U.S. Welfare Reform

[Lissa]

@cosmosdan

About 1/4 of the people dropped off the welfare roles rather than do menial labor.

Are you certain that the only reason they dropped off the rolls was out of laziness? Could it have been that people couldn’t show up because of sick kids, or a sprained ankle, or a million other things that can go wrong, and were forced to drop out of the program because they didn’t show up for a day’s worth of work? (Beauracracy can be like that, allowing for no excuses.)

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.

That’s not what I’ve read. I’ve read tales of grinding poverty in which people died for lack of food or even wood to burn to keep them warm. Here’s a great article about poverty in Victorian London. In it, the author shows through the numbers why private, local relief organizations weren’t even managing to scratch the surface. Here’s one from the same book about “workhouses” which were the Victorian’s idea of welfare-to-work.

I’ve always liked this part, because it sounds exactly like things you hear today: (These are re-rpints of pamphlets that the author included in his book.)

I am grieved to have to write like this of honest labourers–of men who ought to do their work, keep homes over their heads that are something better than dog-kennels or pigsties, and shrink from a gift as if it were a wound. They increase and multiply, and all for what? To become paupers; to glut the labour market; to keep their wages down at starvation point, to swell the profits of capital. They look to everyone to relieve them, but make few efforts to relieve themselves. The most perfect poor-law; the most perfect administration of that poor-law; the most lavish charity can do nothing for them compared to the wonders of self-help. Let them defer their marriages for six or seven years, and they will turn their backs on strikes and starvation. My sympathies are with them in any well-considered scheme to benefit their condition. I have lived amongst them and know their ways; I willingly acknowledge their many virtues, their generosity, their endurance under suffering, but I want to see them with a little more pride. They may not always beg themselves, but they make their wives and families beg for them. The disgrace is theirs where the poor, pinched women in scanty clothes are sent to crowd round the parsonage-door, or to hold out the well-thumbed, creased petitions in their thin, bloodless hands.

[Renob]

@Kimstu

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”.

And you do know that that time limit doesn’t apply to all TANF recipients, don’t you? States have the leeway to exempt 20% of their TANF caseloads from the requirement and there are other exemptions to that time limit.

[Renob]

I guess you and I have been reading different things, Lissa. Losing Ground by Charles Murray and The Tragedy of American Compassion illustrate quite convincingly that the current “give money to the poor” approach of fighting poverty does not work. Since poverty has remained virtually unchanged since the “war on poverty” began, I’d say that they may be onto something.

[ralph124c]

@Lissa

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.

So why is it that immigrants manage to succeed? I know several-one guy came here with NOTHING-within 5 years he bought a run-down house; lived in it, spent months at Home Depot buying materials, etc., and fixed it up (while living in one apartment). He also managed 9by working two jobs0 to send his sone to college. One thing for you liberals to ponder; if you get everything from the governemnt (rent, food, clothing allowance, and money); what do you DO with your time? i mean, everything is given to you-so what on earth do you do?

[Kimstu]

@Renob

And you do know that that time limit doesn’t apply to all TANF recipients, don’t you? States have the leeway to exempt 20% of their TANF caseloads from the requirement and there are other exemptions to that time limit.

For a minority of recipients in particularly stringent circumstances, yes. But modern welfare policy overall is hardly fostering any general attitude of “the government will support me for the rest of my life”, which is what you seemed to be claiming.

[Kimstu]

@ralph124c

So why is it that immigrants manage to succeed?

Some immigrants manage to succeed. Others struggle all their lives and never get anywhere. The point of welfare is not that it’s intrinsically impossible for any poor person to succeed without it—everybody knows that that’s not true—but that it improves the chances for more poor people to succeed.

@ralph124c

One thing for you liberals to ponder; if you get everything from the governemnt (rent, food, clothing allowance, and money); what do you DO with your time?

What, are you trying to use up the strawmen from your Halloween decorations? I don’t think anybody here is actually arguing for any welfare policy that even comes close to “getting everything from the government”.

[Renob]

@Kimstu

For a minority of recipients in particularly stringent circumstances, yes.

For 20% of their caseloads. States have wide latitude here.

