The "Carrot and Stick Approach" to Welfare Programs

Plus, this amounts to making elementary schoolers directly responsible for part of the family income, especially grocery money. Certainly no pressure there, whether or not there is abuse.

Brilliant! And therefore violates child labor laws and should be immediately struck down. I love it!

clover wrote:

Plus, this amounts to making elementary schoolers directly responsible for part of the family income, especially grocery money. Certainly no pressure there, whether or not there is abuse.

Yar, I would like kids in families on welfare not having ulcers by the end of first grade. Think of the healthcare costs.

I would support something along the following:

1. We have an established baseline of aid for welfare folks. School should be available year-round (tutoring over the summer) for people in that program and they should be provided school breakfast, lunch, and a snack before they go home to take the food issue mostly off the table.

2. Students in this program who do well on their grades earn a bonus for their family, so instead of a penalty for bad grades it's simply no bonus.

3. If the parents are physically able to work they can choose to spend up to 20 hours a week doing community service projects (keeping people company at retirement homes, cleaning parks, etc) to which they can receive an additional bonus to their welfare.

So bad grades no service= subsistence level, at this level your basic needs should be met with little to no extra spending cash.
Good grades and no service=Now you have some spending cash
Good grades and service=Should be some reasonable % premium over subsistence.

Carrots are way better than sticks.

I know some people find it distasteful, but we should also find some incentive programs to keep people from pumping out a bunch of kids they can't afford or raise well. Can we pay people not to have kids? Offer a one time $2500 payment and free snippage for any male who wants it? With technology/process improvement/automation I think we really should start thinking about how we really don't need as much low skilled labor, and that trend is going to continue.

bandit0013 wrote:

I would support something along the following:

1. We have an established baseline of aid for welfare folks. School should be available year-round (tutoring over the summer) for people in that program and they should be provided school breakfast, lunch, and a snack before they go home to take the food issue mostly off the table.

Where, exactly, are you going to get the money to keep schools open year-round, let alone expand the school lunch program to 12 months (and cover breakfast and a snack as well)?

bandit0013 wrote:

2. Students in this program who do well on their grades earn a bonus for their family, so instead of a penalty for bad grades it's simply no bonus.

Again, where is the money for this bonus program coming from?

bandit0013 wrote:

3. If the parents are physically able to work they can choose to spend up to 20 hours a week doing community service projects (keeping people company at retirement homes, cleaning parks, etc) to which they can receive an additional bonus to their welfare.

I'm confused. Are you arguing that we should take away someone's paying job and give it to someone on welfare (but not really pay them for their labor) or are you arguing that we should bring back indentured servitude where we can simply force people to work and not pay them market value for their labor?

And how do you propose to deal with the companies who would gladly ditch their existing employees, who they have to pay a market wage and benefits, for welfare workers who's pennies-on-the-dollar wages would be picked up by the government. What a private sector boon. Free (or very nearly so) labor!

bandit0013 wrote:

So bad grades no service= subsistence level, at this level your basic needs should be met with little to no extra spending cash.
Good grades and no service=Now you have some spending cash
Good grades and service=Should be some reasonable % premium over subsistence.

I'll ask you the same question I asked jdzappa earlier in the thread: how much do you think people are getting from these program?

In Tennessee, the average TANF benefit was $164 a month and the average food stamp benefit was $268 per household. And, because both of those are needs based programs, you had to be living below the subsistence level in order to qualify for them in the first place (about $13,000 for a family of three).

These benefits don't magically catapult people to life on Easy Street, they barely get them up over the poverty line, which our government so charmingly defines as the threshold below which people are "lacking the resources to meet the basic needs for healthy living; having insufficient income to provide the food, shelter and clothing needed to preserve health." All of our needs based programs use that definition, meaning they are only concerned with getting people to subsistence level and nothing more.

Obviously I think taxes should pay for it. Taxes are at the same time too low and we spend too much on crap.

Holding summer classes for a subset of struggling students would give them more personal attention.

Besides a child should never, ever go hungry.

I don't see why it would impact jobs. Parks are always looking for volunteers.

