i wrote this on words first...I got timed out here..It takes me a little while...
bobby...I could care less how rich some people are…More power to them..They pay enough! The only thing I care about about, are the tax dollars that are being wasted..I don’t mind paying my share, but I demand my monies worth..Only one American safety-net program has a track record of significant success. Fifty years ago, 35 percent of the elderly lived in poverty, while only 9 percent do so today – even as the definition of poverty has changed. The average family living in poverty now has air conditioning, washers and dryers, and microwave ovens.… Lincoln said, “You judge a nation by how well it takes care of its very old and very young…
Twenty-two percent of children live in poverty in the US, and many of those end up transferring to programs for adult poverty almost automatically. ..Social programs bear most of the blame for that process.Decades of incentives that discourage or penalize marriage, havedamaged the family structure, but social programs are entirely to blame in my opinion…
The CDC reported in 2010 that single mothers accounted for 40.6 percent of all children born in 2008. Children raised outside of marriage are nine times more likely to live in poverty than children raised by the father and mother.The breakdown of the family and the diminishment of marriage as a social institution play a large part in producing and perpetuating poverty. To the extent that social programs discourage marriage, they contribute to poverty rather than solve it.
Clearly, if we want (as you seem to) to keep our social safety net programs – and there is very little political will to do otherwise at this time.. we need to re engineer them to prepare children for success. To that end, we should try to find ways to improve education as a means to escape poverty and strengthen the institution of marriage.We need to find and eliminate marriage penalties in welfare programs, and perhaps look for ways to reward marriage in households with children. That also means orienting the state approach to marriage where the state interest lies solely in protecting the children. Whatever it takes…
Welfare programs should also move towards self-sufficiency. Ironically, we already accomplished that in the mid-1990s with a rare case of real entitlement reform, in which Congress and President Bill Clinton created incentives for welfare recipients to find work. That requires an economy that produces real job creation, but also consistency in enforcing those provisions. President Barack Obama undermined them by executive order earlier this year, a move that should be rescinded as soon as possible.
We can do better on education in part by allowing resources to flow to non-government players through school choice. Too many families have no opportunity to offer their children any other option but the failing public school closest to their house. The substandard education that children in these schools receive, forces them into poverty later just as it sends them down the easy path from Supplemental Security Income derived from claims of intellectual disability as a child to adult disability checks. School choice for poor families would enable parents to make choices that will allow their children to compete later for jobs, and to produce innovation that will lift even more children out of poverty in later generations.
Finally, while there is no will to eliminate social safety-net programs, they may face doom anyway on the basis of simple math. Governments at every level have incurred liabilities for safety-net programs that they have no realistic chance of fulfilling. Politicians expand programs without paying for what has already been promised, and those who argue for reform are shouted down by people who argue by anecdote.
If we want to save these programs to help the TRULY needy and lift people out of poverty, we need to put these programs on solid fiscal footing. That will mean rethinking every such program’s benefits, eligibility, and administration in a way that puts costs at a reasonable and sustainable level.Otherwise, we face a fiscal crash that would end these programs forever. perhaps if thinking people can agree that the safety net strangles some of the very people we intend to help and needs serious reform to solve rather than motivate poverty.
A guy named Kristof’s (For the New York Times) wrote a column a few weeks ago. Instead of traveling to Somalia or another war-torn piece of geography to find poverty and a lack of response, Kristof went to Appalachia to see what poverty looks like in the US, and how government programs respond to it.His conclusion should make people across the political spectrum sit up and take notice….And I quote
“This is painful for a liberal to admit, but conservatives have a point when they suggest that America’s safety net can sometimes entangle people in a soul-crushing dependency. Our poverty programs do rescue many people, but other times they backfire.”
Kristof found a number of cases where well-intentioned social-service programs produce perverse incentives that work to keep people in poverty rather than lift them out.Briefly, from a column that should be read carefully in full, those examples include a financial incentive to keep children illiterate, welfare benefits that punish marriage, and the ease in which children move from poverty programs to disability programs as adults.
The result, as Kristof discovered to his discomfiture, is precisely the kind of institutionalized poverty and dependency that safety-net programs produce when designed or expanded poorly. From a societal point of view….” it’s a form of child abuse"
