives for good behavior. Sure, learning for the sake of learning is a noble endeavour, but the problem we’re trying to solve is poverty, if paying people to behave in the ways that will reduce poverty works then we should do it. The cost of not doing it is killing us.
As for bankers, **Kimmy, **that’s the system we have now. It was instituted by the senate. They made the celebration last the whole year, every year, and defined ‘responsible’ to be ‘doing anything the hell you want’. See how good it’s worked?
ETA: Nyah nyah - Bricker had gay thoughts.
even sven: Can I have a cite on this. Also clairify who the ‘we’ is! Thanks.
Last year, I taught at a school that had something like 70% of the population on free and reduced lunch. I had kids that got bags of food from the school to take home with them on weekends, so they wouldn’t go hungry. Being around the kids, hearing what they had to go through - it’s really hard, emotionally. I felt really bad for them because, most of the time, their circumstances weren’t their fault.
As a soft-hearted teacher, I can’t imagine failing a kid if I knew that meant he wouldn’t get the food/support his family needed or if I knew it meant he’d get beaten by his parents, etc. (There’s also a decent chance I would’ve been harassed by the parents who’s kids were failing. I mean, I already got harassed by parents and they didn’t even have money riding on the kid’s grades.)
But passing a kid because I feel bad for him doesn’t do him any favors in the long term. But what do you do? If the short term consequences/circumstances destroy the kids, how important is it to prepare them for the long term anyway? (And are they even being prepared in the right way? How important is it that they understand Algebra 2, really? But that’s an entirely different discussion…)
Not only does it save money to provide long-acting reversible contraception (and all forms, really- insurance companies know this), it crashes the abortion rate. Search with terms like Contraceptive Choice Study St. Louis. The response to this from the Right is revealing. These people really just hate sex except under strict conditions. They’ve responded with cries of “What about STDs!” and “Eugenics!” and all that.
You’d think they would support saving money, greatly reducing abortions, and shrinking Democratic constituencies.
Not to nitpick your otherwise compassionate post, but when is a kid ever at fault for being poor?
I don’t know what’s more depressing: The fact legislators have spent taxpayer dollars putting forth needlessly destructive bills like this one, or the fact that so many people think this bill is based on sound principles.
Welfare is there to provide people the minimum for human survival. Food, water, shelter. What kind of message are we sending if we make life essentials contingent on your child’s grades? The message I’m receiving is “Your kid doesn’t deserve to eat if he can’t pass his/her classes, and neither do you or your kid’s siblings. Sorry.”
That’s a lot of responsibility we’re putting on people who aren’t even old enough to legally vote, smoke, or drive a car.
I can’t say I agree with either of you, but I swear, I haven’t laughed this hard at a post on the Dope in a long time. Well done, Bricker.
Maybe “fault” wasn’t the most accurate word to use… There were a couple students who’d made enough bad decisions that they’d either gotten kicked out of their houses outright or been forced to leave home. I also had one that just decided to leave home and go out on his own.
There IS an organization that provides financial rewards to drug addicts who agree to get long-term birth control or sterilization to try to prevent crack babies, similar to your idea. This has, of course, resulted in a lot of hysterical screaming and crying about how Project Prevention is trying to coerce and exploit drug addicts. I think that your program would meet very similar wailing and gnashing of teeth about how it is abusive to poor people, even though personally I think it is very pragmatic.
Speaking of drug addicts, I definitely believe that substance abuse is a major factor in the cycles of poverty and poor parenting being discussed here. This is certainly not to say that everyone who is poor is a drug addict, obviously. I just happen to work with a population in which poverty and drug abuse are rampant and see how it affects a lot of families. Good intentioned efforts to try to make parents more culturally comfortable with schools don’t do much when you’re dealing with some people who really don’t care about anything other than buying more crack (such is the nature of addiction).
This appears to be incorrect. According to thissite, 26% of AFDC reciepiants were on it for 2 to 5 years and 20% were on it for more than 5 years. So, roughly half were long term situations. TANF has different rules than AFDC because so many on AFDC were long term reciepents.
Additionally, since we decided to implement this program to help people through desperate times, we also decided that the people recieving the assistance had to help themselves through the desperate times as well. In other words, get a job. So, yes, we can make them jump through hoops to get this benefit.
This proposal may not be the best way of attacking this particular problem, however, just giving them aid with no strings isn’t going to help the roughly %50 who would be on this long term without those strings.
Solving the poverty problem, as far as I can tell, has three parts. One, education. Two short term help if needed. Three, motivation. The first part, education is directly linked to motivation. Some of the chronically poor are so because of bad luck. However, a lot of poor folks are poor due to bad choices and little education. Programs to assist with education are good. Programs that actually motivate people to get the education are better. This program may not help the parents, but it may help the kids get an education which is the best way to get the kids out of poverty.
Slee
I know, right? How come it never occurs to all those poor people to try not being poor? :rolleyes: