Tag Archives: Welfare Reform

Commentary

What working at Wal-Mart taught a young conservative woman about the poor

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My friend Jose sent me this wonderful article from The College Conservative.

Excerpt:

During the 2010 and 2011 summers, I was a cashier at Wal-Mart #1788 in Scarborough, Maine. I spent hours upon hours toiling away at a register, scanning, bagging, and dealing with questionable clientele. These were all expected parts of the job, and I was okay with it. What I didn’t expect to be part of my job at Wal-Mart was to witness massive amounts of welfare fraud and abuse.

I understand that sometimes, people are destitute. They need help, and they accept help from the state in order to feed their families. This is fine. It happens. I’m not against temporary aid helping those who truly need it. What I saw at Wal-Mart, however, was not temporary aid. I witnessed generations of families all relying on the state to buy food and other items.  I literally witnessed mothers of small children asking their mothers if they could borrow their EBT cards. I once had a man show me his welfare card for an ID to buy alcohol. The man was from Massachusetts. Governor Michael Dukakis’ signature was on his welfare card. Dukakis’ last gubernatorial term ended in January of 1991. I was born in June of 1991. The man had been on welfare my entire life. That’s not how welfare was intended, but sadly, it is what it has become.

Here are just two short anecdotes:

a) People ignoring me on their iPhones while the state paid for their food. (For those of you keeping score at home, an iPhone is at least $200, and requires a data package of at least $25 a month. If a person can spend $25+ a month so they can watch YouTube 24/7, I don’t see why they can’t spend that money on food.)

d) A man who ran a hotdog stand on the pier in Portland, Maine used to come through my line. He would always discuss his hotdog stand and encourage me to “come visit him for lunch some day.” What would he buy? Hotdogs, buns, mustard, ketchup, etc. How would he pay for it? Food stamps. Either that man really likes hotdogs, or the state is paying for his business. Not okay.

I urge you with every fiber of my body to click through and read the true story of Welfare Queen #1 and Welfare Queen #2. Read them, and weep. Just because someone is poor, it doesn’t mean that they are automatically a good person. Maybe they are poor because they are irresponsible and selfish. Had you ever considered that? In any case, it’s not the government’s job to hand out money without knowing anything about the person who is getting the money. Government should leave the money in the hands of people who earn it, and let us decide who deserves to receive charity. (At the most, they should give us a tax deduction for charity up to 10% of our gross income to encourage more private charity)

But wait! There’s more!

From Human Events, toll workers being paid over $100,000 a year by the government.

Excerpt:

Ladies and gentlemen, meet Princesella Smith, who raked in $89,599 for operating the toll lanes at the George Washington Bridge in 2011.

Smith isn’t alone.  An investigation by the New York Post revealed that another toll booth operator pulled in a whopping $102,670 in 2011, $40K of that money coming in overtime.  In total, as the Post notes, there are at least 24 New York and New Jersey workers who have raked in more than $80,000 as “public” workers at a job that requires us to hand them even more of our money.

[…]Besides excessive wages to people whose only skill requirement is to sit on a stool and count and collect dollar bills, tax dollars reserved for transportation uses have gone to a panoply of nonessential programs.  As Ronald Utt of The Heritage Foundation points out, the “highway trust fund” has been raided to pay for Indian reservations, historic preservation sites, Appalachian and Mississippi Delta development, roadside beautification, bicycles, hiking paths, university research, and—the granddaddy of all expenses—feeding the $425 million beast that is the Department of Transportation.

The Port Authority (PA), for instance, employees a gardener for $94,000 and a blacksmith for $146,000 a year.  Heck, there are even retired PA employees who are making around that amount by cashing in on unused vacation and comp time.  (Here’s an idea:  As we’re facing budget deficits well into our future, how about requiring public employees to use their vaca time … or lose it.  No cashing in allowed.)

The larger problem highlighted with transportation spending, as Ronald Utt underscores, is the concept of public ownership.  A paltry 65% of highway taxes collected actually go to making driving a more pleasant experience for commuters.  The rest is squandered on whatever fancies a politician’s spending appetite at a given moment.  As the number of people driving has increased on the nation’s roads and highways (up 71% since 1970), lawmakers in Washington, D.C., and around the country have funneled money to stupid bike lines and high-speed rail debacles.

If I were President, I would immediately cancel all pensions for retired public sector workers and outlaw public sector unions.  What a colossal waste of money.

UPDATE: John Hawkins just posted a column entitled “The Five Things You Can Learn From Wal-Mart“.

Commentary

Jay Richards explains how welfare forces people into dependency

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Christian philosopher Jay Richards writing for the Heritage Foundation.

Excerpt:

More than 77 government welfare programs—which are spread across several federal departments and provide cash, food, housing, medical care, and targeted social services to poor and low-income persons—are “means-tested.” That is, beneficiaries qualify if they are below a specified income level.

Regardless of their intention, means-tested programs by their very nature pose disincentives for households to increase their incomes and risk termination of their benefits. Thus, the welfare system effectively set up roadblocks to the two main avenues for economic progress: marriage and employment. A single mother would be ensured of her benefits package as long as she did not take a job or marry an employed husband. Given this scenario, it’s not surprising that dismal societal trends have followed.

Unwed childbearing is the major cause of child poverty in America. Since 1965, the rate of unwed births has soared from 7 percent to 39 percent (and among blacks, to 69 percent). Children born and raised outside marriage are nearly seven times more likely to live in poverty than children born to and raised by a married couple. Moreover, unwed childbearing is concentrated among low-income, less educated women in their early 20s—those who have the least ability to support a family by themselves.

