The people I've known who were eligible to but refused to use food stamps did not feel it was "beneath them"- I'm pretty sure they felt that they didn't truly need them, and that there was someone worse off who needed them more than they did.
Actually, the amount of paperwork and hassle to apply for foodstamps is crazy. It can be embarrassing because you have to provide so many details about your life and give them legal permission to dig into all kinds of records.
I realize the need to prevent fraud but there has to be some kind of balance to allowing someone in a bad situation to keep a little dignity.
Then there is the craziness that you can buy things like candy with foodstamps but not vitamins.
I realize the need to prevent fraud but there has to be some kind of balance to allowing someone in a bad situation to keep a little dignity.
On the contrary, that would be counterproductive.
At low levels of income, there is virtually no relationship between earnings and consumption. So if a person's utility function is proportional to consumption, with a slight disutility for working, they will choose not to work.
This happens in the US up to the $30k/year level - i.e., a person earning $0k/year and a person earning $30k/year will consume roughly the same amount of goods and services.
However, if you make receiving food stamps/welfare/etc unpleasant (i.e., more unpleasant than actually having a job), you would encourage some people to work for a living instead.
What you are saying (and that link) sounds exactly like a person that has never been poor without a support network of family and friends. It's just a mental exercise with no basis in reality and no "hands-on" experience.
The modern welfare system does not allow non-disabled people to draw an infinite amount of assistance - it's very restricted and for a finite amount of time. They must constantly show real proof they are looking for work and even with part-time jobs their assistance is immediately scaled back.
Assistance shouldn't be a punishment, it should be care and kindness while someone gets back on their feet. You aren't going to make assistance less attractive than a minimum wage job, it's impossible.
Could you tell me the flaw in my analysis? Or are you merely asserting that because I lack a certain experience, I am therefore incapable of analyzing the problem using statistics and logical inference?
They must constantly show real proof they are looking for work and even with part-time jobs their assistance is immediately scaled back.
This is simply false. The vast majority of the poor are not looking for work, nor are they working. Nevertheless, they consume an average of $30k/year.
Did you even bother to read my link?
You aren't going to make assistance less attractive than a minimum wage job, it's impossible.
It's hardly impossible, but I agree that a lack of dignity is probably insufficient to push more than a few people over the threshold. That doesn't mean we should skew the incentives even more toward couch surfing and away from work than we already do.
Unfortunately for all involved, the poor are people too and to decide to make their lives as uncomfortable as possible in order to force them to get a job is maybe logical but certainly not a kindhearted thing to do.
Furthermore, it is likely that in many cases the very poor don't work because they are unable to -- mental illness is a commonly cited factor, but these days it's hard for anyone to get work -- particularly those lacking high school degrees, for instance. If someone cannot work for such a reason, then by attempting to punish them for not working you simply reduce their already-slim ability to contribute to society.
The flaw in your analysis, and your linked article, is following the fallacy of Homo Economicus, which is
"an arbitrary definition of man, as a being who inevitably does that by which he may obtain the greatest amount of necessaries, conveniences, and luxuries, with the smallest quantity of labour and physical self-denial with which they can be obtained."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homo_economicus
In reality, humans rich and poor alike have many considerations of equal or greater importance than their utility function. For example, people not work full-time because they are in school, because they are practicing an art or craft, because they are taking care of family, because they have a wealthy benefactor, because they are employed in an illegal trade like drugs or prostitution, or because they are trying to break into a difficult industry like film.
Please go learn what a utility function is before claiming it doesn't apply. Everything you described is simply a part of a person's utility function.
If you wish to claim that the poor disproportionately prefer to gain other things than wealth (e.g., they prefer hobbies/long shots over work which might earn them $0-30k), you are agreeing with me.
You've implied that you believe the number of poor people not working is so high because we skew their motivation toward "couch surfing" through aid programs. I am arguing that many are in fact "working" on something besides a full-time job, and would not be convinced to adopt another lifestyle by minor disincentives in welfare. Aid to the poor is a social program, not an economic widget, and surveying the number of people in the program who are actively seeking self-sufficiency is an utterly worthless metric of its efficacy.
We seem to be in agreement. The poor don't work because they don't need to work in order to consume and instead prefer to engage in other (non-work) activities.
We also seem to agree that "a lack of dignity [or other minor disincentive] is probably insufficient to push more than a few people over the threshold [towards work]" (as I said a few posts up).
I'm always glad when I can convince others (including others with whom I share different values) of the correctness of my pet hypothesis. It suggests I'm on the right track.
That link makes the unfounded assumption that the poor choose to be poor. If you assume that the poor choose to be poor, then it is easy to see that there are situations in which it's rational to choose to try to live off welfare. From that perspective it makes perfect sense to want to make the lives of poor people even more miserable so they'll choose to stop being so poor...
Also, don't forget that Clinton ended welfare as we know it, resulting in fixed periods of welfare anyway. It also resulted in some evils, like single mothers working 6 hours a day (with their kids in a daycare) making less money and spending less time raising their children.
I think the final line (heavily edited) "it is rational not to work as long as work opportunities pay less than $30k/year" is what we should focus on: let's try to make their work opportunities better through extra services (maybe mandatory without a waiver of disability or insanity) that give training and education.
That is an interesting link; but it will probably catch a lot of flack.
I believe that instead of making poverty "unpleasant", we should structure the reward system so that it drives the poor towards self-reliance using positive rewards. For example: right now, if a mother is not working, she gets support for childcare. But the moment she starts working, her support dries up, so it becomes an economic disincentive to find work. So the rewards should be graded in such a manner that they don't disappear; it should be a continuous function, whose gradient points to self-reliance. So for the same single mother in my example, for every dollar she earns, her childcare benefit would go down by, say, 10 cents. She would still get 90% of the benefit of her labor.
I'm sure if we put our minds to it, we can come up with a system that works.
Unfortunately, a lot of the current stakeholders (in addressing these issues) have a lot to gain by maintaining the status quo; they'd be out of a job if there was no poverty....
Sounds similar to the 65+ year-olds out in the rural US where I grew up that complain about big government while defending their Medicare payments, sometimes in adjacent sentences.
Yup, there is a limited budget and if things get bad enough in a state they will even limit them to only people who have disabilities. It's rare but has happened.
Then there is the craziness that you are immediately ineligible for foodstamps the very day you get a job, regardless if you do not get a paycheck for a couple more weeks.
You get so much per month - based on your income and fixed expenses. In my state, income must be below $1500/mo period, and then there is a secret formula that says f(income, expenses) = food stamp amount. Every six months they ask if your situation has changed.
The money has to come from somewhere. Food stamps purchase real goods, and the government pays the stores for them. So, like the money they are a mostly direct proxy for, they are limited in number.
