You’ve gotta feel bad for the Minnesota Republican Party. Flip just 5,000 votes in the last gubernatorial election, and they’d be the ones gleefully dismantling civil society piece by piece. But no. Tom Emmer had to lose, and now Wisconsin Republicans — frickin’Wisconsin — get to be the poster children for the Republicans’ war on everyone who isn’t a multimillionaire.
Well, the Minnesota GOP may not be able to enact the kind of hateful, spite-filled legislation that’s turned Scott Walker into a national pariah, but by cracky, they’re going to at least force Mark Dayton to veto their viciousness:
Minnesota Republicans are pushing legislation that would make it a crime for people on public assistance to have more $20 in cash in their pockets any given month. This represents a change from their initial proposal, which banned them from having any money at all.
[…]
House File 171 would make it so that families on MFIP – and disabled single adults on General Assistance and Minnesota Supplemental Aid – could not have their cash grants in cash or put into a checking account. Rather, they could only use a state-issued debit card at special terminals in certain businesses that are set up to accept the card.
And of course, I’m sure those business would be able to enroll for free. And I’m sure that there’d be no kind of gaming the system to steer these funds to businesses that gave money to the right people. Of course this wouldn’t be a gateway to massive corruption.
But far more offensive than the fact that this would set things up nicely for those lucky, GOP-connected businesses who got in on the ground floor is the assertion that all those poor people are using their public assistance on booze and cigarettes.
First off, what if they are? I know, this shows I’m just a crazy socialist, but I really don’t care if a poor person takes their meager assistance and buys a beer or a smoke with it. Is it purely necessary for survival? Folks, very little in our lives is “purely necessary” for survival. But seriously, have we reached a point where we get angry if the poor have even the slightest moment of relaxation?
Yes. Of course we have. Silly of me to ask.
Second, is there any evidence of the massive fraud that the GOP alleges? As usual, no, there isn’t.
And third, and most important — what does it benefit us to keep those on public assistance from having cash? Leave aside the corruption angle. As Freakout Nation points out, this would effectively bar those on assistance from using public transportation. Which would kind of make it difficult for them to, you know, find a job or get an education or do anything but walk to the government-sanctioned poor person store on the corner, which charges 350% more than Target, but you can’t use your debit card at Target, now, can you?
Aid to the most desperately needy in our society doesn’t just benefit them. The money they spend on food and shelter (and yes, the occasional candy bar or cigarette) helps to support businesses. That money then can be used by businesses to expand their operations, to hire new employees, and to help people get off of assistance.
Yes, there’s a point at which a safety net becomes too comfortable. But the Minnesota GOP is now looking to make the safety net a noose, strangling those who dare to use it. Again and again, it’s a class war — with the rich attacking everyone else. I’m just glad, as ever, that we elected Mark Dayton.
In addition to further ghettoizing the poor by restricting their consumer choices to certain locations, this sounds like a bureaucratic (and expensive) nightmare to implement and enforce.
This seems, too, to discourage things you’d think that you’d want to encourage — like working little side jobs and being financially productive when you can. When I was out of work, a friend of mine paid me $100 to reorganize her kitchen. I fixed computers for people in my building for $50 or so each. I did things to make a little money, here and there. Every single time I got paid in cash, I would be breaking the law?
You have to wonder why nobody said “Guys, this is a PR disaster” somewhere down the line.
Also, it would take a genuine fraudster all of five minutes to get around this. Cash? Oh no, Officer, all I have is this here gift card.
@Mythago-
Or, you know, put the bills anywhere but your wallet.
As is typical of scary-sounding analyses from partisan bloggers, the bill does not do the things that it is listed as doing.
The actual bill summary is here.
The bill does not ban aid recipients from having more than $20 in their pockets; it says they can only draw $20 of their benefit in cash in a given month.
The bill does not restrict them to using “special” terminals at only a few businesses; the debit cards are just ordinary debit cards (accepted just fine at Target, by the way). There are restrictions placed on certain kinds of businesses (liquor stores, casinos, tattoo parlors) that those businesses have to set up their debit terminals not to accept the benefit program’s cards.
The bill does not make it impossible for folks to pay their bills or take public transportation. Utilities accept debit cards for payment, and public transportation authorities will sell you a bus pass with a debit card.
Wouldn’t it just be easier to round them up and kill them?
Are there no workhouses? Are there no prisons?
What are these people doing walking around free?
Is that all? That seems perfectly reasonable. They’re poor, after all, and clearly don’t know anything about money. If we allowed them to have cash, they’d just lose it all to hucksters or spend it on frivolities. We’re just looking after their best interests.
I have to say it blew me away when we could get unemployment only on a debit card through a bank we don’t bank with. What kind of cushy deal is that?
ETA: For the bank, I mean.
There is absolutely nothing stopping you from getting together with a group of like-minded people, pooling your contributions, and sending cash to whomever you want.
There is absolutely nothing stopping you from getting together with a group of like-minded people, pooling your contributions, and sending cash to whomever you want.
I thought that was what I was doing when I paid taxes. What do governments exist for except to provide for the basic safety and welfare of their citizens?
Welfare is in fact sold to us as something that is absolutely necessary for survival. When we propose scaling back the welfare state, the left raises the spectre of people dying in the streets. Many, if not most, people who are willing to sacrifice their hard-earned money to prevent the poor from starving to death would not be so willing to make that personal sacrifice in order to subsidize consumption of beer and cigarettes.
To sell welfare as something that’s necessary to keep the poor alive, and then look the other way when the money is spent on frivolities is outright fraud.
Now, to be fair, I don’t actually know how much that happens. For all I know, this is rare and politicans just want to be seen doing something, which is the root cause of quite a bit of legislation. I’m just responding to your assertion that it would be A-okay if it did happen a lot.
Of course not. The poor can relax all they want. It’s none of my business what they do in their free time. But what they do with my money is my business.
The government of Minnesota is doing that. They aren’t doing that in the exact format you might prefer, with their own tax money, but boo hoo – they were voted in by people who presumably knew way they’d broadly administer the state’s programs. If you’re unhappy about that, you’re also free to move to Minnesota, start voting there, and demand that your representatives do things your way.
Failing that, the solution for people outside the state who want the state’s welfare clients to have cash, is to send them some cash. Jeff, I think, does live there and so his complaint has the added piquancy of “this isn’t how I want my government to run”; when I responded to Jeff, rather than to 6, 7, 8, 9, I limited my contribution to pointing out what he (and other liberal handwringers) had gotten wrong about what the law will do.
I suspect that this would be less efficient than unrestricted spending. Let’s say that Bob isn’t totally honest, and is on welfare, and wants to spend $8 on beer. If the laws are like Minnesota’s laws, Bob goes to Sue and says “hey, you buy me $8 worth of beer and I’ll buy you $16 worth of groceries.” Now Bob will have less money left over after his beer to spend on food for his kids.
I’d prefer a universal basic income, myself. But if we have to have strings attached to the money, I’d like them to be better designed strings.
(And no, I don’t think that my being in Oregon means I don’t get to have an opinion. It just means I don’t get to have a vote.)
Now Bob will have less money left over after his beer to spend on food for his kids.
But Sue will have more. So the irresponsible person’s children suffer, and the better parent’s children get a premium. The net social utility is zero, but the actual distribution of goods flows more highly to the person with better social values. Justice is served.
THANK YOU. I am SO SICK of that argument. I have heard people making that argument while sitting in their cushy houses sipping expensive wine and it makes me want to throw things.
Once you pay your taxes, it’s not your money anymore. I can’t believe our society is so petty that the wealthy can’t grant the poor ownership even of the little money we set aside specifically for them.
Also, in terms of welfare being necessary for survival, even if one believes that the sole purpose of welfare is to keep people from dying (as opposed to allowing them to live with some semblance of dignity) something must be said for psychological health. Obviously things like cigarettes are bad for you (but, you know what? Sometimes I use scant resources to buy things that are bad for me, and poor people happen to own their own bodies, so I don’t care if they use “my money” to buy a pack of cigarettes), but to say that no welfare should ever be spent on “frivolities” not only sends us down an absurdist path of privileged people dictating what’s frivolous (“You may only buy Kotex maxi pads! OB tampons are frivolous! You may buy coffee, but no sugar! Actually, nix the coffee! FRIVOLOUS! So say I!”), but can also be more damaging to a person’s psyche and well-being than just allowing them to make their own decisions.
Here’s a challenge to everyone who wants complete control over what poor people spend their money on: spend one month living only on what’s absolutely necessary for survival. Cut out all the “frivolities.” Then, once you show me your receipts, I’ll take you seriously when you claim the right to meddle in other people’s lives – unless I consider something you’ve bought to be unnecessary for survival, in which case I’ll have to ask you to start over again.
Until I see those receipts, though, I can’t really take people seriously when they claim that they know what the poor should spend their money on better than the poor do.
so I don’t care if they use “my money” to buy a pack of cigarettes
OK. Send them some of your money.
Of all the preposterous assumptions of humanity over humanity, nothing exceeds most of the criticisms made on the habits of the poor by the well-housed, well-warmed, and well-fed.-Herman Melville
Yeah, “poor people should use their welfare money for food and living expenses instead of smokes, booze, and cool tats” – crazy fuckin’ talk, that.
what they do with my money is my business.
Oh god.
But we couldn’t put any restrictions on what the banks or auto companies did with our money after we gave it to them in bailouts because if we didn’t let them pay their executives huge bonuses, the sky would fall and we’d turn in to Soviet Russia and they’d take their baseball gloves and go home and god knows what else.
JUST PICK AN ARGUMENT, PLEASE.
Or admit that it’s emotionally satisfying to have someone weaker than yourself to criticize and pick on.
Not crazy. Just spiteful, mean, and cruel.
“Buy your kids food, instead of hitting the racetrack” is spiteful, mean and cruel. Check.
Well Elusis welfare for the rich=a social necessity. Welfare for the poor=drunks with tats who smell like ashtrays.
Because everyone knows rich people spend their money on morally approved things while the poor waste theirs on booze and drugs and body mods. I’d let Charlie Sheen or Rush Limbaugh explain it but they’re out on a bender right now.
Robert,
Yeah considering that that phrase contains a lot of ignorant assumptions.
Elusis, I didn’t think the banks or car companies should have gotten dime one. I think they should have been hung out to dry and their executives should be sleeping in the street right now.
So I’ve “picked an argument”. It goes like this:
Be responsible for your own life. If you find yourself unable to do that, and end up needing government charity to survive – and I have, personally, been there – then suck it up and expect that you might not get the freedom to go blow the wad at the craps table, and might have people engaging in the fascist cruelty of expecting you to take your welfare money and spend it on survival instead of fun. Oh, the humanity!
And if you’re a gazillion dollar company, I don’t give a flying fuck if you survive or not. If you fail in the marketplace, then die a well-deserved (corporate) death so that less incompetent people can pick up your wreckage and try to use the resources more effectively than your fuckbrained stupidity managed to do.
ZERO dollars for corporate welfare. Some dollars for personal welfare, for people who really need it to survive – and they can spend it on surviving, thank you, not tattoos, drugs, and gambling.
Consistent enough for ya?
Re: Bob and Sue. We don’t know if Sue is a parent, so we don’t actually know that money has been transfered to a more responsible parent — and in any case, since a major purpose of welfare is to assist Bob’s kids (that’s why parents get more welfare than non-parents), saying “screw Bob’s kids, transfer the taxpayer money to someone else who may or may not be a better parent, and might not need taxpayer money at all” isn’t a very satisfying answer.
The truth is, you can’t control how Bob spends the money down to the level of “he must not buy a beer.” If Bob wants a beer, he’ll buy a beer; the question is if he pays ordinary rates for the beer, or pays “buy me a beer, I’ll buy you double in food” rates. Bottom line: The rules don’t cause Bob to not spend “our” money on beer; they cause him to spend twice as much of “our” money on beer. How is that better?
I don’t think strings should be attached to the money. But if you must have the nanny-state strings I know Republicans are so fond of, at least design them halfway intelligently. For instance, welfare checks could be higher for parents whose kids have good school attendance records (given those parents whose kids have bad attendance records an extra incentive to make sure their kids go to school every day). The state’s interest in Bob’s kids going to school is a lot greater than the state’s interest in making sure Bob spends twice as much on beer.
* * *
Finally, “Buy your kids food, instead of hitting the racetrack” is a false choice; it’s quite possible for a responsible parent to both feed their kids and, every now and then, go to the racetrack (or to a movie, for that matter; or drink a beer now and then).
Elusis:
What Robert said. Libertarians were pretty much universally opposed to the corporate bailouts. What made you think I wasn’t? Tu quoque isn’t really a valid argument when it’s true, but it’s not even true in this case. Do you always just automatically assume that anyone who disagrees with you must be a hypocrite?
Some questions:
1. Aren’t there already laws to hold individuals accountable for misusing the welfare money they receive?
2. Is there any real evidence that such an overwhelming number of poor people are indeed spending the money they receive in such a way that we could characterize it as a sufficient waste of taxpayer money even to begin to think that these kinds of laws are justified?
“Buy your kids food, instead of hitting the racetrack,”* is a principle that it’s easy for a liberal to support. And I admire programs (well-designed ones, as Amp noticed) that encourage everyone, not just those on social welfare, to spend their money for socially optimal purposes.
But if you’re going to hold, broadly, with Hayek, then I think you need to accept his argument that the reason economic freedom is so desirable is because it lets us sacrifice the least important thing to us first. Since money is fungible, when we suffer a decrease of it, we can distribute that decrease in our own life so that we feel the least pain; this is the central benefit of economic freedom.
If that’s so, then your arguments aim to eliminate the most(?) vital freedom of the poor because they need social assistance. Which, again, is a tenable position–but a bit of a sickening one, at least from where I stand.
*Does not, of course, encapsulate this proposal, even the more limited version you’ve outlined. There are plenty of legitimate uses for cash in amounts $20 (an example is provided below), and the law does NOT penalize misuse of welfare money, but rather, keeping substantial volumes of it in cash.
As for legitimate uses of more than $20, cash–suppose that one goes into labor prematurely, and has to grab a cab to the hospital. Cab fares can easily go above $20, and not all cabs in all cities in Minnesota will take debit cards.
Re: Bob and Sue. We don’t know if Sue is a parent, so we don’t actually know that money has been transfered to a more responsible parent — and in any case, since a major purpose of welfare is to assist Bob’s kids (that’s why parents get more welfare than non-parents), saying “screw Bob’s kids, transfer the taxpayer money to someone else who may or may not be a better parent, and might not need taxpayer money at all” isn’t a very satisfying answer.
Hmm. But it’s the transaction that Bob wants to make. Isn’t the point of this thread that we should honor the choices that folks on welfare want to make?
Bottom line: The rules don’t cause Bob to not spend “our” money on beer; they cause him to spend twice as much of “our” money on beer. How is that better?
You’re leaving out part of the transaction. The rules cause Bob to spend “our” money on beer, plus groceries for someone else. How is that worse?
For instance, welfare checks could be higher for parents whose kids have good school attendance records (given those parents whose kids have bad attendance records an extra incentive to make sure their kids go to school every day).
Someone bring this man an honorary set of stocks! We’ll make a Republican of you yet. But you need to phrase it in purely punitive terms – LESS welfare money for kids with BAD records.
Finally, “Buy your kids food, instead of hitting the racetrack” is a false choice; it’s quite possible for a responsible parent to both feed their kids and, every now and then, go to the racetrack (or to a movie, for that matter; or drink a beer now and then).
Sure. I imagine the state welfare rolls are just chock-brim full of responsible parents able to scrupulously provide for their families while hanging on to enough surplus income to drop some on the ponies.
“Sure. I imagine the state welfare rolls are just chock-brim full of responsible parents able to scrupulously provide for their families while hanging on to enough surplus income to drop some on the ponies.”
Careful, your implicit attitude vis a vis the poor is showing.
Which is to ask, do you believe that the irresponsible represent the majority of the poor, moreso than the well-off? This is normally assumed to be the case. But I don’t see how penury, where irresponsibility can be the difference between life and death, is a worse teacher of responsibility than luxury, where error is forgiven.
1. Aren’t there already laws to hold individuals accountable for misusing the welfare money they receive?
Dunno. Probably. This law isn’t about that; from what I can tell from perusing the summary document, it’s about requiring the ATM machines at “bad” businesses to be reconfigured not to accept the welfare debit cards, and restricting the ability of recipients from taking cash off their cards.
2. Is there any real evidence that such an overwhelming number of poor people are indeed spending the money they receive in such a way that we could characterize it as a sufficient waste of taxpayer money even to begin to think that these kinds of laws are justified?
The answer to the first part of your question is “probably not”, because for some weird reason it’s hard to find evidence that people are using *cash* inappropriately.
The answer to the second part of your question is “yes”, because these laws do not need any particular level of irresponsible spending to be “justified”. He who pays the piper calls the tune; he does not have to first lay out the evidentiary basis for why he picked Mahler over Bach.
@29 – If every liberal I argued with started citing Hayek, I could die a happy man. So thanks for that.
The key thing to remember here is that we aren’t talking about the economic freedom of the person spending the money, we’re talking about the economic freedom of the person whose money it is. They aren’t the same person in this case. We should be optimizing the utility of the taxpayer, not of the tax consumer. And – though it isn’t my personal choice, or my state – in Minnesota apparently the taxpayer’s utility is best served to asking that the tax consumer spend the credit they’ve been issued in trackable ways, and not at the track.
If a parent’s resources are so thin that going to the track will take away from the kids’ necessities, then no, it’s not possible for a responsible parent to feed the kids and go to the track.
Well, as dying happy is the only reasonable ambition,* I’d be kinda a toolbag to not assist you in that aim.
“the person whose money it is.”
I don’t buy it. Money, when transferred, becomes the money of the recipient. That’s the case in sales. It’s the case in taxes, where your money becomes government money, only yours inasmuch as you participate in the social organism. That’s the case in tax rebates, where once you cash the check, the government’s money is your money. That’s the case in social security, where once my great-aunt cashes her check, it’s hers. It becomes part of her household economic decisions, freely made. I cannot imagine why social welfare should be any different.
Once we’ve spent the government’s money (i.e., our money, under the aegis of a particular collective agent), it is gone. We can examine the second-order effects of our spending, just as we can with all purchases, and decide to adjust our spending accordingly in the future. If we discovered that most welfare recipients spent their money on something abhorrent, we could reduce the amount spent in welfare. Perhaps even in a targeted fashion, by making those who make a certain sort of purchase ineligible for welfare in the future.**
Your model, however, misleads us. It encourages us to think of government money, already disbursed, already in a fellow citizen’s pocket, as still “our money.” Of course this understanding leads to busybodyism, nanny-state rules, and poor policy! It tricks us into thinking that our head peeks out of the poor’s pocket, surveying their daily life and passing judgement on their business, when that’s simply not the case.
* To quote Sophocles, Oedipus Rex: “So while we wait to see that final day,/we cannot call a mortal being happy/before he’s passed beyond life free from pain.”
**I’d consider this morally tenable but unjustifiably draconian, barring extreme cases. There’d also have to be substantive discovery requirements to provide real process.
Which is to ask, do you believe that the irresponsible represent the majority of the poor, moreso than the well-off? This is normally assumed to be the case. But I don’t see how penury, where irresponsibility can be the difference between life and death, is a worse teacher of responsibility than luxury, where error is forgiven.
The relative proportion does not matter. The well-off are not at issue; if you’d like to have a discussion of the well-off, let’s do that, but here-and-now we’re talking about those so poor as to be on welfare, or general disability.
And the answer is again, I don’t really know. However, my thinking is that someone who wants to spend money on gambling and liquor and tattoos, while simultaneously needing money from the state to feed their children, is very unlikely to be the type of prodigiously-gifted resource manager who can be supporting a family on a few hundred dollars a month and still be able to responsibly drink, smoke, and gamble.
I cannot imagine why social welfare should be any different.
The thinking is, because it is largely to people who are broadly considered irresponsible, if not incompetent.
Theoretically, you are correct. Practically, the willingness of people to pay taxes to support welfare is contingent on that welfare being used appropriately, in the view of the people paying the taxes.
If it were up to me, welfare payments would be a cash grant with no strings attached. But the size of those payments, in a society where taxpayers get to vote, would likely be smaller than they currently are – which is already pretty darn small. The technocrats managing the state welfare programs believe that the social utility they can provide will be higher if there are strings on the money, because the willingness of the taxpayers to provide the money will be higher. I think this is probably correct.
Would you rather have $300/month that you have to spend on food and utilities, or $100/month that you can spend however you like?
And welfare queens driving cadillacs! Not to mention bootstraps. Bootstraps, people!
Seriously, though, show me evidence that this is a large enough problem that we need to seriously impinge on the economic freedom and the dignity of the vanishingly small population of social welfare recipients who meet your requirements of how to spend their money and this will be a conversation worth having.
Until then it’s just listening to you tell us how morally bankrupt and what scamming leeches the poor are.
I’m responding to questions posed, Jake. If you don’t want the answer, don’t pose the question.
If you’d prefer, I’d be delighted to go back to comment 5, and discuss how this site and the other lefty sites pushing this story are seriously misrepresenting the bill. But nobody seems to want to engage on that one.
@35, Robert, 8:30 AM (Wall of text, look out for the bolded TL;DR if you want to skim.)
Robert, I’m a bit perplexed. Am I arguing with positions you personally hold, or are you seeking to represent the views of those who voted for this law? You seem to disagree with most of it, including the retrograde view of the poor you outlined above. It’s tricky to discuss or debate with someone when the distinctions between the positions they’re defending personally and the positions they’re explicating is unclear.
That said, I’ll strive to muddle through.
The thinking is, because it is largely to people who are broadly considered irresponsible, if not incompetent.
But we’ve agreed that this thinking is not particularly justified. Whoever supports this law taking as a necessary basis the idea that the poor are incompetent does not have sufficient grounds for the law.
Theoretically, you are correct.
Glad to hear it! Weren’t we having a discussion specifically about theory, though?
Practically, the willingness of people to pay taxes to support welfare is contingent on that welfare being used appropriately, in the view of the people paying the taxes.
