|
njlauren -> RE: Why get off welfare? (8/23/2013 12:06:47 AM)
|
I have heard figures like this before, and in general, they are bullshit, it is statistical gerrymandering to prove that the poor are lazy and want to live off everyone else. If you ask the tea party, they will tell you if you just got rid of welfare, we could balance the budget and the milk and honey would flow (hint, social welfare spending in the federal budget outside the entitlements is small fry, it is a fraction of what we spend on defense, and last I checked is less than farm subsidies).
The problem is they are adding up a lot of benefit programs that people are supposedly eligible for and coming up with the magic number of let's say 31k. There are more problems with that than a piece of swiss cheese, and here is why:
1)It assumes that the 'value' they claim is real. In a lot of cases, the in kind value they claim is like those adds where they say a product is valued at 100 dollars but you are getting it for 19.99....
2)Some of the programs involved, like food programs, food stamps, section 8 housing and such, is not just available to people on welfare, in fact a lot of the federal programs you mention are available to working people, too, so adding that to the value of welfare benefits is distorting it, if a benefit is available to someone working it is not an incentive to stay on welfare. Working poor people are eligible for those and other programs...
3)The cash value of welfare payments, even in NYC, even without taxes, is not all that high, if we take out the programs that apply to working people as well as welfare recipients, I would bet welfare direct payments are under 10 bucks an hour.
4)The other problem is assuming that people on welfare don't want to work. Despite what the Cato institute (big donors: Koch brothers) claims, the overwhelming majority of people on welfare are transients. Yes, there are hard core welfare recipients, who have spent their life on it, but they are a pretty small percent, most people are transients. In recent years they have swelled, because the economy sucks, but most are transient. Of the people on it permanently, a good percentage are old people, where welfare supplements their meager SS benefits.
5)Another big problem is showing those benefit numbers, and saying it is someone who could be earning those kind of numbers or even near them, when a lot of the hard core welfare recipients, at best, would be working at a fast food restaurant or the like, they have very few job skills or education. Worse, many of the are single mothers, and day care is incredibly expensive, and free day care is as elusive as the 500 dollar ferrari they advertise on government auction 'newsletters'........Paul Ryan may proudly declare he once worked at a Mickey D's as a teenager, but when you are making 9 bucks an hour and trying to live on it in a city and have a couple of kids, forget it, he wasn't living off of it.
The reality of living on welfare isn't what many working poor or rural people think it is. Among other things, in places where most welfare recipients live, there aren't the other resources out there, people living on farms or in rural areas can hunt to supplement their food supply or grow gardens, can't exactly do that in Watts or the South Bronx.
I think there are disincentives to working, the way benefits eligibility is calculated, for example, someone on welfare gets medicaid, whereas a working poor person with relatively little income would not be eligible, there are problems.
There are problems with the welfare system and there are far too many people hooked on welfare, but rather than come up with solutions, what we have is the Ayn Rand bullshit that has become the mantra of the supposedly religious GOP, that the poor are lazy and don't want to work, and the answer is to get rid of all the benefits and let them fend for themselves, and everything will be fine., and if we do that, then the Koch brothers and scum like Trevor Norquist can have their taxes cut, since the poor dears have to apply for medicaid soon cause ya know, 50 billion dollars just doesn't go as far as it used to......I am tired of hearing it.
My dad wasn't thrilled with the welfare state, he wasn't happy about those who live on welfare their whole lives, believe me, but he also knew what poverty was, he grew up during the depression in NYC, his father was a stone mason when there were no jobs, and they had it rough, there were times when they didn't have enough to eat and so forth. To his dying day, he said that there was nothing dignifying about being poor, and that often those who claimed that they had been poor, had worked their way out of it, had not been really poor, not the way he say during the Depression, and he said he would take the welfare lifers a million times over if he didn't have to see what he saw then, he didn't want to see kids going hungry, he didn't want to see people so desperate they rummage through garbage cans and such, he said this is the United States, not India or some country like that where they don't give a crap, we are better than that. I don't want to wake up and read the news, and hear what happens in Japan, that has little social safety net, that they find people who starved to death, the Cato institute and the rest of them can take their annotated copy of Atlas Shrugged and the rest of the drivel written by that cunt, and shove it up their assholes, if they can fit them with all the sycophants with their heads shoved up there.
|
|
|
|
