Ending Welfare For Those Who Can Work
When I moved to New York and had very little money, I lived at the Y at first (no kitchen; showers down the hall). I found a roommate situation that didn't work out too well and then moved to a 10 x 12 room with no kitchen in a converted SRO.
Even then, new to New York, with no connections, I paid $900-some dollars -- while my older boyfriend at the time had a rent-controlled, eight-room, pre-war Upper West Side apartment for $400.
I wanted to do things with my life, so I wasn't just going to sit around -- wherever I lived -- but there's incentive to not earn or not earn all that much with the way subsidized housing rents are calculated. Chart here for 2017.
From a WaPo story, "Trump administration wants to raise rents and require work for housing subsidies."
U.S. Housing and Urban Development Secretary Ben Carson on Wednesday proposed raising the amount that low-income families are expected to pay for rent -- tripling it for the poorest households -- as well as encouraging those receiving housing subsidies to work, according to a legislative proposal obtained by the Washington Post.The move to overhaul how rental subsidies are calculated would affect 4.7 million families relying on federal housing assistance. The proposed legislation would require congressional approval.
...Tenants generally pay 30% of their adjusted income toward rent or a public housing agency minimum rent -- which is capped at $50 a month for the poorest families. The administration's proposal sets the family monthly rent contribution at 35% of gross income, or 35% of their earnings working 15 hours a week at the federal minimum wage. Under the proposal, the cap for the poorest families would rise to about $150 a month, affecting about 175,000 families currently paying the minimum rent, HUD officials said.
The bill also would allow public housing agencies and property owners to impose work requirements. Currently, only 15 housing authorities in about a dozen states require some sort of work or job training in return for benefits, HUD officials said. In Atlanta and Charlotte, N.C., at least one adult needs to work 30 hours a week for a household to receive housing benefits. Chicago requires able-bodied beneficiaries to work 20 hours a week.
Seniors over the age of 65 and individuals with disabilities would be exempt from the rental increases for the first six years. They also would be exempt from any work requirements. HUD officials said that group makes up more than half of the 4.7 million families receiving subsidies.
"Every year, it takes more money, millions of dollars more, to serve the same number of households," Carson said, citing years-long waiting lists for federal housing assistance. "It's clear from a budget perspective and a human point of view that the current system is unsustainable."
This brings us to a post on ending welfare by Myron Magnet at City Journal.
A key bit from it:
A pregnant single woman who does not want an abortion but can't afford to house, feed, and nurture a child, should give her baby up for adoption. In any event, she should not have the unjust alternative of dragooning her taxpaying neighbors into paying her a salary for having an out-of-wedlock child.
Discuss.
But first, more from Magnet:
Two objections will immediately meet this proposal. The first, practical, one: there won't be enough adoptive parents willing to take these babies. We know that policy changes can mold cultural change--for instance, proactive New York policing deterred young toughs from carrying guns--and this dramatic change in welfare law is likely to produce a dramatic change in behavior, too, especially with the restoration of workfare as a first step. But no one can predict how quickly the policy shift, and the all-important rhetoric about personal and parental responsibility surrounding it, will dissuade young women from bearing children whom they can't support. It may be that the orphanage population will temporarily swell, a gloomy prospect, since not all orphanages are good. But in that case, it also may be that some enlightened and well-funded charitable orphanages will morph into group homes for both the babies and their mothers, where the babies can get the moral and cognitive nurture they need, while the young women learn the life skills to be good parents and productive citizens, so they can ultimately take their children to their own self-supporting homes. Molding viable, if imperfect, families seems the best possible intermediate step.The second objection will be a charge of racism--a cry always raised against proposed welfare tightenings. Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, and the Congressional Black Caucus will label it an all-but-genocidal attack on the black family. It's true that 27.5 percent of black families were receiving cash welfare in 2012, census numbers show--a subset of the two-thirds of American black families that are single-parent households, and of the 81.5 percent of black families receiving some kind of government assistance, if only food stamps and/or Medicaid. But is this what the Reverends Jackson and Sharpton want for their fellow black Americans? Surely they know as well as anyone the numbers correlating single-parent families with poverty and social pathology. Surely they should want an end to government programs that reinforce a culture hindering black Americans from joining the mainstream, from rising out of poverty and seizing every opportunity that American society and the U.S. economy now offer gladly and open-handedly to all. Surely they want, as moral leaders, to encourage the formation of families that prepare children for the success that American society holds out to them, the chance to realize all the human potential that lies within them.