Not as a universal rule. That’s a pretty strongly American experience; other nations are substantially less judgmental about how such funds are spent. However, I’m not arguing generally about the willingness of the state, or the Republican party, to write morally acceptable social welfare laws. I accept that it may be impossible to get laws I consider morally acceptable passed. Right now, I’m simply seeking to define and defend what I believe those laws should be.
in a society where taxpayers get to vote
This is an aside, but do you believe that the current society is NOT one where taxpayers get to vote? Because I assure you, 1) yes they do, and 2) the richer you are, the more likely the government is to change its policy in response to your concerns.
would likely be smaller than they currently are
Sure. It’s the old refrain: society will not meet my standards of moral conduct. I’m not trying to argue that I’m electable today. I’m trying to argue what the policy should be.
Thus, the final question of your comment supposes we’ve been having a rather different discussion than I thought we were.
TL;DR:
Listen, I know what I’ve written won’t persuade someone with real contempt for the poor. Of course not. But I’m not talking to the Minnesotan legislature. I’m talking to you, and I’m arguing that this law is morally unacceptable on your grounds because it represents an unnecessary interference with the economic freedom of those on social welfare. Are you persuaded by my contention (you, personally)? If not, why not?
As for 34:
None of those contentions seem particularly unreasonable, though you didn’t address my claim that actually, poverty should teach brilliant budgeting in a way that wealth can’t. (C.f. your Great Depression-surviving relatives.) However, the tone of your comment seemed to connect it to a variety of toxic attitudes about the poor, and I was wondering to what extent, consciously or unconsciously, you subscribed to those attitudes. It seems not much; glad to hear it.
I’m arguing that this law is morally unacceptable on your grounds because it represents an unnecessary interference with the economic freedom of those on social welfare. Are you persuaded by my contention (you, personally)? If not, why not?
I’m not persuaded. Forced taxation for the purpose of providing social welfare is a greater moral wrong than interference with economic freedom, in the system of morality that you’re espousing here. You’re telling me I don’t get to spend my money for my own direct benefit at all; you’re telling him he can only spend “his” money for his own direct benefit in certain ways. The system is beating me up, then slapping him a couple times.
Now in actuality I don’t mind forced taxation for providing social welfare (much); if I was designing Bobtopia from the ground up it would be different but I’m not doing that. *YET*. So having acceded to one economic-liberty harm, I am unmoved that a lesser harm may subsequently be done. We’ve already opened the lid of the no-economic-interference Pandorian box; working the hinges back and forth a little bit more is unproblematic.
you didn’t address my claim that actually, poverty should teach brilliant budgeting in a way that wealth can’t
Because it’s irrelevant, as well as undermining of the general case for welfare that I presume you would make. Fine, the poor are all genius budgeters. Guess we can cut their benefit, then!
Robert, you’re so privileged you’ll probably never even see it. You don’t know shit about about being poor, nor the conditions that bring about poverty. And you’ve been thoroughly suckered by propaganda about poor folks. And go ahead and have a fit over those comments: I don’t care.
I’ve been poor. Been on welfare. Gotten off of welfare. Have worked in multiple jobs with people on welfare. All here in Minnesota. I have watched the welfare laws change again and again. Getting more and more restrictive over the past dozen years or so.
You want realities, buddy? All the law changes in the world of this kind won’t mean shit in the end. The small percentage of fraud that happened in the past will continue. But in the end, it’s tiny in comparison to the amount of money handed to corporations who instantly redistribute whatever is given to them straight to the top. And I always seem to be running into libertarian types who claim to be equally against corporate welfare and individual/family welfare, but spend 80% of their energy tearing poor folks a new asshole, and blaming the “welfare state” for all of society’s ills.
And maybe you hadn’t noticed that more and more formerly middle class folks have landed in the DWP/MFIP system in recent years. And some aren’t leaving terribly fast either, despite having good work records in the past. Plenty of ageism going on amongst the older set of that crowd. Being 55 and out of work blows.
The benefits people receive often don’t cover basic needs at this point as it is. You didn’t receive enough to cover both rent and food expenses? Well, you sell off (illegally) some of your food stamps at a higher price. You screwed up when you were 18 years old and now can’t get a job because of your criminal record? Well, you go into “underground” work. You lost your job, got sick, couldn’t pay the hospital bills, and now are faced with trying to stretch the measly dollars you get from the state to deal with regular expenses + the reduced (i.e. on a payment schedule) medical bills? Well, maybe you get depressed and booze out for awhile. Or you default on everything until you’re homeless.
And let’s consider those working with folks on welfare – the support net. MFIP job counselors often have 200-500+ cases to address in a given month. Meetings are mostly about paperwork. You ever seen a monthly MFIP form? When was the last time you went to the bathroom? (The questions are almost that detailed.) You think they asked the MN Twins any of that shit, over and over again, before agreeing to make taxpayers pay for that ball stadium?
You name the large corporation in this state, and I’m sure I or anyone else here could locate the local, state, or federal subsidy given to it to help it become successful. Without taxpayer money, none of them would have broke over the small business hump and into the big time. Target, Cargill, General Mills, Lawson Software, Medtronic – not a one has made it totally on it’s own.
Nor has any of us. Not a single one of us has earned our living “on our own.” Everyone benefits from taxpayer-funded roads, fire departments, police, etc. Everyone’s job, from the CEO to the janitor, is dependent on the work of all the others in their company or organization.
After all these years of interaction, I’m not even sure I think a welfare system is the best answer. But until we come up with a better way, it’s what we have.
So, go ahead and live in your libertarian “I did it all myself and so should you” fantasy. And when the floor falls out from under you, or someone that you love, good luck with holding that story together.
What seems to be the fundamental argument here is whether or not we should tie people’s rights of self-determination to how much money they have. In which case, the answer should already be obvious, since the courts have already ruled that the amount of campaign donations are protected as free speech. So people who have more money have more free speech than the rest of us, therefore people who have more money clearly have more rights in general than the rest of us.