But modern welfare policy overall is hardly fostering any general attitude of “the government will support me for the rest of my life”, which is what you seemed to be claiming.

Of course, welfare is really only part of the overall government benefits package. There is also free housing, free medical care, free transportation (to a certain extent), free long-term care, free food, etc. I’ll admit that direct cash payments for most people are time limited, but the government also provides a host of other benefits for people that are not time limited and can easily fall under the rubric of “welfare.”

[ralph124c]

@Renob

For 20% of their caseloads. States have wide latitude here.
Of course, welfare is really only part of the overall government benefits package. There is also free housing, free medical care, free transportation (to a certain extent), free long-term care, free food, etc. I’ll admit that direct cash payments for most people are time limited, but the government also provides a host of other benefits for people that are not time limited and can easily fall under the rubric of “welfare.”

I’d add to what you said: here in MA, there is a ragbag of over 30 programs that provide welfare. so recipients move from plan to plan-they get educational assistance, then move to transitional assistance, then move to diasbility asisstance, etc. There is “WIC” (womaen, infants and children ) food assistance, and all kinds of subsidies (rent, telephone, medical care, etc.) You can literally keep the thing going for years. if youwant to. finally, there is “disability”-which applies when you can’t get a job because you can’t get a job.

[Lissa]

@Renob

Since poverty has remained virtually unchanged since the “war on poverty” began, I’d say that they may be onto something.

Jesus Christ said it himself, “Lo, the poor will be with you always.” There is* no way* to eliminate poverty all together. I’m not expecting the welfare system to make poverty dissapear. Not everyone can live a “middle class” lifestyle-- there simply aren’t enough good-paying jobs for everyone who wants one. All we can do is try to lessen the impact on those who suffer and give what help we can to assist them in trying to better themselves if they can.

[gonzomax]

40% of the welfare numbers are children. Add in the mentally ill tossed into the streets. Drug and alcohol users. It is not a pretty picture. Simple platitudes do nothing to face the scope of the problem.Obtaining education in an unstable environment.Trying to escape welfare at 5.15 an hour is a joke.Especially when the hours are limited to avoid paying benefits. Illness ,asthma malais all contributeto the problem. It is a depressing and oppressive background to escape.

[Oregon_sunshine]

Welfare is broken because it doesn’t substantively help people. I knew going into living on the dole (back in the 90s when it was just then going down the tubes) that I had to do something different with my life, so I went to college. When “work” requirements came in later (meaning basically you have to be slave 40 hours a week to the gov’t for your $200 a month) I would not have been able to accomplish this because of having no time (not just weekly time taken up by “work requirements” but also the time cap on welfare support being too short to get a bachelor’s degree). There are very few ways to get out of poverty effectively without career training of some sort. Minimum wage jobs don’t pay unless you’re working two of them, and then you get no medical insurance, and what about actually being around to raise your kids? New welfare laws are designed to punish parents, not help them escape poverty in any meaningful way.

[sleestak]

@Renob

Of course, welfare is really only part of the overall government benefits package. There is also free housing, free medical care, free transportation (to a certain extent), free long-term care, free food, etc. I’ll admit that direct cash payments for most people are time limited, but the government also provides a host of other benefits for people that are not time limited and can easily fall under the rubric of “welfare.”

This reminds me of something else.

When I was a teenager my parents bought a fourplex. My parents, being a nice people who do try and help people, bought a fourplex that was for low-income people. They thought, at the time, that they could help some people while making a reasonable profit (less profit than they would get in other investments, but still a reasonable profit). That lasted about 9 months. The tenants, all of whom were on some form of government assistance, were absolutely amazing, and not in a good way. They would not pay the rent and they would hide when anyone showed up to collect it. They damaged the property, in some cases severely. One particular family had two cars (one of which was a brand new truck) and their kid had a $600 BMX bike, I was about 14 at the time and serisously into BMX. His bike was nicer than mine. That family ended up being evicted because they wouldn’t pay the rent even though the rent money came from the government*. Also, the police were regularly at the place for fights, drugs, etc.