Or rather, I wish that they did. In fact, they are part of a giant, soul-crushing poverty-industry juggernaut: the politicized pastors who at least since Walter Rauschenbusch's Social Gospel have preached social justice (as if we still don't have it) rather than virtue and the perfecting of your individual soul; the child-welfare workers; the kinship foster parents; the government health and welfare bureaucrats; the Medicaid mills; the disability quacks; the Democratic political blowhards who brand every inequality an injustice and the pundits who cheer them on; the Open Society Foundations; the diversity deans and oppression-studies professors who don't know that Jim Crow ended long ago and that women sit in the Senate and on the Supreme Court bench and, with the availability of late-term abortion, are now free to kill their babies on the very threshold of entrance into the world--the list is endless. For these poverty-panderers to conjure up mind-forg'd manacles where no real ones exist is evil. The purity of their intentions--when they are pure--doesn't matter. It's the results that count.
A counterpoint, from The American Prospect's Christopher Jencks and Kathryn Edin:
some conservatives, such as Charles Murray, think that eliminating AFDC would help curb the trend toward single-parent families. To test this theory, it is useful to look at Mississippi, which has never offered more than token benefits and currently gives a single mother with one child only $96 a month. Despite such tight-fistedness, Mississippi's children are more likely to grow up in single-parent families than those in any other state. That is partly because Mississippi children are very poor and disproportionately black. But if limiting AFDC to $96 a month does so little to deter single parenthood, it is hard to see how eliminating AFDC entirely would do much more.Murray's answer is that Mississippi also gives single mothers food stamps and Medicaid, which are worth far more than $96 a month. He wants to eliminate these programs as well. But what would this mean in practice? Would there still be hospitals and doctors that gave the poor free care, as there were before Medicaid was established? Or would doctors simply refuse to treat sick people who are poor? Hardly anyone favors the latter solution. But if the poor could still get medical care, why should changing the way we finance it deter poor women from having children? Eliminating food stamps poses similar problems. If we replaced food stamps with soup kitchens and food pantries, we would probably not deter many poor people from having babies. If eliminating food stamps meant that a lot of poor children went hungry, the electorate would vote in liberals who promised to bring food stamps back again.
A pregnant single woman who does not want an abortion but can't afford to house, feed, and nurture a child, should give her baby up for adoption. In any event, she should not have the unjust alternative of dragooning her taxpaying neighbors or an unwilling father into paying her a salary for having an out-of-wedlock child.
Totally agree, but I've completed it for you.
It's futile to try to control our borders while we continue to subsidize the creation of people with no future right here at home. All they'll ever be able to do is collect welfare or take up crime.
jdgalt at April 25, 2018 10:12 PM
But in that case, it also may be that some enlightened and well-funded charitable orphanages will morph into group homes for both the babies and their mothers, where the babies can get the moral and cognitive nurture they need, while the young women learn the life skills to be good parents and productive citizens, so they can ultimately take their children to their own self-supporting homes.
Oh, Myron Magnet, you're hi-lar-ious!
Though I do agree with this:
Despite, say, New York City’s spending of $25,000 yearly per student in its public schools, according to 2016–17 Independent Budget Office numbers, the average kid doesn’t come away with the basic 3R skills essential to success in the modern economy.
The obvious answer is to skip the $25K spending, let parents foot the bill, and then perhaps we'll see a demand for quality. Unfortunately, those who decry "government schools" are all too quick to hoover up "government money."
Kevin at April 25, 2018 10:21 PM
Workfare is a great idea, until you peel back the cover. How does a minimum wage single mother pay for daycare, especially with daycare licensing requirements driving up the costs? Will you then allow unlicensed daycare as a cost palliative? Charities will likely step in to help cover some daycare for workfare moms, but for all shifts? And those charities would be subject to the same licensing requirements, driving up their costs.
Once you accept that the government has any role to play in this, you bind the taxpayer to fund years of raising someone else's children.
As cruel as it sounds, the answer is that the government does not belong in the welfare business - welfare, workfare, or any fare.