I think the issue with this legislation comes down to five very common issues that invariably result in bad legislation:

1. Legislating a 'problem' without actually proving it exists.
2. Failure to show sufficient evidence that the proposed solution will improve the 'problem'
3. Failure to even attempt to look for unintended consequences!!! (this one is a big problem for well intentioned people)
4. Blaming the poor for their situation despite evidence to the contrary. (typically connected to racism)
5. Attempting to *force* students to do better.

1-3 Can effect any legislation regardless of target and IMO they result in a lot of very bad laws. If you look at the best laws (from the constitution down) they all start with identifying a real problem, finding a solution that is reasonably expected to improve the situation, and then anticipating potential unwanted unintended consequences and mitigating them.

Recent 'welfare reform' efforts (I use the term very loosely) have lacked these.
People on welfare are buying drugs! -> actually no they use a a lower rate.
Kids on welfare are missing school! -> have you checked on other poor kids lately?

If we make their family starve they will suddenly be able to get their kids to school -> non-sequitur. Do you honestly think they don't already try to get their kids to go to school?

This is a great idea! -> Have you considered the fact that if someones 12 year old refuses to follow directions the entire family starves, gets evicted etc.? Does that help the other children? The parent? The 12 year old? Society? Are you ready to dedicate police to hauling kids into school? Doesn't this make it even harder for the people on welfare to obtain a job? Could this increase child abuse? What alternatives could be paid for with the administration cost? How much paperwork is being put on the already overburdened schools? etc. etc.

I know some people find it distasteful, but we should also find some incentive programs to keep people from pumping out a bunch of kids they can't afford or raise well. Can we pay people not to have kids? Offer a one time $2500 payment and free snippage for any male who wants it?

You know the part I like about this is it targets the males rather than putting further burden on the females. In the time a female can have 1 child, a male can "father" dozens of children.

And while I think it is a general concern across the board to wonder how something should be funded, I don't think it should be used as a carte blanch dismissal of ideas.

bandit0013 wrote:

I would support something along the following:

1. We have an established baseline of aid for welfare folks. School should be available year-round (tutoring over the summer) for people in that program and they should be provided school breakfast, lunch, and a snack before they go home to take the food issue mostly off the table.

2. Students in this program who do well on their grades earn a bonus for their family, so instead of a penalty for bad grades it's simply no bonus.

3. If the parents are physically able to work they can choose to spend up to 20 hours a week doing community service projects (keeping people company at retirement homes, cleaning parks, etc) to which they can receive an additional bonus to their welfare.

So bad grades no service= subsistence level, at this level your basic needs should be met with little to no extra spending cash.
Good grades and no service=Now you have some spending cash
Good grades and service=Should be some reasonable % premium over subsistence.

Carrots are way better than sticks.

I know some people find it distasteful, but we should also find some incentive programs to keep people from pumping out a bunch of kids they can't afford or raise well. Can we pay people not to have kids? Offer a one time $2500 payment and free snippage for any male who wants it? With technology/process improvement/automation I think we really should start thinking about how we really don't need as much low skilled labor, and that trend is going to continue.

Be careful what you incentivize. Giving a bonus for good grades is just gonna result in people doing homework for their kids, rampant cheating on tests and 'shopping' for easy teachers which will result in the kids being worse off than they already are by virtue of growing up poor.

bandit0013,
I do not disagree with everything you said. But I may agree for a different reason.

Backing up a bit, you have 3 ideas. What problem or problems are they intended to address?

bandit0013 wrote:

Obviously I think taxes should pay for it. Taxes are at the same time too low and we spend too much on crap.

Holding summer classes for a subset of struggling students would give them more personal attention.

Besides a child should never, ever go hungry.

I never questioned the need for the additional services, I simply asked the very appropriate question of how the fine folks of Tennessee were going to pay for them.

Raising taxes is a political non-starter at the federal level as is juggling budgets with the sequester going down. At the state level Tennessee has been busy chopping about $100 million a year from its base budget for the past couple of years to make up for revenue shortfalls. What "crap" state programs are going to have to be cut to get the services you want?

bandit0013 wrote:

I don't see why it would impact jobs. Parks are always looking for volunteers.

Volunteers for what, bandit? Picking up trash? Parks have a maintenance staff (or contract a private firm to do maintenance), so you'd literally be allowing parks to fire full and part time workers and using massively underpaid welfare workers instead. Net result, less jobs.

