With effort that you aren’t willing to make. It happens here all the time. You’ve said you’re not interested enough. Fine. No need to waste time discussing it.
Do you have any reason to think no data is available. If there isn’t then your opinion is based on nothing but your own bias.
States struggle to pay welfare. What I remember is a Governor of NJ limited welfare payments and one of Ruby’s cites mentioned another Governor who did something similar. The recipient would get X amount for one child Y amount for two and that’s it. If they have another child no increase.
I tend to agree with the institution rather than foster families. Both have their plus and minus. If Ruby’s correct that your plan would throw millions of additional kids into institutions I think that’s a serious kink in the idea. It doesn’t sound like it would be saving money.
I don’t have time to study the articles. In thinking about it the last couple of days I agree that removing children from their parents without clear reasons such as neglect or abuse is not a good idea for society.
We require training and a license to cut hair but anyone can have kids. From that there are parents that are loving and nurturing, parents and families that are dysfunctional or worse, and everywhere in between. When I lived in subsidized housing most families I saw were nurturing with the usual range of human failings. A few exceptions were just scary and sad. That kind of thing ranges across every economic group. It would be wrong to target the poor to lose their children because they had a child while receiving aide.
I still maintain that in order to promote personal responsibility rather than a sense of entitlement we need to establish reasonable limits and guidelines. I noticed one of your cites a Governor had established limits such as I’ve mentioned in the thread. I believe others have done something similar. IMO we need to have rules and programs in place that provide opportunities while requiring something of those who need help and are able to contribute. We as a society do a lot better if we help lift people out of poverty and help them become a contributing citizen. If we create an overall attitude of helping people out temporarily while expecting something back from them the percentage of freeloaders who abuse the system will be relatively insignificant. {I hope}
Again you rush to judge. I have looked around some and either my Google-fu sucks (which is possible) or there isn’t anything at hand without spending quite a bit of time to run it down.
That is good to know. I wish that California would follow that example.
I doubt that she is correct but then again I doubt there is any way to prove it. I just don’t think that millions of babies are born each year to women currently on welfare.
It isn’t “the poor”, it’s the subset of the poor who are living on the taxpayer. They would have the choice of losing their benefits if they wanted to keep the baby.
You talk about wanting to get rid of the every growing sense of entitlement and IMO the biggest way to do this would be to eliminate using children as an excuse for being unable to work. It seems to me that if people knew up front that if there is a pregnancy, they will either lose their benefits or lose the baby, far far fewer babies will be born into welfare homes.
Someday, a majority of society will realize that having children shouldn’t be a right that anyone can exercise any time they feel like it.
While I don’t think the idea is as horrific as others do providing it’s implemented under certain guidelines, I think there’s a better way. The one I first mentioned. Limit the amount they get on welfare and require some service of those who are able.
too late to help your parents though. okay I kid. That was to good a straight line to let slide.
The deciding thing for me was the realization I mentioned in my response to Ruby.
Being a lousy parent or a good one or somewhere in between crosses all economic groups. Hey, let’s make birth control more available. Let’s offer educations to those who want it and have more jobs that provide a living wage.
And then what? Really, this is your scenario, so imagine for me what happens when a woman with a baby is cut off from all benefits. Is this going to help guarantee that child breaks out of the cycle of poverty? Is it going to reduce crime? Do tell. Even a Vulcan with no emotions can tell you that, empirically, you would be worsening the social problem that you claim to be trying to cure.
Statistics have already been provided that women on welfare have 2 children or fewer, generally. Accidents do happen, even when people are on birth control. And the benefits gain for an additional child is not enough to support the child. Short of actually cutting off all benefits, the system does not particularly reward a woman for having additional children.
Subsidized day care might help the situation. With what it costs, it doesn’t pay for a woman to go back to work.
Why would they realize that when it IS a right that anyone can exercise any time they feel like it? It is, and that right has been upheld over and over. Just because you wish it were not so doesn’t negate reality.
136,000 women are getting WIC for their first child. At minimum, then, 136,000 child would be born on some form of welfare. Now, imagine how many women must be getting WIC for a second or third new child, considering 2.4 million women get WIC and over half of them are also getting AFDC and/or food stamps, so they are definitely on multiple forms of welfare. Is it unreasonable, then, for me to approximate that 500,000 children are born on welfare per year? I don’t think so; I think that’s a conservative number. If you dispute my numbers, please find a cite; otherwise, it’s churlish of you to continue to question my veracity when you’ve offered nothing substantive of your own (as usual).
There are currently about 500,000 kids in the foster care system, and the majority of them are not infants; this costs about $22 billion/year. Is it safe to say, then, that you would be vastly overburdening the system with all the new infants you’d be entering into the system, and that it would cost in the tens of billions to administer properly? Would you be willing to pony up the tax money to create and run this program?
Actually, it would have been far better if they had at least waited to have kids until they could afford them, or even better not had them at all since my father was crap for a parent.
I don’t see what those things have to do with it - people are going to have children whether they can afford them or not. Birth control is very available, people just choose to not use it, or they have been raised on abstinence only, or they are dumb teenagers that believe all sorts of weird things, like peeing afterwards will keep you from getting pregnant.
Unfortunately, people view having children as a right. Whether they can afford to raise them, whether the mother is a long time drug user and likely to birth an addicted maybe messed up baby, whether either parent has previously abused children, whether the parents are pre-teens. Which would actually be neither here nor there for me, except society also expects the taxpayers to pay for all of these children that these folks should never have had in the first place. And the parents get to use their children for excuses for everything.
Am I? How many of these mothers that you claim love their babies so much would be willing to lose their benefits so they and that all important baby can starve together?
Besides, I said “their” benefits, as in the mothers’ benefits. She could still get the formula/milk/diapers for the baby.
