But leave it up to “progressives” to give it a try anyway. It’s just taxpayer money after all.
Edith Gutierrez is quick to acknowledge her failings as a parent. And she knows what it’s like to be poor.
So for her, a New York City pilot program that will link cash grants to good parenting makes a lot of sense.
“It could keep parents on the ball,” Gutierrez said of Opportunity NYC, which the city plans to start as an experiment in September.
“A program like that would help parents get more involved in their children’s lives, and at the same time it could help them get their own education and learn a trade,” Gutierrez said. “Maybe something like that would have helped me stay out of trouble.”
Maybe. But then, there are a lot of maybes connected to Opportunity NYC. Mayor Michael Bloomberg acknowledged as much in unveiling the $50 million, privately funded initiative, the first of its kind in the U.S.
“It’s new. It’s innovative. And as with any good idea, there is always the possibility that it won’t work,” Bloomberg said in March. “But we can’t be afraid to try new things.”
The program is modeled after Oportunidades in Mexico, a 10-year-old aid initiative that has been credited with alleviating Mexico’s direst poverty.
The Mexican system, like conditional cash-transfer programs in Brazil and other Latin American nations, makes demands on participants while offering small but meaningful cash rewards.
The cash goes directly to the family, almost always the mother or other female head of the household. Parents can receive from $40 to $100 a month if they fulfill such responsibilities as taking their children to the doctor or keeping them in school.
Great, first we “imported” the people. Now we’re importing their ignorant social programs.
Just trying to make it feel more like home?
What would you bet that registering to vote (Democratic, of course) will be one of the things incentivized?
Where do I sign up to get paid to take my kids to the doctor, etc.? Oh, yeah, that’s right – only total screw-ups get paid for doing what they’re supposed to do in the first place. Responsible people get to pay for the whole mess. SICK!!!
How about a program where I get paid for not breaking the traffic laws, not breaking into homes, not beating my wife…
I have no problem with this as it is privately funded. People are more than welcome to waste as much of their own money on feel good bs as they like.
The problem is that “progressive” scholars will glowingly praise the program regardless of any ill side effects or unintended consequences and, thereby, getting it turned into a “publicly” funded program.
Unintended consequences; the first thing that popped into my pointy little head: I wonder how many crack ho’s will eschew one of their many abortions and bring a miserable child into their miserable lives specifically in the hopes of being able to cash in on their “good parenting” money?
I wonder how many of them will be able to live up to the (ridiculously meager) expectations of the program and actually collect any of the money. I wonder how many of them will realize that the costs of actually having that annoying brat around far outweighs any money they will get from the program. I wonder how many more abandoned, abused, neglected, murdered children will be brought into the world specifically as a result of this “feel good” initiative?
But I’m not a cynic or anything.
“Half the harm that is done in this world is due to people who want to feel important. They don’t mean to do harm — but the harm does not interest them. Or they do not see it, or they justify it because they are absorbed in the endless struggle to think well of themselves.”
–T.S. Eliot
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