Or are you going to insist they just do make work so you can feel better these obvious deadbeats had to do something to get your hard earned tax dollars?

Requiring tens of thousands of people to offer up their labor at rates that would be far below market value (you never bothered to explain how your "bonus" program would work, but it would clearly have to be well below minimum wage levels to work) would always eliminate other jobs or lower the wages companies were willing to offer. I mean why should a retirement home pay someone $10 or $15 an hour to take care of granny when they can get a welfare worker for effectively free since their "wages" come from the state in the form of benefits?

Or are you going to insist they just do make work so you can feel better these obvious deadbeats had to do something to get your hard earned tax dollars?

...please tell me this is ironic, otherwise, it's in contempt of a lot of people (I'd be willing to bet a few of whom are on these boards) and well past the unacceptable line as far as I'd be concerned. Haven't we already established a baseline of how many people are working 40+ hours a week and still falling below this line?

@OG

Check out the stats on the long-term unemployed and their chances of being hired. If you were actually doing some supervised work it could go on your resume, and might help in breaking up that issue.

The person taking care of granny in the retirement home typically is some form of nurse, are they not? How would someone who volunteers to come in and play checkers with granny cost a job?

billt721 wrote:

Be careful what you incentivize. Giving a bonus for good grades is just gonna result in people doing homework for their kids, rampant cheating on tests and 'shopping' for easy teachers which will result in the kids being worse off than they already are by virtue of growing up poor.

When you're in school, using someone else's help is cheating. The minute you get a real job it's called collaboration.

/don't get me started on how farked up the education system's methods are.

fangblackbone wrote:
I know some people find it distasteful, but we should also find some incentive programs to keep people from pumping out a bunch of kids they can't afford or raise well. Can we pay people not to have kids? Offer a one time $2500 payment and free snippage for any male who wants it?

You know the part I like about this is it targets the males rather than putting further burden on the females. In the time a female can have 1 child, a male can "father" dozens of children.

Well, plus the whole part where for a male the procedure is a simple outpatient procedure completed in less than 30 minutes. It's much more complicated/dangerous/expensive to fix a female.

fangblackbone wrote:

And while I think it is a general concern across the board to wonder how something should be funded, I don't think it should be used as a carte blanche dismissal of ideas.

FTFY

There's something that really, really bugs me in these last couple of posts. Talking about "fixing" human being left and right as if they were no more than animals, that's just so unethical. The line "my body, my rights" comes to mind. Plus, you're just completely ignoring the population who had kids and hit hard times because of unemployment or sickness (the health care system being what it currently is) or whatever bump on the road of life they came across. That's assuming that life is a straight line, a fixed trajectory from which you never waver.
The suggestion to fix sterilize people because they are currently in a tight spot is just loathsome to me. I will, however, temper my words by saying that offering a vasectomy or tubal ligation to someone who wants it done isn't a bad idea, but then again, I'm of the opinion that most medical procedures should be accessible to the bulk of the population.

But returning to the topic at hand, education... I tend to agree with you, Bandit, I'm not sure we're being taught in school the tools that will truly serve later on in life. Seems to me I was actually taught to parrot back facts and demonstrations, and waking up to the real world was a jarring experience. Of course, that would mean an in-depth reform of the educational system, but that's neither here nor there.

Just my two cents, I guess.

Eeima is correct. Making a medical procedure free is very different from incetivising it in such a way that the poor may be forced into it for food.

realityhack wrote:

Eeima is correct. Making a medical procedure free is very different from incetivising it in such a way that the poor may be forced into it for food.

I missed where the assertion was made that those were the choices (starve or fixing).

A first world society should have basic needs met.

It doesn't have to be sterilization or starve, it can be sterilization or get evicted, sterilization or whatever basic human need you want to plug in there. When you start monetizing the human body, you're taking a dangerous path.
By all means, make it free if you wish, not just for the poor but for everyone, but by no means throw in oodles of cash that might be too tempting for the needy. You run the risk of people electing to get the procedure because they're in a tight spot only to have them bitterly regret it later. And there's no end to the psychological damage then, particularly in the matter of an individual's fertility (or lack thereof).

Bandit0013
"A first world society should have basic needs met."

