U.S. Welfare Reform

Great Debates
1

I hope this is the right place to post this. It could get me to the pit, but I think it should be a debate.

Let me start by saying that I tend to think of myself as a dyed-in-the-wool liberal. I believe government can do some good. I believe that children going hungry in the richest country in the world is shameful. That said, my time teaching in an inner city school has changed some of my thoughts on how government can help.

Welfare in the United States is broken. The system infantilises the people dependant on it by treating them like poorly behaved adolescents, which in turn tends to make them behave like poorly behaved adolescents. Families in which the men are involved with their children are penalized. There seems to be more reward for cheating than for taking care of your business. I think the biggest problem is that it breaks the economic ties between eating and working.

I know that some of the welfare to work programs have tried to address these issues, at least in this state, they haven’t bothered to keep track of how the “successes” are doing, and they have completely failed the children left behind. We need to rethink these problems.

I think we also badly need to think about how school truancy is will affect the next generation of welfare recipients. Some inner city schools think of 70% attendance as pretty good. Understand that that is a whole lot of kids with 90% attendance and many with 20% or less. Even at the elementary school level. By high school most of these kids with poor attendance cannot do work suited to 6th graders, let alone high school work. These kids will be the next generation of welfare recipients. Sometimes their mothers are at work and don’t have any backup to make sure their kids get up. Sometimes mom is too stoned to know if the kids went to school. Sometimes it is an older sibling supposed to do the job, and if he does he is late for school. Sometimes education is just not a priority, whether the family is in so much crisis that it is too far down on Maslow’s scale, or sometimes they just don’t care.

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We need to build orphanages. These need to be used for the children who are not in school the majority of the time. They need to be safe places for underage students who have been kicked out of the house. They should not be permanent places. Maybe more safe places for kids to be when a family in crises gets its act back together. There should be adequate supervision and help with homework and family counseling. Maybe visiting rooms would help too.

We need childcare. This childcare could possibly be in conjunction with the orphanages above, maybe not. These need to be 24-hour places near bus routes. They need to be safe and clean. These also need to be set up to get children the children out the door in time for school. Somehow these places need to find a way to be set up for sick childcare as well.

Finally for the grownups we need to bring back the CCC. Whether it is shoveling snow, raking leaves, or more permanent work in the childcare facilities, everyone receiving help works. There needs to be a way to reward good work within that and a way to move people up through the system. With that, everyone receiving help gets the support to make working work. I don’t know how we deal with education for adults in some of this but I think that needs to be built in, but probably full time in school for adults cannot be an option.

2

Some of your ideas might possibly be workable in urban environments, but what abour rural areas? My hometown has very little public transportation, and what little there is only services the city area, not the outlying communities and neighborhoods.

Who’s going to pay for all of this? The American people deeply resent paying taxes for assisting the poor. Many people see the poor as lazy and immoral-- basically deserving the lifestyle that they have.

What about people with health problems?

Sure, you can offer training for people to get better jobs, but there aren’t good-paying jobs just dripping from the trees. Even people with excellent work records and great educational backgrounds often have trouble finding work. Is it your intent that they should all work for this CCC-style program? If so, that would be astoundingly expensive.

My idea for solving turancy issues is rather hard-assed. I think if children show a pattern of truancy which is not excused by illness, the parents should have to go to jail. Every time Junior skips school, Mom and Dad spend the night in the slammer. (Staying the night so that it doesn’t jeapordize their jobs. If they have none, they can go during the day.) If this doesn’t solve the problem, the parents lose custody and the kid goes to a juvenile detention facility where his behavior can be controlled.

3

I think that jailing parents only works with elementary school parents. By high school its the kids making the bad choices, and by that point they are too far behind for it to make a difference.

I was entirely thinking of urban welfare. I am not sure I know enough of the rural problems to offer any suggestions. Perhaps that is part of the overall problem. The reasons for poverty are so different in different places and with different families, and welfare itself is pretty much the same for everyone.

I do think that there should somehow be jobs for almost everyone on welfare, whether it is a CCC style or something else.