And yet, they still go ahead and have two children for the taxpayer to raise. As for accidents on birth control, there are fewer than are actually claimed since there are women who claim an “accident” when they actually wanted to have a/another baby.
Yup, there is that using the kid as an excuse thing.
That isn’t a response to what I said. Neither is it very logical, since “rights” have been overturned and rewritten thruout history. Which is why I hope that someday society will notice that giving the right to have children to everyone is not such a good idea.
That only follows if all of those first kids were born while the mother was on welfare. It also only applies if all 136,000 women were dumb/selfish enough to go ahead and have and keep a baby while on welfare.
Uh, well, since I said that I doubted that there would be millions of babies born each year to women on welfare, I’d say that you just provided the cite…
Sure, if it is the program that was originally proposed. The whole point is to cut down on the number of children born and raised in poverty, with a poor education and prospects. So that fewer end up in the system, and eventually there is a major savings. Far preferable to the current way things are done - just throw money at the problem and hope it will go away.
Here in Australia, someone had the bright idea of taking aboriginal babies away from their mothers to “help them break out of the cycle of poverty” or whatever it was that it was supposed to achieve.
How did that turn out?
Short answer: turned out to be a lot more expensive in the long run. Both financially and morally.
More than you would think, I’m sure. You seem utterly unfamiliar with the parent-child bond, and likely scornful of it, but it exists. I think you’d be shocked at how many people would take their children and run, likely into lives of crime and homelessness. Yay!
Wow, how generous of you. This would cut down on crime an break the cycle of poverty how?
You are the taxpayer, and you are noticeably not raising anyone. You are paying a small amount of money to help someone else raise their child, usually for a short period of time. You find this incredibly onerous but would pay far more to remove the children from their parents altogether, despite the documented negative consequences. How perverse.
Cite? Or is this just your “intuition” again?
Do you know the difference between an excuse and a reason? Do you know what daycare costs? Do you have any compunction against speaking out of ignorance?
This, from the woman who fails to see the arrant illogic and immorality of wanting to take away the children of the poor from their mothers for the crime of being on welfare. It’s already been proven that it wouldn’t work and wouldn’t achieve your stated goal. But you don’t actually care about logic, do you? Or helping children get out of poverty. Just punishing women who have children while on welfare, since in your plan, you’d have the power to do so, because these women and children are vulnerable.
First of all, does it not occur to you that a mother might keep her child, despite being on welfare, because she LOVES HIM and doesn’t want to lose him? It’s not stupid or selfish to want to care for and raise your own child. I know you disagree, but I think that’s because you lack any empathy or understanding of children and parents. The bond between a mother and her infant isn’t mystical or spiritual; it’s physiological, hormonal, and very real. It’s damaging to an infant’s development to take him away from his mother and put him in institutional care. You don’t care about that. Period. Full stop. Since we are allowed personal judgments in GD, I will say I think that your plan is monstrous. See Shakester’s link in the post above mine for what the outcome of your monstrous plan, as implemented in Australia, would be. I’d love to see you dispute what he’s saying, using facts, but you can’t, or won’t, of course.
But, back to the facts: If the mother is getting WIC, that IS a form of welfare. Even if you don’t consider WIC welfare (which I’m sure you do), 60% of women who receive WIC also receive AFDC and/or food stamps. 2.4 women receive WIC for about 6 million children. Would you care to wager how many of them were born on welfare, since all of them are under the age of 5? If only 10% of them (a number I admittedly made up, but which I think is conservative, for the sake of argument), then that’s about 600,000. Add that to the half million children already in foster care, and you now have over a million children, including 600,000 infants, in the system. It would cost upward of $50 billion dollars, easily, since the current system costs $22 million, and that’s for foster care. Institutions would have to be built, people trained, government bodies formed, etc. It would be an enormous undertaking. You do nothing but complain about how your taxes go to children, and yet…
So you’d stop bitching about poor people and their children if this plan were implemented, even though your taxes would go up? I simply do not believe that. People are so loath to give up their favorite hobbies. Also, you have not proven that your plan would break the cycle of poverty and fewer would end up in the system. All cites, not just the ones provided by me, indicate that factually, you are flagrantly incorrect. You would harm children and not prevent them from ending up in the system. But you don’t care about facts, and you have none.
I rest my case. This conversation is over on my end. I know how you need to have the last word and can’t bear to part with it, so I will let you have it, as I’m away until Monday, assuming that you are the only one still reading and replying, and that if I ignore you, you’ll go away. Go ahead, take your parting fact-free shot, and let’s hope this thread is dead by the time I get back, since arguing with a brick wall who is immune to facts and unable to provide her own isn’t my idea of a productive way to spend my time. I’m comforted by the fact that no one else agrees with you, even those who agree with you on other aspects of this topic.
Until things change considerably, having children is a right. People have kids, planned and unplanned, for all kinds of reasons. I’m not interested in having the state decide who should be allowed to have kids. When the population gets bigger and resources get tighter that may happen but that’s many generations away.
What I was referring to was the fact that people of all economic groups can be lousy parents , or good parents, or somewhere in the middle. I saw bad parents on welfare but I also saw good ones who raised good kids. I agree with breaking the welfare cycle of long term dependency. I just think theirs a better way.
While I think your suggestion will cut down the birth rate somewhat it will also create other huge problems. I think it’s* possible* to create such a system that actually works but I suspect it’s not realistic to think that’s exactly what would happen. I think the more humane and less costly way is to limit welfare payments and require something of recipients. At the same time we need to try and develop an economic society where more people can earn a living wage. In that way we still achieve the goal of reducing the birth rate, reducing welfare cost, without removing children from parents and trying to maintain another large government program.
okay I kid. That was to good a straight line to let slide.