In my post the other day, I railed against taxpayer assistance for the poor a bit. Â I’m not against such assistance, as a matter of fact, such assistance kept my family from starving one winter when I was a little boy. Â I would prefer that such help come from private charities, but I know that such charities find it harder & harder to raise money (especially since the States & the Fed are so eager to tax), so until we change the tax structure and curb the spending, it is, for a great many people, a good thing. Â It is something that helps them get back on their feet. Â Yes, there are abusers, and it would be great if we could devote the resources to catching the Kings & Queens of welfare & disability fraud, but there is a point at which you’ll spend more to actively hunt the abusers than the abusers skim off the system. Whether or not your state is spending the right amount is valid topic for debate, but I’m not gonna get into it.
The reason I say this is because, in the grand scheme of things, for the most part, welfare spending is pretty small. Â To get a good feel for how much it is, this site is very useful. Â You can tweak the controls at the bottom to get a look at various types of spending by state, or for the US as a whole. Â You can also break out sub categories of spending as well.
It’s pretty easy to see that aid to the poor is not a huge part of most budgets. Â And while most welfare systems could definitely use some reform, there are much bigger fish to fry.
I agree, Mad Rocket, but in the case of government welfare systems, it’s the bad example they set and the bad lessons they teach that does all the damage. In an ideal world, the welfare system WOULD just be there as a bridge from bad times to better times for families, but there is almost no incentive in the support system itself to get people up, out and off of welfare.
Sure, there are jobs programs, etc, and I personally know a WA State jobs recruiter, and no one I know works harder on a daily basis, but the programs aren’t tied together well.
The system, for one example, that just keeps extending jobless pay almost indefinitely, because “it would be cruel to cut anyone off in a recession” is part of the problem here, not a solution.
Jobless pay should start immediately and be high enough so that you don’t have to starve your family or live in a car. It should count whether you’re fired or laid off, and you should begin retraining into something USEFUL with a guaranteed job IMMEDIATELY. You should be graded while in that training, and if you don’t apply yourself to learning your new job, you should be terminated from the program, and from all benefits when 90 days are up.
A mix of incentives for people to keep TRYING is the key. Some of the incentives need to be positive, and some need to be negative.
This wheel doesn’t have to be re-invented, just bring in some experienced trainers from the military (BTW, there are a LOT of them out of work), give them money to set up a pilot program, and in a month it will be teaching it’s first class of re-trainees.
Like I said, reform is certainly needed.
My mother-in-law (may she rot in hell) was on welfare for a while when my wife was young. The rules in WI at the time were such that welfare would give you enough to live on if you were unemployed and could not be employed at a wage sufficient to survive. No job training, no education benefits, and if you did get a low wage job, you’d lose your welfare benefits.