4

There are more jobs than it may seem. I mean, we have people entering the country illegally in order to take them. Why? Americans won’t work them. It can’t be because of the wages, since illegals sure find a way to live on them.

There is work out there for people on welfare. The objections to the 1996 welfare reform law were the same as Lissa makes, and yet once states started enforcing work mandates people found jobs or acquired the skills to get jobs. Were they the best jobs? Probably not in most cases, but they were an entry to the workforce. There are jobs out there and welfare should be oriented towards moving people into those jobs. It already is to a certain extent, but it still has a way to go.

Right now states must time limit most of their people on welfare. I say that the way to reform it is to time limit everyone. No excuses, everyone must find work after a certain period of time. If you have a disability, there is SSI, which is separate from welfare. However, people with disabilities should be encouraged to work, too. Having a disability does not necessarily obviate your need to support yourself.

As for women on welfare who keep having kids, were this Renob’s World, once a woman signed up for welfare she also signs up for birth control. Yes, it’s paternalistic and invasive. So what? You want government money, the government gets to tell you how to live your life. You want to have more kids? Then you must find a way to support them yourself.

5

I guess my ideal goal is to get people out of poverty, not to just get them off assistance. Simply shuffling the poor off to McJobs isn’t really helping them. Since poverty is a huge factor in crime and other social ills, assistance is really an investment.

You simply can’t acquire all of the skills you need in a couple of months’ worth of classes:

– A person needs a certain level of social skills which certainly aren’t innate. “What do you want?” is a perfectly valid question. It’s only with training do we learn that “May I help you?” is a much better way of putting it. Sounds simple to teach, but a lot of people are very much put off by the servile demeanor that working with the public requires. Social skills are rooted in one’s early socialization. They can be trained into a person, but they’ll never be almost *instinctual *as with someone who as been raised with them.

– People need clothes. Read any of the anti-dressing-up threads and I think you’ll be surprised at the number of people who own no “nice” clothes which many good jobs require. These require an immediate capital investment which can be very hard to come up with for poor families. They also need reliable transportation, and public transportation isn’t available in all areas.

– Many of the poor have little or no access to preventive health care. They may have poorly cared-for teeth or skin ailments, or illnesses which make working a regular schedule difficult.

–Lastly, you’ve got to think about the crushing nature of poverty. What’s to motivate a person who makes shit wages for working very hard and knows that this is going to be the rest of their life. They have little or no chance of moving on to something better. All they have to look forward to is finally quitting when they’re too old or their body is too broken to work any longer (no retirement, so that’ll be on Social Security.)

The American Dream tells us that if we just work hard enough, we can succeed at anything. It’s hard to tell that to someone who is holding down three jobs while trying to raise a family. Chances are, they’ll be poor all their lives, and their kids will be, too, unless they’re super-bright or talented at sports.

6

I DO know that this country needs child support reform before any other reform. Men (and some women) are being treated like criminals for missing one or two months of child support, being denied visitation and many, many other cruel forms of punishment for being late on payments.

7

Yes, it is. A “McJob” is the first step into the workforce. “McJobs” teach basic skills to unskilled workers. Most people don’t work these jobs their entire lives. Getting people who have never worked into these jobs is probably the best thing we can do for them.

Yes, there is a correlation between crime and poverty, but I reject the notion that poverty breeds crime. Correlation is not causation.

I never said you could. Some training may be necessary, but a lot of these skills will be learned at “McJobs” that you look down on. That’s where quite a few people – myself included – learn basic job skills as teenagers.

So what? I don’t see the point of this. If a person is in a job and is rude, that person will soon learn that either he/she shapes up or he/she will be stuck in a dead-end job. If there is no welfare to fall back upon, that’s a pretty good incentive to start acting more social.

There are thrift stores and charities that can provide these clothes. Furthermore, quite a few jobs do not require nice clothes. Construction, for instance.

As far as transportation, since over 70% of people in poverty own a car, this isn’t a barrier to most. And for those in any big city, public transportation is certainly available.

