Politics Welfare & Other Social Programs--What Reforms Are Needed?

snowy · Oct 21, 2015

You cannot buy things like beer, lottery tickets, etc. with either WIC vouchers or SNAP. Period. People can buy them with their own money on the same transaction, though. SNAP won't even pay for most prepared foods; since it's all electronic now, purchases get divided into SNAP eligible and not-SNAP.

ralphie250 · Oct 22, 2015

here if you know the right people you can but all those things and you can cash in the total amount of the card for a small price. its all in how they code the things at the store

Chris Noyb · Oct 22, 2015

ralphie250 said: ↑

my opinion

this is a touchey subject for me

I think that to be on welfare or to get any kind of government assistance then you should be able to pass a drug test. I have to pass one to work, why cant they to get help.
I see people using wic cards to but beer, lottery, smokes and non essential things. now I know tht this partly lies on the responsiablity of the store at which they are doing it at and the store should be held accountable to some extenct.

I know quite a few people on welfare that don't work, but they have no ambition to work. they say that working at mcdonalds for example is beneath them. yes I have a trade, but if I lost my job today you can bet your ass that I would have one somewhere doing something within 2 days. I have a family to feed and responsibalities to my family and bills. nothing is beneath me as far as working. but that's just me. my work ethic is very strong

with the way the world is today there are too many freeloaders in the country because we ( strong word) have let it get to that point. and its like having kids or a dog, once they see you will give in they will keep doing it.
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Drug tests. The expense alone sounds cost prohibitive to me. Sure, you might nail some addicts and/or people who are frequent users of "heavy" drugs, but you might also nail some folks who do a little toking once in a while.

WIC cards. In Texas we have Lone Star cards (clever name, eh). Some "sin" items are prohibited, and yes some stores get around it by ringing up items incorrectly. In the neighbor"hood" where we live I see them used frequently. Some people are careful shoppers who make smart purchases to maximize their food dollars. Other people buy thing$ such as pre-cut chicken piece$, pre-mixed flavored drink$, name brand product$ that are convenient, etc. Unfortunately those products qualify as food.

Ambition to work. In a previous post I mentioned people who claim that working results in a reduction in benefits. They can barely get by on welfare, or they can barely get by with a low-paying job and reduced benefits. Small wonder that some choose full welfare benefits. How to correct this? FIIK.

ralphie250 · Oct 22, 2015

the bad folks, fuck it up for the ones that really need it

Baraka_Guru · Oct 22, 2015

Chris Noyb said: ↑

Ambition to work. In a previous post I mentioned people who claim that working results in a reduction in benefits. They can barely get by on welfare, or they can barely get by with a low-paying job and reduced benefits. Small wonder that some choose full welfare benefits. How to correct this? FIIK.
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The irony is that those who most deride the welfare state are those who are otherwise okay with America being a de facto plutocracy, where the über-wealthy eschew any sense of duty when it comes to social cohesion. The 1% live distinct from American society as a kind of noble class that uses their power for selfish ends, which only serves to worsen poverty and increase class conflict.

Wealth disparity is increasing in America despite it already being similar to that in Russia and China. I have more than once described America as a First World country with Third World features.

You can look at this objectively. Incomes are flat despite productivity and wealth increasing. The wealth virtually gets sucked up to the top so that you have a situation where the top 20% holds nearly 90% of the wealth.

The GDP is growing but the median household income remains flat. The wealth goes somewhere.

How to correct this? It requires a solution with many parts. Maybe look to an economy like Denmark's, which Forbes often ranks near or at the top for doing business. What's interesting is that Denmark's union membership is around 70%. In the U.S., it's 10%. In Denmark, university tuition is free. Students are also given monthly financial aid. In other words, they're paid to go to school. In the U.S., post-secondary education is prohibitive and usually results in massive debt loads. In Denmark, health care is free and high quality. In the U.S., it's unnecessarily expensive and subject to mandatory insurance.

I could go on.... Or you could just listen to Bernie Sanders.

EDIT:
Also, not completely unrelated:

When Iceland’s President, Olafur Ragnar Grimmson, was asked how the country managed to recover from the global financial disaster, he famously replied,

“We were wise enough not to follow the traditional prevailing orthodoxies of the Western financial world in the last 30 years. We introduced currency controls, we let the banks fail, we provided support for the poor, and we didn’t introduce austerity measures like you’re seeing in Europe.”
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Iceland sentences 26 bankers to a combined 74 years in prison

martian · Oct 22, 2015

The New York Times ran a rather timely article yesterday. I present it here without further comment.

The Myth of Welfare’s Corrupting Influence on the Poor

Plan9 · Oct 22, 2015

The Noble Savage vibe is strong in this thread.

/not even trolling

Baraka_Guru · Oct 22, 2015

Plan9 said: ↑

The Noble Savage vibe is strong in this thread.

/not even trolling
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I'm not feeling it.

snowy · Oct 22, 2015

Chris Noyb said: ↑

Drug tests. The expense alone sounds cost prohibitive to me. Sure, you might nail some addicts and/or people who are frequent users of "heavy" drugs, but you might also nail some folks who do a little toking once in a while.