By this definition the US is not by any stretch of the imagination a first world country. Certainly that argument can be had, but arguing that your sterilization for pay program would be just fine if we had a complete social revolution and suddenly were in a completely different position is a bad argument. A hypothetical country where almost anything would work can be constructed.

Bandit0013
"I missed where the assertion was made that those were the choices (starve or fixing)."
If $0 is received it is free health care.
If a significant sum is received it is last ditch source of income. Wither that is required for food, rent, other medical bills, etc. In this case obviously those who are currently well off would never need to resort to this. But the poor might need to resort to it.

Aren't food, shelter, and medical basic needs?

I get your point, but you don't seem to be grasping that people might not want a knife to their winky unless some compensation is involved.

See "etc."
Frankly if the operation was free anyone who wanted to do it could do so easily.
Adding compensation is an attempt to get people who do not want to (even if it is free) to do so by increasing the benefit.
The benefit you are proposing vastly disproportionately 'helps' the poor (even if they are poor because of problem gambling).

Let's go back to my previous post regarding how legislation goes bad.

1. What specifically is the problem that you are trying to rectify? And what evidence do you have that this is a real problem (vs. a stereotype or unavoidable issue for example)?

If the issue is 'people have kids they can't support' but you advocate minimum support for everyone, then you need to rephrase the problem at best.
Is the issue that POOR people continue to have children?

Lets go back to defining the problem before we continue a discussion over the unintended consequences of one 'solution'

even if they are poor because of problem gambling

Oh for the love of Buddha, there are a lot of reasons you can be poor. Not all of them are on the person themselves. Can we stop with the thinly or non-veiled references to everyone needing some form of government assistance being a leech on the system who is only out to game the system for as much free money as possible?

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/2012/12/georgia_s_war_against_the_poor_the_southern_state_is_emptying_its_welfare.single.html

Demosthenes,
I apologize as I seem to be the culprit in some serious miscommunication. I completely agree that most people are not poor by choice or by any flaw of their own. This is a serious societal problem in this country and we all hold the bag.
I did not in any way mean to imply that poor people are poor because of anything they did or are.

My statement was in response to a string of posts in-which we were discussing the 'land of oz' where everyone's basic needs were taken care of no matter what and I was simply trying to find a good example of a reason outside of those basic needs that would cause someone at that basic needs level to require extra cash.

Honestly I completely agree with you that our social policy with respect to the poor is a shameful abysmal disaster. And our collective attitude toward people who temporarily or permanently need government assistance of one kind or another is an embarrassment to our country.

I apologize again for the miscommunication. Maybe it will help when I can put in real quotes. Or if I put in a little more effort.

Also, thank you for the link. I love it when people link to great articles with facts that can be verified and thoughtful commentary on those facts. I did not know Georgia was so bad off (I knew it was bad, but that is way worse than I thought).

I guess I don't get the context or point of that statement of because of gambling... but that's alright.

Also, you're kind of a skimmer, that was on the last page, I merely re-linked it to illustrate my point of the multitude of reasons people end up needing assistance that don't really come down to "their fault".

EDIT: No offense meant by that. Meant as a joke, but rereading it, came off as hostile or patronizing, not my intention at all.

Demosthenes,
It's cool.
I honestly have a hard time sometimes following untreated message boards, especially over days... and especially when I joined the board after the thread was started.
I will endeavor not to skim so badly.

realityhack wrote:

Is the issue that POOR people continue to have children?

Let's hypothesize this. Before I write anything more I don't want anyone jumping down my throat or thinking I actually hate poor people or anything. But let's consider this.

On a sociological level is this a problem?

We are living in a period of great advancing technology and automation. This is causing a lot of manual labor jobs that would be filled by people of low education/aptitude (ie the working poor) to go away. We also have some pretty sound statistics that show (statistically, not 100%) that people born into a certain financial class are likely to stay there and that people born into a certain education level class are likely to stay there as well.

So as we continue advancing towards a point where little to no "unskilled" labor is needed, what actions should we as a society take?

1. It could be that the mean of production of basic goods will become so efficient that it's not a big deal that more than half the population doesn't work. Do we all just become artists, poets, etc, a great enlightenment? What does economics look like if resources are no longer effectively limited?
2. It could be that the benefits of having lower population from an economic/environmentalism perspective are compelling enough that incentives should be put into place to reduce the birth rate.