So? If you have a disability, go on SSDI. I also question how many poor people are actually prevented from getting a job because of bad teeth or skin. I see plenty of people working who need some grill work.

Their motivation – not starving.

Plenty of dirt poor immigrants move up with hard work and plenty of native-born Americans do so, too. It’s not hard to move from poor to middle class.

8

Is it a destination? I think that it is. Most people with who lack the education and social skills and all of the other necessary acoutraments to success don’t become Success Stories. I’ve known people like that: good people who worked hard but never made it up the ladder another notch.

Let’s leave this. It’s a thread all in of itself.

What sort of family did you have? You don’t have to actually answer this, but you might not realize the benefits that your family gave you. Did they teach you a good work ethic? Honesty? Did they teach you manners? Did they teach you how to manage your money, including how to open a bank account and how to deal with credit? Your McJob didn’t teach you those things-- your parents did. The McJob was simply your first chance to practice them in the real world.

It’s simple basic human nature that the last person that you blame for your misfortune is yourself. People come up with all sorts of justifications to themselves. “The boss is out to get me,” or “That customer just didn’t like me.” Sure, a socially sensitve person will pick up on cues, but social sensitivity is a learned trait, not something you suddenly acquire with your new name badge.

Construction requires a lot more than new clothes. Hand me a hammer and I’m likely to break my thumb with it. I couldn’t build something if my life depended on it. Construction is usually something that’s learned through a sort of apprenticeship. The apprenticeships are hard work for low pay and it takes a while to move up to the point where you’re earning enough to feed a family. What’s a person supposed to do in the mean time?

They may own a car, but is it reliable? In my youth, I recieved plenty of panick-stricken phone calls from friends who needed to get a ride to work because their car wouldn’t start. They owned junkers. To tell the truth, they probably would have been better off if they had bought a better used car, because they probably spent as much as the payment would be on parts that were constantly breaking and engines which sucked up oil like sand in the desert. But they couldn’t come up with a chunk of cash which would be needed for a downpayment on a car, so they kept driving the junkers, praying to get from destination to destination without incident.

Again, they may be working, but they’re likely limited by it. No one wants a secretary with rotten teeth, or a guy with an eye infection working the sales floor.

Nopt much of a motivation since it wouldn’t happen in America. No one literally “starves” here, not even our poorest people. (When was the last time you kicked the emaciated corpse of a beggar out of your way?) Hell, if nothing else, you can live off of a resturant’s dumpster.

They generally have a family network. That’s where places like Chinatown come from-- groups of networked families who came together to support each other in beginning a life in a new land.

Yeah, there are stories of people who became millionaires after starting life with nothing but the clothes on their backs. You know why you remember them? Because they’re rare. For every Success Story, there are ten thousand people who work just as hard and end up with nothing.

9

One of the basic skills that tends to be missing is kind of related to the truency issue. That is getting to work on time every day. So many of my students had no clue why that should have anything to do with their grades, and I knew of a few of them that missed two and three days of work and were suprised that they were fired.

10

Renob, have you ever worked for or volunteered with a social service agency?

11

Lissa, we probably agree more than it would appear. I know what you are saying and I agree to a certain extent. People live in poverty for a variety of reasons and there are obstacles to them moving into the workforce. However, those obstacles are not barriers. They can be overcome. Right now, though, even with welfare reform, the government still enables people to live in this lifestyle. I’m saying that we need government to offer more of an incentive to move into work. I prefer negative incentives, since positive incentives (the government now will pay for job training, housing, transportation, etc.) don’t seem to work for some people.

Blue Willow Plate, I have volunteered at a homeless mission and used to work for a trade association for nonprofits that serve people with disabilities. I also grew up in a very poverty stricken rural area. If you are trying to question my knowledge of poverty, let me assure you that my credentials will bear your scrutiny.

12

**Renob, ** I disagree with the “negative incentives” approach. That was the standard policy for hundreds of years (back when the poor really did starve to death in the streets.) It didn’t yeild positive results then, and I don’t see how it would now. The “positive incentives” approach has only been tried for a brief time thus far. I say give it a little more time.

