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Originally Posted by Ustwo
Lurkette the road to hell is paved with good intentions. The welfare programs have created a helpless and permanent underclass. Right now this same underclass has made it impossible to give needed help to those in New Orleans with their lawlessness. While what you say sounds wonderful in theory, in practice so far it is nothing but a dismal failure condemning multiple generations to helplessness and dependency. Without a total revamping of the system, and a total cut off of funds for some people, this will only continue to grow.
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I don't disagree with you about revamping the system. As it is currently operated, it is inefficient, ineffective, and driven by ideology on both sides and not by empirical evidence. I don't, however, see this as a reason to completely dismiss public programs (as you seemed to do above) as a remedy for the situation - they just need to be 1. targeted to the populations that need them most, 2. focused on prevention (but not to the exclusion of remediation), and 3. to the greatest extent possible, based on empirical knowledge about what works. But we also have vested interests on both sides that refuse to listen to the science, insisting on the one hand that the government has no business intervening in early childhood development since it's a "family issue," and insisting on the other hand that assistance be handed out scattershot with no consideration for efficacy and accountability. And we have patently counterproductive policies in place, such as insisting that TANF recipients who have infants less than 6 months of age work in order to maintain eligibility for benefits, without providing for any kind of alternative child care assistance. We have Head Start funding depending on purely cognitive outcomes, when all the evidence shows that the cognitive skills do no good once the kid hits school without the social and emotional skills to go with it.
Sorry, getting off topic...
Bottom line, I believe wholeheartedly that there is a role for the public sector in ending the cycle of poverty, and that role needs to be informed by best practices and empirical evidence, which it's currently not. But that argues for reform, not dismantling the system. A main problem is that many policy makers are unwilling to make the necessary long-term commitment to funding the programs that work. They're more expensive than the programs that DON'T work but that have been in place for a long time; but they actually pay off in the long run.