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Welfare Benefits Far Smaller Than Scorn Heaped On Them

Welfare recipients have always been easy targets. President Ronald Reagan reviled them as “welfare queens” who supposedly drove Cadillacs and lived large on the government dole (a story that was entirely apocryphal). Heaping abuse on the recipients of the federal welfare program, since renamed Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), continues to be a popular staple of conservative rhetoric. A Missouri legislator recently introduced legislation,dubbed the “don’t get sick” bill, to punish poor families by taking away their TANF benefits if a child misses more than three weeks of school. Last week, a Tennessee legislative committee passed a bill that would slash TANF benefits to families whose children get bad grades. And Florida Gov. Rick Scott is still trying to force that state’s TANF beneficiaries to undergo drug tests that two federal courts have deemed unconstitutional. Scott isn’t alone. To date, 16 states have tried to force TANF recipients to undergo drug testing, despite little evidence of widespread drug abuse among the single moms in the program. 

The focus on TANF recipients is vastly out of proportion with the size of the program, which has been steadily shrinking since it was “reformed” in 1996 by President Bill Clinton and turned over to the states to administer. A new report from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities shows that the cash benefits doled out under TANF are now so meager that they barely make a dent in the fortunes of the recipients. In Tennessee, where legislators were so eager to use TANF as a “stick” to get poor kids to do well in school, the maximum monthly benefit for a family of three is $185—barely enough to lift a poor family above 10 percent of the federal poverty line. Missouri’s benefits clock in at $292 a month, literally the same amount offered in 1996. Thanks to inflation, the real value of those benefits has fallen more than 30 percent, leaving recipients at barely 18 percent of the poverty line. 

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New Romney Welfare Ad Cites Newspaper That Says Its Welfare Reform Claims Have ‘Been Debunked’

Undeterred by his own support for the welfare reform waivers he is now criticizing, Republican presidential hopeful Mitt Romney has released another ad slamming the Obama administration’s decision to give states greater latitude in how they administer the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) program.

The ad cites a Richmond Times-Dispatch editorial to make the case that Obama’s welfare reform waivers are “nuts,” because, “If you want to get more people to work, you don’t loosen the requirement — you tighten them.” The newspaper’s editorial board did, indeed, pen that sentence in an August 15 editorial that defended the Romney campaign’s earlier ads and agreed with him that the work requirement had indeed been “gutted.” Now, though, the Times-Dispatch is admitting that its own claims — which are central to the Romney ad — have been “debunked“:

The 30-second ad doubles down on the Romney campaign’s claim that Obama ended welfare’s work requirement “gutting welfare reform,” a charge that has been debunked by multiple independent fact-checkers.

Had they done their own reporting instead of relying on the Romney campaign’s advertisements, the Times-Dispatch’s editors wouldn’t have had to wait for three independent fact-checkers to realize that GOP claims that welfare reform had been “gutted” were a blatant lie. The directive outlining the waivers makes it clear that work requirements will remain in place, though states will have more leeway in determining how to get welfare recipients out of the program and into jobs.

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The Government Spends More on Corporate Welfare Subsidies than Social Welfare Programs

About $59 billion is spent on traditional social welfare programs. $92 billion is spent on corporate subsidies. So, the government spent 50% more on corporate welfare than it did on food stamps and housing assistance in 2006.

…

When one thinks about government welfare, the first thing that comes to mind is the proverbial welfare queen sitting atop her majestic throne of government cheese issuing a royal decree to her clamoring throngs of illegitimate babies that they may shut the hell up while she tries to watch Judge Judy. However, many politically well-connected corporations are also parasitically draining their share of fiscal blood from your paycheck before you ever see it. It’s called corporate welfare. The intent here is to figure out which presents the greater burden to our federal budget, corporate or social welfare programs.

read more - really, please read the rest.

This is a great article that shows how corporate welfare is a much larger drain on the american taxpayer than social welfare is.

Just as We Suspected: Florida Saved Nothing by Drug Testing Welfare Applicants

Last year Florida became the first state to pass and fully implement a bill mandating suspicionless drug testing of all applicants for Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF). The law mandated that all applicants pay for the cost of the drug test themselves, and that they be reimbursed if their test came back positive. The law was in effect for a mere four months before the ACLU of Florida filed a lawsuit and a federal court blocked the law, saying it was unconstitutional.

Today the New York Times released the most comprehensive data yet on how the law fared during the short period of time it was in effect. We already knew that the law was a failure; what we didn’t know was just how much of a failure it was.

read more  at ACLU Blog of Rights

The Welfare State didn’t destroy our innercities, the War on Drugs did - welfare spending on families remained flat until the War started, at which point it exploded and rose in lockstep with our disproportionately black male prison population.

Everyone from Bill Cosby to Ronald Reagan seems fond of placing the blame for our black community’s fate squarely on the shoulders of African-Americans, largely excusing the rest of America from any blame for their plight and refusing to consider that - just maybe - other factors might have come into play at some point during our shared history.

Until now, the emergence of the modern Welfare State in particular has been singled-out as the single most detrimental force on our African-American community, since it supposedly allowed “welfare queens” with “80 names, 30 addresses, and 12 Social security cards” to pull in over $150,000 of tax-free income a year.  As the argument goes, the Public Welfare Amendments of 1962 created a system that disincentived marriage by rewarding single mothers with loads of free cash.

All they had to do was remain out of wedlock, and the checks would just keep on rolling in.