13

I’m not trying to scrutinize, just trying to get a baseline.

When someone starts a new job it’s common - universal, perhaps - to take a look around to see what works and what doesn’t. Sometimes the new person has mo’ bettah ideas. Sometimes the guy flapping his jaws should just shut up and let the grownups talk. Know what I mean? :wink:

Considering your background, what exactly did you see/hear/read that made you form your opinions? And those things you saw/heard/read that led you to your opinions - were they common or rare? If you worked for a trade association it must have dealt with hundreds if not thousands of clients in need. Were there three (or possibly eight or nine or 20?) stories, good or bad, that influenced you? Would you care to share any of them?

14

I have to say that I think that a good idear would be boarding schools for poor kids. . So many poor kids are influenced by really bad parenting. Maybe have a "Boys Town " style setup, where there are teacher-parents, who could serve as surrogate parents. Like I remember reading Train Go Sorry, which is a book about life at a Deaf school. One of the kids in the book initially starts out being a classic slacker type, when he’s living with his family. The school then has him move to the dorm, and he ends up going to COLLEGE!

15

I believe that there is a major issue with the culture of poverty. I worked as a manager of a pizza joint in a very poor area of Albuquerque New Mexico. I worked there for two years. The people who worked at the place came from very poor families and I got a first hand glimpse of the culture of poverty.

For the most part the people I worked with had been on welfare at some point, expected to be on welfare again and thought it was prefectly natural to be on welfare. Most of the people I worked with had no higher aspirations, in fact they didn’t even think that way. They accepted things as normal that most people don’t.

For example, a girl having a child at age 15 was normal. Dropping out of highschool was normal, the highschool in the area had a dropout rate of ~50%. Going on welfare was normal, in fact it was an expected part of life. Going to college was looked down upon. Quiting a job to go to a party was considered a perectly normal thing to do by the kids *and * the parents. I had a mother of three quit to go to a beer bash. Also, going to jail or prison was pretty much expected for the men. Drugs and booze were also normal.

There were a couple people I worked with that wanted a better life and worked hard for it. One particular kid worked his butt off to support his family, went to high school and got good grades. His goal was to go to UNM and get a degree. He was a smart kid. His family, especially his brothers, tried to undermine his efforts constantly. His mother wanted him to quit school and work full time to bring in more money. Interestingly, his Mom couldn’t hold down a job. This kid had a goal (he once told me he wanted to get as far away as possible and the only way to do that was by getting a degree) and worked hard for it. I got moved to a different store so I am not sure what happened with him, I certainly hope he got in to UNM and finished his degree.

Anyway, from what I have seen, giving people money isn’t going to fix the problem. Giving the people training isn’t going to fix the problem. Changing the culture is the way to fix the problem. I have no idea on how the hell you do that.

Slee

16

That is somewhat my idea for orphanages. In the hypothetical they would work pretty well to give kids a safe place where the norms are going to school, having food, and getting to bed at a consistant time. In practice, care would need to be made that these kids were still viewed as part of the comunity. The Indian schools of the early 1900s were disasterous for the people involved. I also have some problems, what with my liberal leanings and all, looking down on someone else’s culture, except that I saw every day how badly smart kids were hurt by it.

I had one extreemly bright kid, who had been emancipated and lived with her slightly older sister. She would disapear for a couple weeks at a time because any squabble with her sister would lead to getting thrown out of the house, and she would be homeless until whatever the problem was blew over.

I had two or three girls who could seldom make it on time for first hour because their childcare didn’t open until 8 and school started at 8:35. If they were able to get the baby to the door right on time, and if the bus that passed the daycare right at 8:05 wasn’t running fast or too full to stop they could get there, but that only happened once a week or so.

I had a few kids who had moms who worked 1st shift who were expected to get their sisters and brotheres up and off to school. That made them late, although I am not so sure how because elemetary schools start earlier.

We had a bunch of kids in foster care who had foster parents strugling valiently to get the kids to come to school, and work, but it was a huge uphill struggle with kids who had never had the habit of coming to school and were now 15 years old with at best, 5th grade skills.