By all means, let's let any father unwilling to pay for a child he helped create off the hook.
$25,000 per kid? That just smacks of inefficiency.
At 30 kids per classroom, that's $750,000 per classroom. Let's say the teacher gets $125,000 in pay and benefits. And let's put another $125,000 per classroom into rent and maintenance of the individual school - at ≈100 classrooms per school, that should cover it. That means $500,000 per classroom going toward School Board administrative expenses; paying for all those doctorate-level administrators, no doubt.
If New York simply gave each parent $20,000 a year to pay for private schooling, do you think the city would get better results?
Conan the Grammarian at April 26, 2018 5:36 AM
Jenks is right that single motherhood isn't much related to housing subsidies. He is wrong about people going hungry if you convert SNAP to soup kitchens. And you could reduce the cost of SNAP significantly by doing so. The whole argument for individual payments was dignity and respect not coverage. Well, if you can't feed yourself then I don't care much for your feelings. If you want free stuff then we should control costs as much as possible. And it would reduce the corruption that is a significant part of SNAP today.
On the no health care for poor people, that might not be a bad thing both for us and the poor people. Numerous studies have shown reduced health outcomes after people get Medicaid. In fact the reduced lifespan in the US caused by Obamacare is almost 100% due to increased Medicaid enrollment. Free doctors sounds nice but in reality we are unintentionally killing poor people. All the good intentions don't mean much when the outcomes are this bad.
On the school thing Kevin likes to harp on, your numbers are about right Conan. Most US public schools have an overhead of 50-75%. This is why charter schools can offer a superior education at half the price. It is also why the more you spend on schools the worse the outcomes. Most of that money goes into administrator who then interfere in classrooms to justify their pay.
Ben at April 26, 2018 6:38 AM
Ben: "Well, if you can't feed yourself then I don't care much for your feelings."
i assume you meant "won't." There is a big difference between can't and won't. Separating those who won't from those who can't appears to be the real issue here.
iowaan at April 26, 2018 6:59 AM
Soup kitchens and communal dorms. Living off others should be unpleasant. We would see the welfare baby issue stop pretty damn quick.
Welfare should keep people from starving in the streets, and that's all it should do.
Momof4 at April 26, 2018 8:49 AM
No Iowaan I meant can't. If you are not capable of the basis necessities of life (food/water, shelter) then I just don't care that much how hurt your feelings are. Without the kindness of others you will die. That you feel embarrassed or lesser than those who can sustain their own lives doesn't matter to me. If you don't want to feel shame at incompetence then figure out how to support yourself.
I get what you are aiming for. I give even fewer fucks for those who can support themselves but choose not to. But the idea that the mentally retarded should feel just as capable and significant as those who actually are capable is a bad one. They aren't and lying to them is poor morals. You shouldn't go out of your way to make things harder for them or make them feel worse. But you also shouldn't go out of your way to give them a false sense of accomplishment. And especially not with other people's money.
And that applies to the elderly too. Social security is welfare. Both medicaid and medicare are welfare. That you paid into the system means nothing. You also paid into the US military. Doesn't mean you get to walk onto a military base and leave with a rifle. Those three programs are welfare any way you look at them. And they are devouring the federal budget. At this point we just can't afford them. I understand elderly people don't want to think they are on welfare. Well if you don't want a personal stigma of being on welfare then don't be on welfare. Claiming your welfare is some sort of saving program is a lie and it is unhealthy for you and the nation.
Honestly I care little about HUD support. From a cost side we are talking about We are talking about 40 billion and Carson wants to cut around 8 billion out of it. Sounds like a lot of money . . . until you look at the full budget. SS is 725 billion. Medicaid 275 billion. Medicare 480 billion. HUD's total budget is 1% of the federal pie. The cuts are 0.2%. This isn't significant from a financial position.
Ben at April 26, 2018 8:57 AM
I'll also add, you cannot separate the deserving from the undeserving in this context. There isn't a bureaucracy or law made that was ever capable of doing so. As an individual you might be able but as a government this is an impossible task. We have over 1000 years of history where various governments tried to do this and they all failed.
So separating can'ts from won'ts isn't possible.
Instead you do what Momof4 suggests and you let them separate themselves.