This view was popularized by a Nobel Prize winning physicist, William Shockley, who argued that these programs“tended to encourage childbirth, especially among less productive members of society (particularly blacks, whom he considered to be genetically inferior to whites), causing a reverse evolution.”  Shockley popularized this hypothesis, bringing it to both Congress and the public, and even put forth a proposal offering financial rewards to minorities if they were voluntary sterilized.

So assuming that the Welfare State was created by black mothers who had no intent to ever marry, and willfully popped out babies to get paid, we’d expect to see a steady even rise in American government expenditures on the welfare funding sent to families and children starting in 1962 and then into the next few decades.  That’s the year the Public Welfare Amendments were passed, which specifically increased aid to dependent children.

And yet that’s not what happened at all.

read more at Tremble the Devil

So, socialism and welfare is okay if you’re a corporation…

Why aren’t the same people who bitch about “poor people living off their tax dollars” up in arms that the government continues to bail out and subsidize corporations and banks that fucked up and continue to fuck up. Seems like it amounts to pretty much exactly what they are bitching about except the recipients aren’t poor people…

Seems awfully hypocritical.  

Drug Testing the Poor: Bad Policy, Even Worse Law

bohemianarthouse:

Drug Testing the Poor: Bad Policy, Even Worse Law | TIME

Drug testing proponents like to argue that there are large numbers of drug users going on welfare to get money to support their habits. The claim feeds into long-standing stereotypes about the kind of people who go on welfare, but it does not appear to have much basis in fact.

Several studies, including a 1996 report from the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, have found that there is no significant difference in the rate of illegal-drug use by welfare applicants and other people. Another study found that 70% of illegal-drug users between the age of 18 and 49 are employed full time.

[…] it is hard to escape the suspicion that what is really behind the drive to drug-test benefits applicants is a desire to stigmatize the needy. The fact is, there are all sorts of people who benefit from government programs. Businessmen get state contracts, farmers receive crop subsidies and retired state workers receive pensions. The pro-drug-testing movement, however, is focusing exclusively on welfare recipients — an easy target. + 

(Source: fuckyeahdrugpolicy, via bluntlyblue)

Welfare (Q&A post I made re-bloggable)

wtficon asked:

What’s your opinion on welfare? Read this ‘blog post’ and i thought “hey you have such a strong opinion on so many different things, why not find out your opinion on welfare,especially with the amount of the debt the US is in.

(i’ll give you the link to the post shortly, i can’t seem to post links in questions)

I read the article you linked to.

Personally, I feel that welfare is a necessary social “safety net” and should be used as such, but it shouldn’t be a way of life. I think it should be set up much in the same way as unemployment, in that you should have to be reviewed every few months for eligibility, you should have to show proof that you are looking for a job or be enrolled in some sort of education program.

As far as the article you linked to, the guy that wrote it seems to be using the “welfare queen” argument, and to me this is very “black and white” thinking, when there are always shades of gray. He’s assuming everyone on welfare is simply sucking at the taxpayer’s teat.

While there are people out there that genuinely are lazy and simply don’t want to work, I’m sure for every one of them, there are others who had simply fallen on hard times, lost their job, can’t find a job, or had a family situation which may have financially strained them to the point where they could no longer afford to sustain their self.

On line that really stuck out at me was;”If we taxpayers are expected to pay for other people’s mistakes”

Again, this is a broad generalization and the same kind of “demonetization” of people on social programs I saw during the Regan era.

What really kills me is these people who want to sit and spout off about people on welfare being a drain on the tax payers and want them chemically or surgically sterilized are the very same people who want to de-fund programs like planned parenthood (which provides low cost or free birth control) and then will sit there and bitch about poor people “popping out babies”, but that’s another rant for another time.

Basically what it all comes down to is, I do believe that there are those who abuse social programs, but you can’t cut these programs simply because of the people who game the system.

Welfare should be used as a means to “get back on your feet” and not a way of living.

wtficon asked: What's your opinion on welfare? Read this 'blog post' and i thought "hey you have such a strong opinion on so many different things, why not find out your opinion on welfare,especially with the amount of the debt the US is in.

(i'll give you the link to the post shortly, i can't seem to post links in questions)

I read the article you linked to.

Personally, I feel that welfare is a necessary social “safety net” and should be used as such, but it shouldn’t be a way of life. I think it should be set up much in the same way as unemployment, in that you should have to be reviewed every few months for eligibility, you should have to show proof that you are looking for a job or be enrolled in some sort of education program.

As far as the article you linked to, the guy that wrote it seems to be using the “welfare queen” argument, and to me this is very “black and white” thinking, when there are always shades of gray. He’s assuming everyone on welfare is simply sucking at the taxpayer’s teat.

While there are people out there that genuinely are lazy and simply don’t want to work, I’m sure for every one of them, there are others who had simply fallen on hard times, lost their job, can’t find a job, or had a family situation which may have financially strained them to the point where they could no longer afford to sustain their self.

On line that really stuck out at me was;”If we taxpayers are expected to pay for other people’s mistakes”

Again, this is a broad generalization and the same kind of “demonetization” of people on social programs I saw during the Regan era.

What really kills me is these people who want to sit and spout off about people on welfare being a drain on the tax payers and want them chemically or surgically sterilized are the very same people who want to de-fund programs like planned parenthood (which provides low cost or free birth control) and then will sit there and bitch about poor people “popping out babies”, but that’s another rant for another time.

Basically what it all comes down to is, I do believe that there are those who abuse social programs, but you can’t cut these programs simply because of the people who game the system.

Welfare should be used as a means to “get back on your feet” and not a way of living.