Why is welfare bad

Today, the fixation on dependency and its consequences is no less acute. Following a new directive by the Trump administration, Kentucky, Arkansas, and 14 other US states have announced or introduced work requirements as a condition of eligibility for Medicaid public health insurance for the poor. But the idea that government assistance drives dependency is not unique to any country, even if all countries face unique challenges in providing safety nets for the poor.

Moreover, beliefs about dependency are not just common among the rich; one often hears similar complaints from the very people whom social programs are meant to help.

It is thus little wonder that such beliefs would translate into policy. Using the World Values Survey, my colleagues and I have assessed how much people attribute poverty to laziness, as opposed to social and economic unfairness, and how it relates to beliefs on redistribution. We find that the more people attribute poverty to a lack of willpower, the less generous the transfer system in their country will be.

So, beliefs about dependency can have real and tangible implications for the poor and the protections they need. But what if those beliefs are wrong? For example, far from creating dependency, it is possible that welfare programs actually give people the necessary tools to achieve financial independence, provided that the assistance is dependable rather than sporadic and temporary. In that case, the provision of government assistance over an extended period of time could yield high social and economic returns, not least by allowing low-income families to make longer-term investments for the future.

The more people attribute poverty to a lack of willpower, the less generous the transfer system in their country will be. The program was implemented in randomly selected sub-districts, which were compared to a control group of sub-districts that did not have the program.

Moreover, the program was directed at families, which were encouraged to use the benefits to invest in their children. Only households with children or a pregnant woman could enroll, and a portion of the stipend was made conditional on fulfilling various health- and education-related obligations, such as basic immunization and the completion of at least nine years of school.

As in many countries, these conditions are hard to enforce in practice, so many households received full payments despite non-compliance.

One important feature of PKH is that it did not merely provide a few weeks or months of assistance between jobs or in the case of a financial shock. Nevertheless, even with income from other family members and from government programs, non-working leavers have considerably lower income than they did when they were on welfare.

Consequently, leaving welfare has been particularly disadvantageous for these women and their children. The existence of such a group shows that there is great diversity in the experiences of welfare leavers, for while some have fared reasonably well, others have not. Not surprisingly, employment rates of less educated leavers are considerably below those of more educated leavers, and poverty rates are higher, as are the employment and poverty rates of those leavers who are in relatively poor health.

Random assignment studies of time-limited pre welfare reforms show some evidence that welfare reform results in a larger fraction of families ending up with below average incomes. The presence of a group of women who have left welfare and are not doing well is consistent with broader trend studies indicating that the poorest single mother families have experienced declines in income in the post-reform period.

As noted previously, women who were once welfare recipients and have left welfare are not the only ones affected by welfare reform. Some women have chosen not to apply for welfare subsequent to reform, possibly discouraged by the work requirements and other new mandates that come with being on welfare, and possibly encouraged enough by the good economy to stay off welfare and work.

Other women have applied for welfare but have been rejected. Over twenty states have formal diversion programs, which encourage women through financial inducements and other means to not come onto the welfare rolls. More than thirty states have either diversion policies or have imposed work requirements that must be fulfilled prior to eligibility for benefits. The decline in the number of women joining the TANF rolls has been very large in the post-reform era.

In some states, the decline in entry onto welfare has been more important quantitatively than the increase in exit rates in accounting for the caseload decline. This finding casts a different light on the caseload decline and demonstrates that there is an important group of women other than leavers whose employment, earnings, and income should be of interest to policymakers.

Unfortunately, no studies have been conducted to date that examine this group, so their employment status and well-being remains unknown. However, the studies which have showed large post-reform increases in employment rates of single mothers as a whole, and which necessarily combine both those who have left welfare and those who have not come onto the rolls, strongly suggest that employment rates of women who choose not to enter the welfare system are high. The overall picture of employment among single mothers in the wake of welfare reform is a favorable one, indicating widespread work among former welfare recipients and among low-income single mothers as a whole.

With this accomplishment a given, reauthorization should focus on policies that address the remaining problems. There are two major problems that deserve attention. One is the broad issue of how to improve the income gains of women who have left welfare for work.

Income gains are too modest for too many families, with earnings gains insufficient to counter reductions in benefits and with poverty rates-though lower than for families staying on welfare-remaining high.

Aside from the need to increase the income of former welfare families for its own sake, income gains from leaving welfare will be necessary, in the long term, to provide financial incentives for women to leave welfare for work. While sanctions and work requirements can continue to be used to push women into the work force, they will operate much more successfully if the financial incentives operate in the same direction.