@ nathan, yes, exactly. Basic necessities like soap, shampoo, tampons or pads, clothes, shoes, and transportation to and from work are never covered. When my family was on welfare, we had a hell of a time figuring out how to get those things, and this was in the early ’90s before all of the “welfare reform”.
Nathan – I have been poor. Working poor, unworking poor, on short-term disability poor, and on Medicaid poor. So – try again. Also, nice try with transforming “people need to be responsible” into “I did everything on my own without a whit of assistance and so should everyone else” – but no sale. I said what I said, not what you heard in your head.
Waxghost – How does requiring that the casino not allow me to use my welfare card there undermine my right of self-determination?
As already detailed, who gets to decide what is right or wrong to do with one’s money? What if a poor person is feeling particularly upset one day, goes to play the penny slots because it will give her a temporary reprieve from the crushing mediocrity of her everyday life, and ends up winning a million dollars? Why would you want to deprive her of that? More importantly, why would you want to deprive her of the few minutes of reprieve from the crushing mediocrity of her life?
What if said person instead was trying to get a job at that casino? She’s taken a bus out there and it took her 2 hours to get there. She has to wait for the manager to show up, which she didn’t anticipate, and by the time he does, it’s been a couple more hours. By the time the interview is done, she is very hungry, but the only place that’s not a significant walk or bus ride away to eat is at the casino itself. (None of the casinos where I live are within a reasonable distance of any eating establishment). She would have brought a peanut butter sandwich if she had known it was going to take this long, but she isn’t psychic. Should she just starve because she has made the horrible, horrible (according to you) mistake of being on welfare?
Better yet, what if I was in charge, you were on welfare, and I decided that it was wrong for you to have your own car rather than using public transportation? What if, continuing this imagining, you lived in a rural area where there was no public transportation available? Or the only public transportation available ran from 9 to 5 during the week, 10 to 2 on Saturdays, and not at all on Sundays, but the only jobs that you could find required you to work late and/or on the weekends? In other words, if you can see past your ideology for 2 seconds, you will realize that there is a real world out here with real world problems, that not everyone is like you, and that real complications may arise for a significant number of people because you arbitrarily decided they didn’t need X.
You may say that these scenarios won’t happen to a significant number of welfare recipients, and for these specific scenarios you might be right. But being on welfare is not a walk in the park; it is a constant, never-ending attempt to scrape the tiniest bit of survival out of your existence. It is being the last scavenger to the already-picked-clean bones. And what you are suggesting is an added burden on these poor people, which amounts to telling them exactly how and when they are allowed to crack open those bones to try to get a little marrow, no matter how hungry they might be.
As already detailed, who gets to decide what is right or wrong to do with one’s money?
In the case of welfare funds provided by a compassionate state so that people won’t starve, the compassionate state.
What if a poor person is feeling particularly upset one day, goes to play the penny slots because it will give her a temporary reprieve from the crushing mediocrity of her everyday life, and ends up winning a million dollars? Why would you want to deprive her of that?
Because for every million-dollar winner, there are a million non-winners who just spent the last $5 in their account on the slots instead of buying milk and bread for the kids. And the million-dollar-winner’s desire for gusto for the marrow of life is not why her fellow citizens contribute the tax money they earned by working for a living, to her subsistence.
Given the choice, it’s a safe bet that Bob would prefer to buy a beer with cash, at ordinary store price, rather than buy a beer through trading food away at twice the store price.
It’s worse because Sue may not be poor enough to qualify for welfare, and may not have kids. If “bang” is described as “groceries going to the households of poor people with kids,” and waste is defined as “money spent on beer,” the government gets more bang and less waste for its buck by giving Bob cash.
My grandfather used to take me to the track. Horses are cool and fun to watch, and it’s free admission. Add in five bucks for two hot dogs, and it’s still a much cheaper outing than a baseball game or a movie theater.
I have friends who are supported by welfare. They’re not irresponsible; they’re taking jobs (which have been either transient or part-time, and thus don’t add up to full-time family wages), applying for better jobs, and getting training and certifications so they can get better jobs in the future. Their kids are fed, clothed, educated, and seem happy and healthy.
And yeah, sometimes they have a beer. Sometimes they play bingo (a form of gambling). It’s extraordinarily snobbish to assume that this must make them irresponsible, incapable parents.
Finally, are you — or the Republicans doing “the thinking” you describe, perhaps — unaware we’re currently having the longest period of sustained high unemployment since the depression? That’s not because the people who are now unemployed abruptly became much more incompetent and irresponsible; it’s that the economy is creating many fewer jobs than it used to.
(*Although “incompetent and irresponsible” is a pretty good description of both Wall Street and the Bush Administration’s economic policies.)
The state is not “compassionate” when it is not dealing with the realities of people’s everyday lives. And compassionate is not, “Here’s 5 bucks, now let me decide what you can and can’t do with your life.”
But you don’t know which one(s) might win, so who are you to deprive them of the possibility? And would it then be better for our casino-goer to decided to kill herself than to spend any money to take care of her own psychological health?
@Amp:
Times are indeed rough. I expect we’ll see more unlucky people joining the welfare rolls.
Do you really think “damnit, people on welfare need beer and tattoos too!” is the political line likely to shore up ebbing public support for welfare?
Good to hear your welfare-receiving friends are working their way out of it. Since they do have cash jobs in addition to their benefit, then they’ll have no trouble paying for their beer and betting out of that cash income, saving the taxpayer’s contribution for the things it was meant for.
@Waxghost:
But you don’t know which one(s) might win, so who are you to deprive them of the possibility?
Seriously? This is your argument? The answer is “I’m the person paying for them to play the game, and I choose not to pay for that.”