Evicting a tenant of one of these apartments was just about impossible due to the government being involved. When the one tenant that did get evicted left (it was the family with the brand new truck) , they absolutely trashed the apartment. They peed on the walls. They broke the toilet, probably why they peed on the walls. They broke all the mirrors. There were holes in every wall of the apartment. It tooks thousands of dollars to get the place livable again. (Lesson learned: don’t deal directly with people you are going to help. Just give to charity and let someone else deal with the headaches. Not a good lesson to learn but that is what happened)

My parents sold the fourplex after about 9 months because it was a nightmare. They tried to do something to help people and got treated like shit by the very people they were trying to help. It was a small sample size, four families, but all four families did this kind of crap which leads me to believe that it is a culture issue. The tenants had no respect for anyone and seemed to believe that paying for things was optional.

How do you get people like that to start respecting others and how do you get them to *want * to work?

There are some who end up on welfare due to circumstance that are out of their control. I am willing to bet that most of those people use welfare for its intended purpose and then get on with life. There are others, though, who take welfare as a way of life. How do you get those people to change their attitude?

Slee

*This particular family was getting a lot of assistance. I don’t remember the details but they were getting additional assistance from one of the Native American tribes. They were a Native American family and had a lot of money being thrown at them. They had two new cars, a $600 bike for their kid, a massive brand new t.v. yet they wouldn’t pay the rent, which was a fairly trivial sum.

[gonzomax]

In Mikchigan the rent money went directly to the landlord from the state.

[MLS]

@ralph124c

I’d add to what you said: here in MA, there is a ragbag of over 30 programs that provide welfare. so recipients move from plan to plan-they get educational assistance, then move to transitional assistance, then move to diasbility asisstance, etc. There is “WIC” (womaen, infants and children ) food assistance, and all kinds of subsidies (rent, telephone, medical care, etc.) You can literally keep the thing going for years. if youwant to. finally, there is “disability”-which applies when you can’t get a job because you can’t get a job.

I hope you’re not really being as cruel as it sounds regarding “disability.” The people I know who are on disability would love not to be. But then they’d also love to be free of the debilitating ailments that prevent them from working. Believe me, if you were offered the chance to switch places with most people who receive disability, you wouldn’t do it. And, for the record, it is not easy to get Social Security Disability. Not at all. In fact, almost everyone gets rejected when they first apply. Those who do get it have to go through an appeal process that may take years. You don’t just “move to disability assistance.”

[Renob]

If you have a disability and you want to work, there are plenty of resources out there to help you find work. I’m not of the mind that if you have a disability you should necessarily be excused from participating in the workforce. A disability may be a barrier to work, but there are government programs as well as private nonprofits set up to help a person overcome that barrier. For some with severe disabilities, even these resources may not be enough. But others, especially people who only have physical disabilities, should be working.

As far as government help for people with disabilities, there are really two paths you can take. If you don’t want to work, you apply for SSDI. The process there basically revolves around you trying to prove you can’t work. As mentioned above, quite a few people are rejected but then hire a lawyer and are able to fight this rejection. In quite a few cases, this “disability” involves things like back pain, ADHD, and other hard to prove disabilities that, frankly, I think should be disallowed. To me, a disability is something like Down’s Syndrome, not ADHD, back pain, or alcoholism.

On the other hand, if you want to work, then you can go to Vocational Rehabilitation, which is a government program set up around the concept that people who have a disability should be given assistance to find a job. VR will pay for training, education, etc., to help someone with a disability find a job. There are also private agencies out there to do this training – or which are set up specifically to employ people with disabilities.

As you may suspect, I think that more people should be sent to VR and fewer to SSDI. In fact, I think that anyone who applies for SSDI should be sent to VR first. If you have a disability, let’s try to find a way for you to have a job. If that fails, then go ahead and receive SSDI.

[MLS]

Renob, I wonder if you have any personal experience with applying for SSDI or know anyone personally who receives it.

VR might be great for someone who, say, can’t walk or can’t see as well as most. You can teach (please, not “train,” that’s for animals) a person to do a desk job or deal with new blindness, or any number of other things. Heck, I could lose the use of both my legs and one arm and still do my job as long as I had one hand, eyes and a brain.