Ben at April 26, 2018 9:02 AM
Maine started requiring work to get welfare a few years ago and their rolls dropped by 2/3 (forgive me if I don't have exact numbers). This does a lot to separate the can't from the won't.
One of the things that historically kept families together was that they needed each other (including distant relatives). Families often owned some business together: a farm, a store, making clothes. Older relatives would keep the younger in line. This can get broken up by prosperity (everyone has a job) or by welfare (everyone has unearned income). In the second case the results are not good.
Once established, the thought that children might starve inhibits people from getting rid of welfare, but the best cure is to couple reducing benefits with increasing opportunities. For example, here in Chicago there used to be lots of street vendors and newspaper stands, as well as the Maxwell Street Market. All closed for good or bad reasons, but the effect is eliminating opportunities for the poor. Same with requiring 2 years of beauty school to braid hair.
cc at April 26, 2018 11:22 AM
Get to know those approved and those denied CC. Listen to their stories and look at their lives. I think you'll find this did far less to separate the deserving and undeserving than it looks like.
Back on the budget, the US takes in 2.3 trillion dollars. But it spends 3.6 trillion. That is 1.3 trillion dollars more than it takes in. Or 57%. Our current interest payment is 227 billion. Or 10% of revenue. Looks quite reasonable on the debt side. But that is based on the low interest rates from the Obama era, 3%. Historical norms for this debt is 6-7% with high points being 15%. A return to normal interest rates will double to triple the money spent on interest payments. I.e. it will jump up from 10% of revenue to 20-30%. But we aren't paying off any of that debt. In fact it is going up every year and no one is talking seriously about cutting spending. After all look at what happened when Carson talked about cutting 0.2% of the budget. In the words of Democrats 'There is blood in the streets!'. Instead we keep spending more and more.
Now some have suggested the only solution is to grow our way out of this debt. I say baloney. Many of our welfare programs are indexed to growth and infact are indexed above growth. So the faster we grow the deeper in the hole we get. Others say to tax the 1%. Problem is the 1% don't have that much money. They already pay for 35% of revenue. So raise taxes on everyone! Except you run into Hauser's law. This isn't a theoretical rule but instead a historical record. The US can raise rates or lower them. You can raise them on some or make special carveouts all day long. At in the end you only get 15-20% of GDP as revenue. Doesn't matter what the rate is. People change their behavior and the Federal government gets 18%. Tax the rich, tax the poor, doesn't matter, Uncle Sam gets 18%.
There is only one good solution, cut spending. Everything needs to come down by ~30%. So I applaud Ben Carson. He is doing his part and only needs to find 4 billion more to cut from HUD. SS needs to drop by 240 billion. Medicare/medicaid combined need to do the same. The military too. But no the military cannot shoulder the full cost. They are only 700 billion. After wiping them completely out you still need 600 billion in other cuts. And no the military is not the cause of the debt in any way shape or form.
But lets be honest, if we are screaming over 8 billion in cuts how likely is it we are going to get to 1300 billion in cuts? Not gonna happen. Instead we will print a lot of dollars and try to inflate our debts away. And we will lie about the inflation so our welfare programs don't grow with it. Not a good answer but almost certainly the one the US will implement.
Sorry for the wall'o'text. Don't hold on to your dollar bills. They are worth less and less every day.
Ben at April 26, 2018 12:38 PM
I think a big part of the problem is that as people earn more money, they lose a lot of their benefits, and the amount they lose in benefits is greater than the increase in their pay.
I have a FB acquaintance going through this now, she would like a to look for a higher-paying job but something about loan forgiveness and food stamp eligibility and a bunch of other stuff (sorry, I didn't memorize all the details of her personal finannces) makes it so she'd be worse off, not better off.
I do think the point of welfare should be helping people get back on their feet, so that if we are paying that pregnant lady, it should be to get her job skills up to par and temporary help around birth time, and then perhaps some childcare assistance while she goes back to work.
NicoleK at April 26, 2018 1:57 PM
OMG Ben you're harsh today, I'm beginning to wonder if you're one of the Russian guys who is hired to say super extremist things!
NicoleK at April 26, 2018 2:02 PM
In the words of Democrats 'There is blood in the streets!'.