I suspect that anyone who is going to kill themselves because they can’t play the slots because of the mean old state, is probably not someone we’re going to reach with policy.
You’ve been ignoring all of my real arguments all along so I thought I’d throw something out there to amuse myself at least.
Waxghost – Robert dismissed about everything I said as well. But I was also pretty snarky, so perhaps I should have expected as much.
But being an armchair critic with zero comprehensive alternative answers to complex situations like poverty is the easiest job on the planet.
The only real argument you’ve made has been that poor people should have a right to self-determination. I quite agree with that. I just don’t see how telling tattoo parlors they can’t take welfare money from the poor person, undermines the poor person’s self-determination. Self-determination means making your own choices with your life; it doesn’t create an obligation on the part of other people to fund those choices.
@ nathan, yeah, when you actually give a crap about the real people behind a political issue, it can be hard not to get snarky.
another detail- being able to buy a bus pass with your debit card isn’t always as useful as being able to pay cash for individual fares- public transit systems vary, but in the ones I’m familiar with, anyway, a bus pass is for unlimited rides for a month for a single user, so if you don’t use it at least, say 20 days out of the month, the math works out cheaper to pay for each trip individually. So sure, taking time out of your life to go buy a bus pass each month at the limited number of locations that will accept the debit card might work ok for someone commuting regularly to a full-time job, but there are others for whom it wouldn’t work. Ex: maybe I’m a mom and have a monthly bus pass for myself, but I can’t get a babysitter for my kids (because that would cost more than I can spare out of my $20 cash for the month) so I need to take them with me grocery shopping on the weekend. So I need cash to pay the kids’ fares (some bus systems let kids under a certain age ride free, but not all). There are plenty of details like that where putting excessive limitations on people’s lives is going to make their lives really really hard.
Waxghost and Nathan, an expectation of this blog is that people will disagree while minimizing and personal attacks as much as possible. I understand (and feel) the temptation, but in this blog, “attack the argument, not the person” is the usual rule. (There are a zillion blogs and forums out there with different rules, of course, and that’s fine).
Regarding the uses of cash, one thing that I immediately wondered about was baby-sitting — without which it can be hard or impossible to do things like attend college or apply for jobs. Babysitters take cash, not ATMs. There are child-minding services which take credit card — but they charge a whole lot more than babysitters do.
Now that is an argument whose force I can see, Amp.
Robert @52, but isn’t that self-correcting behavior? If you spend your grocery check on a tattoo, you go hungry until next month.
Sorry about the delay, I was busy during the day.
So having acceded to one economic-liberty harm, I am unmoved that a lesser harm may subsequently be done.
I absolutely cannot see where you’re coming from on this.
Since I don’t have the same views on economic liberty that you do, I apply the analogy of civil liberties. From my perspective, civil liberties are important intrinsic rights in and of themselves, though it may occasionally be morally permissible to pass laws restricting them with forcible enough justifications.* This seems reasonably analogous to how you consider economic liberty
However, no law restricting a civil liberty creates an implicit justification for another law restricting it, even if the former restriction is far broader, or more intrusive, than latter. Instead, each must be justified on its own, because each is an independent violation of an important right. The slippery slope argument is no more a permissible justification than a permissible counterargument.
*c.f. laws that restrict the proliferation of nuclear secrets.
Because it’s irrelevant, as well as undermining of the general case for welfare that I presume you would make.
I frankly confess that it is not directly related to the point I made above. I was pushing back against the idea that the poor are profligate, which is a common underlying assumption behind punitive and draconian social welfare policy.
The idea that the poor have bad money management skills** is directly tied to the notion that people are poor due to personal failings. This in turn is tied to the notion that people who are poor deserve their condition, and thus don’t deserve welfare. Which is kin to the language about personal responsibility of which you’re so fond.
So I was making the wrong argument there, I admit. I was simply trying to be contrary, to demonstrate that it is possible*** to draw conclusions about the financial aptitude of the poor opposite that which is commonly drawn.
I really should have been frank in saying that I don’t believe it matters whether the poor have good or bad budgeting skills. I don’t see why a discussion of the poor’s budgeting abilities constitutes a response to Amp’s claim that it is acceptable for poor people to want to spend public money on enjoyment.
**which may well be the case for many! I’m not arguing that. I’m arguing the implicit assumption.
*** and I think I was explicit that I was entertaining a hypothetical.
Ok, I know this is a bit silly, but the “c.f.” found above should really be an “e.g.” Please pardon the error.
It never ceases to amaze me that conservatives are enormous fans of the Nanny State when it comes to poor people’s lives and everybody’s sex lives.
Sorry about the delay, I was busy during the day.
Filling in your brackets? ;)
I absolutely cannot see where you’re coming from on this.
Since I don’t have the same views on economic liberty that you do, I apply the analogy of civil liberties.
OK. Your argument makes more sense bearing that in mind.
But like civil liberties, the optimum solution comes from avoiding the violation in the first place. Don’t violate anyone’s liberty, refrain from collecting taxes for social welfare – and let social welfare be a product of individual charity. Now NEITHER party has their rights violated by an impermissible interference in their freedom of choice.
It never ceases to amaze me that conservatives are enormous fans of the Nanny State when it comes to poor people’s lives and everybody’s sex lives.
I could care less what other people do with their lives, sex or otherwise, when they’re using their own resources. Once they start having taxes collected and expended on their behalf, my interest becomes quickened.
If you are living in your own house and buying your own groceries, you can spend every day sleeping on the couch, smoking weed, and playing COD for all I care. Not my problem.
If you’re sleeping on my couch and eating in my pantry, you’d better be up every morning by the time I am, and looking for a job.