More supports for working families in the form of increased child care assistance, assistance with transportation, and other work-related services can substantially increase the incentive to work.

Moving more women from part-time work to full-time work would be another direction to pursue, but this approach has limits if adequate child care and transportation are not available. Major improvements beyond this are likely to come only from increased earnings. This calls for expanding policies aimed at job retention, skills enhancement, and job training. States are only now beginning to think about these types of policies and have a long way to go before such policies are widespread and have a major impact on incomes.

The second major issue is how to develop policies to assist families that have special difficulties in establishing employment. One important result of the studies reviewed here is that many of these families are found not to be on TANF or on any other major welfare program. Rather, they are already on their own, off welfare, and have very low incomes. Any set of services that is directed mainly to TANF recipients alone on the presumption that the most disadvantaged families are still on the rolls, will not reach these families.

This fact requires a major expansion of assistance to the non-TANF population. Some states, notably Wisconsin, have made such an expansion a major goal, but most states are far from having penetrated this population deeply with services and programs. UBI will replace all other benefits.

The elderly, retired, and the disabled would perish. Plus the fact, creating dependency in adults kills pride. UBI will only up the crime rate. Welfare does not pay no where near enough to enable laziness. The entire welfare system and the American citizenry have become just as diseased, selfish, and corrupt as their own goddamned government. Want to talk about the national debt then start looking at corporate welfare and out of control government spending sucking off big business.

Americans, have long been robbed of their very own tax dollars, by their very own government but the citizenry is too blinded by its own goddamned demagoguery addictions to see, or care just as long as none of it goes to help the poor.

Great points! You see the entire reality. I brought the book. My Vision: No poor and no crime among us. Capitalism has been good. But it is not good enough! We keeping stuffing rich people with money. Just ask a rich person. When the scarcity principle is used within a monetary system then the human instinct is brought down to the primal instinct for survival, the scarcity principle needs to be removed from a monetary system too create a more civilised system. There is no real need for money to have any inbuilt value other than being the lubricant that helps monetary bubbles to keep flowing in a circular fashion.

Digital money should be unlimited in its creation, we should have access to money as and when needed to pay our bills and for anything we need it for, this abundance of money would change the way humans think because there would be no reason to try to amass or horde money anymore as it would be on tap so to speak.

A monetary system without scarcity would mean inflation would become non existent as why would one need to put prices up if money was on tap. If we are to have a monetary system then it needs to evolve so we can better utilise it for human evolution to a truly civilised level for all life. We may initially be a little crazy on having the abundance of money because we are so conditioned for scarcity but I think our priorities would change as we got use to the abundance of money and new generations would not know the scarcity we had.

Maybe this could be the bridge to a resource based economy as when we realise that all the things we do could be done for free then we truly evolve.

Someone else will have to provide for you. That is the nuclear and extended family. If you can work, then there should be work available … anything, whether it is private sector or government. Nobody gets by for free.

Even during the great depression, families stuck together and eeked out a living. I do believe in hiring the poor for jobs that we need performed in the areas of great need like healthcare, childcare, schools and police, firefighters, EMTs, public transit, etc. Instead of giving people money and benefits, our government could hire and train these people for these jobs that go unfilled, require a term of service, and then they can take their experience and training on to other things, or remain in their communities in that field.

The only people who should have public housing and other benefits without working are the elderly and completely disabled and their caregivers. Moving people into independence through a career is a solution everyone can support. This will be a hybrid face to face and online event. The main face-to-face event will take place in Brisbane. Call for papers: Abstracts — words due by Friday 4 February ; please click here for more information. A Basic Income is a periodic cash payment unconditionally delivered to all on an individual basis, without means-test or work requirement.

Read more. To propose a news item, please click here. Email address:. About Guest Contributor Guest has written articles. The researchers found that the typical young person exposed to the program for seven years ultimately completed three more years of education and was 37 percent more likely to be employed. They also earned higher hourly wages. This finding has direct implications for the United States, where a core mission of the Republican Party is to reduce government aid to the poor , on the assumption that it makes them lazy.

This attitude is supported by many conservative economists , who argue that government benefits implicitly reward poverty and thus encourage families to remain poor—the idea being that some adults might reject certain jobs or longer work hours because doing so would eliminate their eligibility for programs like Medicaid. But this concern has little basis in reality. In research based in Canada and the U.