Low levels of parental work is the second major cause of child poverty in the United States. In a typical year, only about one-fourth of all poor households with children have combined work hours of adults equaling 40 hours a week. The typical poor family with children is supported by only 800 hours of work during a year, an average of 16 hours of work per week. If work in each family were raised to 2,000 hours per year—the equivalent of one adult working 40 hours per week through the year—nearly 75 percent of poor children would be lifted out of poverty.[6]

Marriage and one parent working = no child poverty. Why is government undermining that? Because broken homes produce children that require government intervention = more government = higher taxes = greater “equality” of wealth through government-run redistribution.

The article explains several government policies that would reduce dependency on government.

Richards explains:

The Welfare Reform Act of 1996 reduced some of these damaging incentives in one major program, Aid to Families with Dependent Children. Under AFDC, states were given more federal funds if their welfare caseloads increased, and funds were cut whenever the state caseload fell. In other words, states were basically encouraged to swell their welfare rolls.

Welfare reform replaced AFDC with a new program, Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF), which provided incentives to move recipients toward self-sufficiency. Funding to each state remained constant regardless of the size of caseloads, and states were allowed to retain savings from caseload reductions.

In addition, states were required to have at least half of their welfare recipients engaged in work or activity that would prepare them for employment. Rather than anticipating depending on the government indefinitely, recipients were limited to five years on the welfare rolls. (Under the old AFDC program, recipients spent an average of 13 years on the rolls.) These reforms in funding structure and incentives made a substantial difference.

Despite dire predictions by opponents of reform that work requirements and benefit limitations would lead to a surge in poverty, just the opposite occurred. States had the flexibility to design programs that best fit the needs of their constituents. State welfare agencies were transformed overnight into job placement centers, while social workers helped recipients access child care, housing, transportation, or other support that was necessary to move them into jobs and toward self-sufficiency.

Within 10 years, welfare caseloads shrank by more than half: 2.7 million fewer families were dependent on welfare checks. As the welfare caseloads fell, the employment of single mothers surged upward, and 1.6 million fewer children were living in poverty.[7] In 2001, despite the recession, the poverty rate for black children was at the lowest point in America’s history.[8]

Unfortunately, Obama rolled back welfare reforms in order to incentivize people to go back onto government dependence.

Keep in mind that Arthur Brooks of the AEI has shown that the amount of wealth a person has (over the poverty level) is not what makes them happy. What makes a person happy (above the poverty level) is that a person is making their own way and earning their own bread by their own work. That’s what makes people happy.

News

Star Parker is running for Congress in California

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Star Parker
Star Parker

Story from Michelle Malkin‘s blog, by LaShawn Barber. Star Parker is running for Congress against Democrat Laura Richardson.

Excerpt:

In Uncle Sam’s Plantation: How Big Government Enslaves America’s Poor and What We Can Do About It, Parker traced the shift in America’s attitude from a belief in strong families and hard work to the flawed idea that the government’s role is to solve social problems.

“Social engineers of the late 1960s told Americans that black people could not take control over the poverty in their lives due to centuries of racism and segregation,” Parker writes. The onus was now on society to “fix” poverty, and taxpayers are still pouring money into it. But poverty can’t be fixed with money, Parker asserts. Moral bankruptcy, caused by the scourge of relativism, must be overcome. Government safety nets allow people to escape the consequences of personal behavior. As a result, there is little incentive to learn from bad behavior.

Holy Snark! Forget Congress, let’s elect her as President! Did you see that she blames everything on moral relativism!!! Gah! She’s perfect!

Take a look at this article about her from WORLD magazine, written by Marvin O’Lasky.

Except:

Parker, born in 1956, is a Republican who hasn’t held political office before, but we joked last month that she had a ready reply if attacked on grounds of inexperience: You’re wrong. I’ve stolen. I’ve lied. I know how to do wrong. Indeed she does. Drugs, armed robbery, four abortions: “I was very flirty and promiscuous, and several bouts with sexually transmitted diseases didn’t stop me.”

Parker, on welfare, learned that “welfare policy hurts the very people we’re trying to help. It boiled down to, ‘Don’t work, don’t save, don’t get married. We’ll take care of you.'” She wanted extra cash that wouldn’t be reported, but when she applied at one Los Angeles business headed by “really good-looking guys,” they refused to pay under-the-table and also said that her lifestyle was “unacceptable to God.”

They didn’t hire her but they did keep calling her, asking her to go to church with them, and she finally did—”and things started changing. I felt equipped to make proper decisions. I could say no to junkie friends. I could say no to the guys I knew.” Parker went off welfare, took a job answering phones in the basement of a food distribution company, learned that she had a gift for selling, gained a degree in marketing, and started her own business.

The business was a magazine that spotlighted church-sponsored events of interest to singles. It did well but crashed in 1992 when Los Angeles (including many of her advertisers) burned in the Rodney King riots. Parker began speaking out against those who thought “that even these riots were somebody else’s fault. I had been hearing for so long the rhetoric that everything that happens to blacks is because of somebody white.”

Parker particularly spoke out on two issues within her own experience. One was education: After balking at a fifth abortion, she gave birth and by 1992 had a child in the sixth grade—”and her school was horrible.” She became a strong advocate of education vouchers and soon was nationally known. The other issue was welfare reform: She and I were involved in that in 1995 and 1996, and I saw her epignosis—knowledge from personal experience—filling in the blanks for members of Congress who had previously moaned about costs without adding up the human toll.

Wowie-wow-wow! Now that’s how women are supposed to sound! School choice! Welfare reform! She sounds ideal!

Oh by the way, here’s a picture of LaShawn Barber.

LaShawn Barber
LaShawn Barber

Always good to post more pictures of conservative women, I always say. And these two are both Christians, too!