Prior to 1996, you might have had a point. However, the 1996 welfare reform bill changed the system, requiring that payments stop after two years and limiting the total number of years in which an individual could receive such aid to five in that person’s lifetime. If you are going to pretend that there are women out there who are getting pregnant simply to have an income without a job or husband when that income will be exhausted before the child is out of diapers, you are going to have to provide a citation, and nattering on that “everyone knows” about a system that you appear to be unaware was radically changed over fifteen years ago is not going to give anyone a reason to trust your claims.
I’ve heard this argument before. The interesting part is you never hear any actual numbers to back it up because it is BS:
[ul]
[li]95% of American households do have vehicles. We live in a country where we have more cars and trucks than we have licensed drivers.[/li]
[li]You don’t need fresh fruits and vegetables to have a healthy diet. The frozen stuff is fine. The canned stuff isn’t as nutritiousness but beats eating crap. [/li]
[li]Most of nutrition you need can be derived from eating beans and rice. cheap to buy, easy to store.[/li]
[li]In reality, these people you are talking about go home and watch TV. If you got time to watch TV you got time to cook.[/li][/ul]
There may be a lot of people that don’t eat nutritious meals, but they aren’t victims. I understand them perfectly. I like eating crap also.
Fwiw, having children and living off of welfare can be a money maker, since you’ll receive more from the government in assistance (see: TANF) than you pay to the government in taxes
No it is not the US. And the safety net in Europe is generally speaking far more generous than the US. Not surprisingly, the US has the highest child poverty rate among the world’s high income countries, with the possible exception of Israel. Cite: OECD - Social Policy Division - Directorate of Employment, Labour and Social Affairs
FWIW, your word is no more credible than the people before you that claimed this with no evidence. If a US cite that supports your assertion exists, you should be able to find it, presuming you’re not using a very special Europe-only version of Google.
Any planning you disagree with is, by definition, poor?
If I’d gotten pregnant, I would have looked at giving the child up for adoption, because during the years during which I was having sex, I was still terrified that I’d be as lousy a mother as mine, her sister, their mother or their paternal grandmother. But, unlike other women I know who were surprised to find themselves pregnant, I knew the possibility of pregnancy existed even though I was taking measures to lower it. How is “considering all possibilities and not only the desirable ones” poor planning?
It’s not about whether you receive more than you pay in taxes. It’s whether you can actually afford to live on that amount long term. Good job reading the thread before posting, though.
Five years max, with those provisos, including establishment of paternity, is hardly the moneymaker driver of large fatherless families that y’all imagine.
“Family caps” also do not have an impact.
Back to the op - part of the answer (to the degree that it turns out to be true that the poverty is causative of larger family size) may be the very simple … access to effective means of contraception, and the power within a relationship to insist upon its use, correlates with maternal educational and income level.
Well the OP did point out that condoms are ridiculously accessible. I, too, often wtf at the lack of condom use. You can’t even take a piss in a bar without staring down a condom machine. Even with the 300% mark-up they’re affordable, for everyone else, drug stores sell them by the box for very little and are often open 24 hrs/day, plus many places give them away for free. It’s not like condoms are similar to other methods of birth control, which essentially mean if you don’t have money or medical insurance, they’re hard to come by. I don’t get the lack of condom use, because they are very accessible to everyone.
I say this as someone whose high school produced multiple single mothers while they were in high school. I don’t mean they grew up to raise children alone later in life. I’m not some sociology major at Carlton College peering over my eyeglasses into the mystical world of poor people, theorizing and reading a lot of well-meaning books by other sociologists who only understand the issues of the poor from the viewpoint of a book. I understand the real-life disadvantages that affect poor people everyday, I understand the psychology --I grew up in it–, I understand the neighborhoods, and know first-hand how terrible the schools are. I’ve watched the issues of the poor perpetuate themselves, and I understand it, and am endlessly irritated by people who don’t. Even so, I don’t get the whole condom thing. But I don’t think lack of contraceptives is the reason for the high birth rates. It may be somewhat of a factor, but it’s a tiny one, and even if we personally placed condoms on the night stands of every poor person in America, the birthrates would still be higher among the poor.
Have you seen the price of gas lately? I rarely see beans and rice in convenience stores, when I do they are considerably higher in price than supermarket prices. After a ten or more hour day of hard monotonous work relaxing and watching TV may well be a better use of their time than cooking. Last, but not least tasty food (and usually the heavy calorie fattening stuff is what tastes good) can help lift a person’s spirits. It can provide comfort in a hostile world. It’s easier to get than Prozac and probably less dangerous than narcotics.
Okay, read it, don’t think there’s a power dynamic in the sexual relationships of poor people that doesn’t allow women to insist on condom use. Maybe in, say, Eritrea, but not in Camden, New Jersey.
So to summarize your point, poor people aren’t eating food for nutrition, they are eating it for entertainment. That is just reenforcing my original point about unsupervised ten year olds.
Surely, you’re joking. You want a cite showing that welfare programs cause certain persons to receive more money from the government than they pay out in taxes?
It’s amazing just how quick some of you are to come out of the proverbial woodwork to try to find fault with something typed out. You’ll find that I (key word) said nothing about long-term solvency or whatever you want to call it, but rather that one receives more by being on welfare relative to what they pay out to the government. That is a simple fact; anything beyond that is pointless posturing.
Fwiw, your question serves no purpose. How do you determine whether or not someone can “afford” to live on welfare? Since it’s virtually free to them, how could they not?
I did read the thread and I was responding to the convo on page one. I’ll take your reply as being an admission that you have no real response to anything I typed out, and instead just felt the need to respond for the heck of it.
So you want a cite showing that welfare programs cause certain persons to receive more money from the government than they pay out in taxes? That’s precisely what I asked, only to have you tell me ‘no’. How about you not try to chop up my responses and ignore that which you wan to ignore?
I’m not so sure how you get to me not having read the thread because I responded to the convo going on on page one, but I digress. With that being said, I can respond to a comment made on any page. There aren’t any rules which say “You can’t respond to a comment (or conversation) made two days ago”. Don’t like the fact that I responded? Don’t read my response. Simple, huh?
Shopping for groceries on the way home from work is not practical for many poor people. Poor people are more likely to rely on public transportion. The bus is not conductive to carrying home large bags of anything and the bus schedules can add another hour to an already too long day. Nor does everyone have access to 24 hour supermarkets to accomodate the non 8-to-5 work schedule. The convenience store however may be 24-hour. As for eating for entertainment, the poor aren’t automations. Everyone needs some entertainment are their personality turns feral. Would you perfer they found their entertainment in alcohol, drugs, or thrill-seeking vandalism?