How are these kids going to hold a job?

17

I appreciate this post. I lived in subsidised housing for a year or two when my kids were little. There were problems from all sides. This is oversimplified but, the system seemed to be set up so that if you had nothing all your bills got taken care of. The minute you started working they took away much more than the work covered. We both worked and eventually got out.

I saw the bad attitude and low expectations on a regular basis. At some point welfare that expects nothing of the recipiant only enables people to maintain their low expectations and bad habits. There’s nothing wrong with being poor and honest and paying your own dam bills. Thats how I grew up. I told my kids that sometimes you have to love people enough to kick them in the ass and thats how I feel about welfare.

All those who are able to work should do something. Years ago I remember reading about a county who required all those recieving welfare to work some job for the county a minimum amount of hours. Raking leaves, picking up trash, painting a wall. anything. If you are getting money from the state then do something productive. About 1/4 of the people dropped off the welfare roles rather than do menial labor. That means THEY DIDN"T NEED IT TO SURVIVE. They were probably working under the table and just taking the money because they could.
I’m all for putting funding into childcare and education, adult education, and basic health care.

IMHO it’s the disparity between wages and living expenses that is a major hurdle. A person working one full time job and another part time job at minimum wage can’t really support themselves in todays economy. Thats messed up. If we want people in these jobs then why wouldn’t we want those people to be able to support themselves?

We need to start teaching real world economics in high school. How credit cards work and what to avoid. Talk about responsibility in the workplace etc. If kids have parents who don’t teach them those basics then we should.

I understand the “I’ve worked hard and want to spend my income on me and mine rather than support those who won’t work” mentality. The reality is that having a support system for the poor that helps with education, child care, and health care is good for society as a whole. Do you want to have less crime 15 years from now. Educate people, give them basic health care, and let their job provide some decent basic living.

18

From what I have read, when poverty relief was mostly private or local, and it involved a good deal of negative incentives, it worked better at moving people out of poverty than today’s system. Of course, I also agree with the point cosmodan was referring to, that a system should not penalize people trying to better themselves. If someone is moving into the workforce, they should not lose their Medicaid, subsidized housing, etc. They should be able to keep those things for six or seven months as they acquire enough money to pay for their own housing and the like. I fully agree with positive incentives like that. But if someone doesn’t work, then I think a whole hosts of negative incentives should kick in.

Blue Willow, my opinions on poverty were mainly formed growing up surrounded by it. As mentioned previously, people thought it was normal to have kids when they were teenagers, drop out, etc. And while I don’t think welfare created this way of thinking, I think that welfare certainly enables it to thrive. Why think of the future when the government will support you for the rest of your life?

As far as the trade association, it involved helping people with disabilities find work. That probably gave me less sympathy for people who don’t want to work. I mean, these people had severe intellectual, mental, and physical disabilities, and they were doing everything they could to make themself employable and find a job. And they were finding jobs. I remember once visiting a an area with a lot of poverty, and yet the businesses were busing in people with disabilities from over an hour away to work in the hotels. I asked them why they didn’t just hire people on welfare who lived in the same area, and I was told that quite a few people who were on welfare did find work after the 1996 welfare reform law, but there were also quite a few people on welfare who simply refused to work. I’m sorry, but if a job can be done by a mentally retarded person, a person on welfare should be able to do it, too.

19

How does providing welfare have any affect on crime? Crime did not go down because LBJ started the “War on Poverty.” In fact, crime was pretty high during the heydey of these Great Society programs. And crime has certainly not gone up since 1996 when welfare reform was enacted and kicked a lot of people off the dole. Generous welfare benefits do not equal less crime.

20

You do know that there is a federally imposed five-year limit on receiving TANF (welfare) benefits over one’s entire lifetime, don’t you? I don’t see how you can rationally argue that today’s welfare system is “enabling a lifestyle” of permanent dependency or encouraging welfare recipients to imagine that “the government will support you for the rest of your life”.