WIC cards. In Texas we have Lone Star cards (clever name, eh). Some "sin" items are prohibited, and yes some stores get around it by ringing up items incorrectly. In the neighbor"hood" where we live I see them used frequently. Some people are careful shoppers who make smart purchases to maximize their food dollars. Other people buy thing$ such as pre-cut chicken piece$, pre-mixed flavored drink$, name brand product$ that are convenient, etc. Unfortunately those products qualify as food.

Ambition to work. In a previous post I mentioned people who claim that working results in a reduction in benefits. They can barely get by on welfare, or they can barely get by with a low-paying job and reduced benefits. Small wonder that some choose full welfare benefits. How to correct this? FIIK.
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WIC is even more limited in terms of what it covers. Hence why there are WIC stickers at the grocery store.

Here's the list of what WIC pays for in Texas: Texas Department of State Health Services, Women, Infants and Children Program (WIC)

Also, if you see fraud on a retailer's end, REPORT IT. Retailers have to apply to provide the EBT services. Additionally, all of the SNAP and TANF funds get loaded on to these cards together, so if a person has purchases that aren't eligible for SNAP, they may still use TANF to pay, but it's two transactions.

Chris Noyb · Oct 23, 2015

It's not just the retailers. There are people who trade prohibited items, such as booze & cigarettes, for allowed items such as milk and bread, with a much higher value on the "sin" items. Back in the food stamps days people would buy FSs at .50 on the dollar. And yes, I've known people who sold their FS and traded in their food.

Baraka_Guru · Oct 27, 2015

Regardless of any fraud, etc., there is this.

A new study suggests that programs like food stamps and housing vouchers cut poverty by almost twice as much as we thought they did.

According to standard census numbers, the poverty rate in New York from 2008 to 2011 was 13.6 percent, before taking these programs into account. The programs the study examines — food stamps (a.k.a. SNAP), welfare (a.k.a. TANF), state-level general assistance programs, and housing aid — dropped that down to 10.8 percent. But the study suggests the real number was even lower: a mere 8.3 percent. If that's true, then the estimated poverty-fighting power of these programs has been dramatically understated for years.
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Study: Food stamps do much more to fight poverty than we thought - Vox

redux · Oct 28, 2015

Another good article that identifies a significant part of the problem - converting social safety net programs into state block grants.

A Party’s Strategy to Ignore Poverty

Arizona, where I was born, in July became the first state to cut poor families’ access to welfare assistance to a maximum of 12 months over a lifetime. That’s a fifth of the time allowed under federal law, and means that 5,000 more people will lose their benefits by next June.

This is only the latest tightening of the screws in Arizona. Last year, about 29,000 poor families received benefits under the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program, 16,000 fewer than in 2005. In 2009, in the middle of the worst economic downturn since the Depression of the 1930s, benefits were cut by 20 percent.

And if Paul Ryan, the Republican lawmaker from Wisconsin who is expected to become speaker of the House, has his way, poor people in many other states can expect similar treatment in the years ahead.

A bit of history is necessary to understand how we reached this point. Two decades ago, when the Clinton administration agreed with a Republican-controlled Congress to “end welfare as we know it,” Washington replaced the poor’s entitlement to aid from the federal government with a fixed block grant to states.

The states were given great flexibility about how to spend the money and a powerful incentive not to give it to the needy. And for all the initial enthusiasm for the idea, welfare reform has fallen far short of the claims of its supporters.

Nonetheless, the block grant approach has emerged as the central plank of the Republican strategy to confront America’s intractable poverty. The party’s main presidential candidates have woven poverty and inequality into their campaign speeches. Nearly all of them are expected to show up in January at the Republican poverty summit meeting in Columbia, S.C., organized by Mr. Ryan, who has laid out detailed plans to overhaul what remains of the American social safety net.

Mr. Ryan has proposed to turn Medicaid into a block grant to thestates. Last year, he put forth an “opportunity grant,” a block grant to replace just about everything else the federal government provides lower-income people — not just the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program, known as TANF, but also food stamps, housing assistance and energy aid — into one dollop of money. The main exceptions would be Social Security and the earned-income tax credit.

For all the talk about creating opportunity for the poor, and how ill-served they are by the current mix of government programs, it’s hard to view these plans as anything but a bald effort to save money.

But don’t just take my word for it. Take it instead from Peter Germanis, one of the White House advisers who help write President Ronald Reagan’s welfare reform proposal of 1986, called “Up From Dependency.” He has been affiliated with the Heritage Foundation and the American Enterprise Institute, both conservative advocacy and research organizations in Washington.

Over the summer, Mr. Germanis published a startling confession. Writing “as a citizen and in my capacity as a conservative welfare expert,” he apologized for whatever role he may have had in the welfare reform enacted in 1996.

“To the extent that anything I ever wrote contributed to the creation of TANF or any block grant, I am sorry,” he wrote. “As I hope to demonstrate in this paper, a block grant for a safety net program is bad public policy.”

full article:
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/28/business/economy/a-strategy-to-ignore-poverty.html
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Politics Welfare & Other Social Programs--What Reforms Are Needed?

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