How do you “train” a person who on three random days of the week (on average) will be incapable of leaving the house or of interacting with other people, to have a steady job? Exactly what job would you “train” a person for if that person will have debilitating physical pain most of the time? Are you familiar with the symptoms and treatments for, say, kidney failure? CFDS? Bipolar disorder?

The statement that SSDI is for people who “don’t want to work” is insulting. As you can probably tell, I have close friends on SSDI who would really, really like to work but cannot, and no amount of “training” is going to change that.

Why should chronic back pain NOT be a disability? Have you ever had it? Do you know what is needed in order to gain relief from it? Do you know how hard it is to do meaningful work when you can’t stand, sit or walk without pain? Do you know what the pain medicine does to your mental state? Sure, sometimes there can be workplace accomodations, but not as often as you might think.

Do you know a lot of employers who want a person who can only work, say, 10 or 20 hours a week, who will on any given day at random need to be excused for flareups, therapy visits and other medical intervention? Who is going to be out of work a lot dealing with side effects of the medicine that is helping him/her to remain somewhat sane and rational? Who sometimes can deal with customers and co-workers professionally and on other days cannot prevent outbursts of frustration with anything less than perfection, and on still other days spends a third of the day in the rest room crying?

Actually, a Down Syndrome person might be among the easier disabilities to match up a job with, although it might not be a high enough paying job for one to support oneself on. I’ve seen people who seem to me to have either that or a similary disability bagging groceries. They do just fine, are pleasant and friendly, and can be taught to do that sort of job responsibly.

I really and sincerely hope that neither you nor any of your friends and relatives ever have to deal with disability. However, if at some point that is not the case, please remember how unsympathetic you are now, repent and ask forgiveness.

[furlibusea]

@Renob

As far as government help for people with disabilities, there are really two paths you can take. If you don’t want to work, you apply for SSDI. The process there basically revolves around you trying to prove you can’t work. As mentioned above, quite a few people are rejected but then hire a lawyer and are able to fight this rejection. In quite a few cases, this “disability” involves things like back pain, ADHD, and other hard to prove disabilities that, frankly, I think should be disallowed. To me, a disability is something like Down’s Syndrome, not ADHD, back pain, or alcoholism.

ADHD is not all that hard to prove. Usually if someone is so disabled as to require SSI they have a lifetime history of bad choices and violence. Generaly, I would be suspicious of anyone who actually was able to fill out the forms in the first place. They don’t tend to have that degree of stick-to-it-ivness. They are also extreemly bad choices for a lot of the run of the mill McJob. Someone with no impulse or anger control working around knives and hot fat fryers is not ideal. Many of these guys wind up cared for by our other system for the poor. (Prison)

[Renob]

MLS, as I said, sometimes having a disability is a barrier to a job. Other times, however, I think that people use it as an excuse not to work. I think that work should be the default. Instead of shopping around for doctors that will say a person can’t work, a person applying for SSDI should be sent to some sort of vocational evaluation. If there is no training (and training is certainly not a derogatory term – plenty of people get job training, and they aren’t dogs) that can help that person find work, then sit back and start getting SSDI checks.

[Lissa]

Renob, how much one-on-one attention for each case would such a system require? I’ve only met a few social workers in my time, but all of them have reported to me that their caseloads are already hugely overburdened and they have a hell of a time managing to fit in whatever meetings with assistance seekers that they already do. I can’t imagine trying to find a job which suits each individual’s specialized needs and sorting out the training they require based on their background would be a speedy and efficient process.

Might it be that hiring all of the additional manpower it would require to manage each SSI-but-could-work-if-we-found-'em-the-right-job case might be even more expensive that the system we have right now?

[Kimstu]

@Renob

There is also free housing, free medical care, free transportation (to a certain extent), free long-term care, free food, etc. I’ll admit that direct cash payments for most people are time limited, but the government also provides a host of other benefits for people that are not time limited and can easily fall under the rubric of “welfare.”

Could you please give some examples of particular government programs that provide non-time-limited free housing and free food to non-disabled poor people?