Based on what I am seeing, I think option 1 is certainly possible through technology, but there will be a transition period where it will totally suck to be unskilled (maybe we're in that period now...). It's not moral to force eugenics on people, but is it moral to create a permanent underclass? What actions should be taken if society continues to drift towards haves and have nots?

bandit0013 wrote:

Check out the stats on the long-term unemployed and their chances of being hired. If you were actually doing some supervised work it could go on your resume, and might help in breaking up that issue.

That thought doesn't jive with your previous thought:

bandit0013 wrote:

With technology/process improvement/automation I think we really should start thinking about how we really don't need as much low skilled labor, and that trend is going to continue.

If you're honestly concerned about the employment prospects of the people who receive government benefits then you should really be focusing on educating and training them, not insisting that they do make work 20 hours a week.

bandit0013 wrote:

The person taking care of granny in the retirement home typically is some form of nurse, are they not? How would someone who volunteers to come in and play checkers with granny cost a job?

I'm seriously at a loss as to why you can't understand that requiring people who receive government benefits to perform forced labor is a bad thing: for them, for other workers, and for our society in general.

I think a major reason for that is that you haven't actually defined any program short of saying that people receiving benefits should have to do something at park or a nursing home or somewhere and they should get some kind of "bonus" to their benefits for their service. My logical assumption is that that "bonus" would have to be near prison labor wages because you can make just about the same amount of money as the monthly TANF benefit as you can working 20 hours at a minimum wage job.

Next is that you've been exceptionally vague about what they're supposed to be doing, short of "volunteering". As I pointed out, even something like picking up trash at a park is also a paid job. So if the park suddenly has dozens of people that *have* to clean up trash, it can easily let go most, if not all, of its maintenance department. Considering the budget pressures state and local governments are under, that would likely happen in a heartbeat.

And that would happen everywhere where you'd want the people receiving benefits to volunteer: those people would eventually replace paid labor. Actually, it would happen much quicker if they had to volunteer at a for-profit organization because they're quickly going to use all the practically unpaid labor they can. And why not? It's basically free profit.

Getting back to your example, if the nursing home wants someone to play checkers with granny then they should hire an Enrichment Activities Coordinator, not rely on coerced labor.

bandit0013
"Before I write anything more I don't want anyone jumping down my throat or thinking I actually hate poor people or anything."
Fine. All I want is to have a discussion.

As far as I can tell from your post (correct me if I am misreading this) your conjecture is that:
"POOR people having children IS a social / societal problem"

You support this conjecture by pointing out that:
1. Low/unskilled labor jobs are in decline
2. People who are born into lower economic classes tend to stay there
3. People born into lower educational classes tend to stay there

You also point out that overpopulation of the planet as a whole is an issue. This doesn't get a number because it is clearly a post-hoc justification not an actual reason for the policy.

It is fairly clear to me that these facts alone do not support the 'problem' that is being proposed.
We could easily say that 'moving jobs overseas' is the real problem, or 'class mobility' is the real problem.

So "poor people having children" is NOT the real problem. That is a problem, prompted by a proposed solution to some other problem.
The real problem might be better stated as:
"The poor population has poor educational, and social mobility leading to a permanent underclass"

Then your proposed solution is to incentivevise this group not reproducing
and then you come up with the 'problem' of 'poor people having children' in response to a per-determined plan.

This is what I was talking about when I posted regarding legislation (even well intentioned legislation) getting messed up consistently.

The negatives you point to can be addressed much more directly. And the unintended consequences of your proposed solution could be quite serious. Especially given the racial divides between classes.
Your 'problem' isn't actually even a real problem. Something else is but you are willing to address the perceived 'problem' without probing deeper.

Speaking very quickly on the 'workfare' concept:
Mass State employees (2011) -http://www2.census.gov/govs/apes/11s...
Full Time 81k
Full Time Equivalent 92k
Part Time 33k
Total about 206k

Mass Welfare - http://www.statemaster.com/country/M...
Total Recipients
108k

So your plan is to create up to 108k minimum wage part time state jobs, quadrupling the existing part time state work force and doubling the general work force? Or are we talking lower than minimum wage?

Wouldn't it be better to just create a smaller number of jobs with an actual living wage?

And of course this would have no effect at all on the existing state employees or any private employees currently making a living wage right?