That's what they said when Bush 43 proposed cutting the rate of increase in the baseline budget. Baseline budgeting is evil, because no one ever looks at programs and say is that still worth doing? and is it worth doing at that price?
I R A Darth Aggie at April 26, 2018 2:28 PM
Tis true NicoleK. I blame the bleach fumes. Cleaning the shower was long overdue.
But the harsh reality I'm pointing out is still there. We are spending $1.50 for every $1.00 we take in and the best anyone is willing to promise is to cut things to $1.48. But reality isn't so forgiving. We have a decade or maybe two and then things will have hit the limit. Two states will probably go into bankruptcy along with numerous cities. And any social security payments will be cut in half either by reducing payments or inflation. It is just how things are.
So I saw the headline "Ending Welfare For Those Who Can Work" and got ticked because it won't be too long and most of that welfare will vanish just because we don't have the money to pay for it. Which does sound super extremist. But it is also reality.
Ben at April 26, 2018 2:32 PM
By all means, let's let any father unwilling to pay for a child he helped create off the hook.
______________________________________
Thanks for the sarcasm, Conan.
Americans simply do not believe in kicking out-of-wedlock kids to the curb, and they naturally feel that taxpayers' rights come first, so fathers should pay. Plus, as I've mentioned, if unwed fathers could get off the hook just by saying they never wanted kids, what's to stop fathers who are MARRIED to the mothers from getting that right too? (Leaving aside clear-cut cases of paternity fraud, of course.)
lenona at April 26, 2018 5:47 PM
"no one ever looks at programs and say is that still worth doing? and is it worth doing at that price?"
I'd be happy if people asked did the program make things worse. That would get rid of 1/4 of gov't programs.
Part of the problem is the press is so in the Dems pockets you'll never hear truth. A .2% cut will be called end of the world harsh. And any program will be talked about as if it were the only one. i.e. Talk about food stamps as if they weren't also getting housing assistance, medicaid and a dozen other payments.
Joe J at April 26, 2018 5:52 PM
Not to mention that in this century, a woman facing an unwanted pregnancy is more likely to choose abortion than adoption (and according to the Alan Guttmacher Institute, 60% of women who have abortions already have children), so if a woman is opposed to abortion, chances are she's even MORE opposed to adoption.
(If she already has children, of course she's not about to give up a baby - what sort of message does that send to them?)
Also, as many point out, while poor people have abortions all the time, it's those girls and women who are truly at the bottom who give birth.
lenona at April 27, 2018 2:49 PM
Ben: Those three programs are welfare any way you look at them. And they are devouring the federal budget. At this point we just can't afford them. I understand elderly people don't want to think they are on welfare. Well if you don't want a personal stigma of being on welfare then don't be on welfare. Claiming your welfare is some sort of saving program is a lie and it is unhealthy for you and the nation.
My understanding is that the original intent of Social Security was to provide financial assistance (welfare) to only the most needy of elderly. (My understanding is also that, at the time SS was created, the elderly were the poorest segment of society.) But Roosevelt and his advisors turned it into a system that would pay money to all elderly people because that would create a much larger constituency for keeping the program going (and, of course, that has worked very well.)
It was also presented as a "savings" program so that people receiving payments wouldn't be stigmatized by getting "welfare." That characterization has also worked very well. Most people today think of SS as a "savings" program where you "get money out" because you "paid money in." It's difficult-to-impossible to get them to view it otherwise.
As for SS/Medicare/Medicaid devouring the federal budget, and us not being able to afford them, it certainly does seem that, in the not-too-distant future, there is going to have to be some kind of reckoning, with changes in payroll taxes or benefits (or, more likely, both.)
JD at April 28, 2018 2:33 PM
It has to be a cut in benefits JD. As I said above the federal government can't pull in more than 15-20% of GDP so raising taxes doesn't actually raise revenue. The two are not historically related. Given that revenue is fixed benefits will have to be cut to fit the money coming in.
There actually is one way to break Hauser's law and get more revenue for the fed. It is to impose a VAT tax. VAT taxes are incredibly rapacious and consequently they are incredibly economically destructive. If the US implements a VAT as a way to pay for these programs the entire world economy will collapse. More or less permanently too.
Ben at April 30, 2018 9:24 AM
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