That’s not me being freakishly interested in your life, that’s me expecting someone living off my charity to act the way I think they ought to act. Uncomfortable? Fascistic? Unreasonable? Maybe so. Easy remedy – move out.
But like civil liberties, the optimum solution comes from avoiding the violation in the first place. Don’t violate anyone’s liberty, refrain from collecting taxes for social welfare – and let social welfare be a product of individual charity.
Sure, that’s a consistent (though wrongheaded) position. But I feel like you’re ducking and weaving here, Robert. You didn’t begin this argument by contending that the welfare state as such is impermissible. In fact, you wrote that “[s]ome dollars for personal welfare” is part of your overall position.
I’ve been responding to that position. My argument is that 1) assuming welfare and 2) holding a strong view of economic liberties, the proposed law* is unacceptable. This is because the law entails a violation of economic liberties for the recipients of welfare, and the prior violation implicit in the welfare state in no way justifies subsequent violations. I don’t think you’ve responded to that yet, and your latest post simply hops back to challenge 1.
So, takeaway questions:
1) Do you retract your earlier statement that you support a welfare state, financed by taxation?
2) If not, in what way do the violations of economic liberty entailed by the system automatically justify later violations of economic liberty to those within the system?
3) If they do not, then what grounds are sufficient for the violations of economic liberty entailed in the law? Have they been met?
*Yeah, I backtracked the link and it does seem to be about cash withdrawals of welfare funds rather than cash possession generally, and the hyperbolic reporting appears to be the quoting of one advocate’s testimony without making it clear that it’s the opinion of a particular person. I still oppose the law as I understand it, though.
1) In a perfect world, where I get to define all the policies and set up the government the way I want? Yes, I recant! In the existing world, with compromise and people who disagree with me? No.
2) Equality of treatment. If the taxpayers can get fucked, then the tax recipients can get fucked too.
3) I already replied to RJN with “what justification do you need” – none at all. Charity – whether state-administered or straight heart-to-heart – can impose whatever conditions it wants.
“You cannot spend any money at the track and if you do I will throw you in jail” is a violation of economic liberty. “You cannot spend any of the money I am giving you for food and rent at the track” is not.
“Of all the preposterous assumptions of humanity over humanity, nothing exceeds most of the criticisms made on the habits of the poor by the well housed, well warmed, and well fed.” Herman Melville.
Nevertheless….
While I don’t mean to dismiss Waxghost and Nathan’s thoughtful insights about Robert’s personal qualities – a rich subject in its own right – I largely share Robert’s views on this topic. While the proposed policy in Minnesota may fail to reflect the need people have for cash transactions, I don’t object in principle to the idea that social welfare dollars come with strings attached.
What duty do we, as a society, have to provide people with money? I don’t know that I see any duty per se, except perhaps for the duty not to discriminate unduly.
What motivates governments to create social safety nets? Two ideas:
1. Insurance. I want assurance that, even if my life goes to hell, I’ll be able to get food and shelter and the most basic things that I value.
2. Guilt avoidance. I want assurance that, even if your life goes to hell, you’ll be able to get food and shelter and the most basic things that *I* value.
At least since Aristotle’s Poetics there has been a view that empathy derives from projecting yourself into another person’s shoes. That is, empathy is not love of the other; it’s love of yourself, projected onto the other. Thus I feel inclined to do unto others as I would have them do unto me – NOT as others would have me do unto them.
Thus we have social safety net programs that are vastly more complicated than just, “Here’s your cash.” The programs are designed to promote all kinds of interests that are often completely unrelated to the preferences of the recipients. To cite one example, do you know how much Health and Human Services spends on food stamps each year? Nothing – food stamps (or whatever they’re calling it now) is a program of the Department of Agriculture, designed to promote the interests of the ag industry in creating markets for food. And the ag industry has no interest in subsidizing tattoos and casinos.
There have been various proposals for creating a guaranteed minimum income. And some libertarian guy (name?) has written a book proposing to eliminate our various social programs and simply give each person an annual lump-sum payment. There’s been much literature on the subject that people will be better able to maximize their own welfare if they can make their own decisions about how to use the money being spent on their behalf.
Nevertheless, I find you starving in my gutter because you opted to blow your entire government allotment at the tracks, then I will not have achieved my goal No. 2: Guilt avoidance. Thus, I’m not all that enthusiastic about giving out money, no strings attached. Ultimately, I want this money to achieve MY goal of assuaging my guilt about poor people not being cared for. You can pursue your own goals on your own dime.
One side note: Social welfare programs generally have income cut-offs or phase-outs. As your income increases, the amount of benefit you get from government decreases – often on a dollar-for-dollar basis. This results in a dynamic whereby the highest marginal tax rates in America are faced not by millionaires, but by people receiving public assistance. Remember this the next time you read an editorial from the Wall Street Journal. (Or spare yourself the time and effort: forget this, but just avoid reading editorials from the Wall Street Journal.)
Oh, that bit about marginal tax rates reminds me of the element of this bill that all the blogging I’ve seen completely ignores:
the bill also removes all EBT fees from the welfare debit cards – makes them fee-free. A relatively minor point to you and me, perhaps, but when you’re getting $200 a month or whatever, a $2 fee is a blow.
1) In a perfect world, where I get to define all the policies and set up the government the way I want? Yes, I recant! In the existing world, with compromise and people who disagree with me? No.
2) Equality of treatment. If the taxpayers can get fucked, then the tax recipients can get fucked too.
3) I already replied to RJN with “what justification do you need” – none at all. Charity – whether state-administered or straight heart-to-heart – can impose whatever conditions it wants.
1) So which metric are you using when you discuss this law? Seriously, that’s a frank question.
2) “Equality of treatment” is no justification for rights violations. Just because an NSA guy is prohibited from talking about his job doesn’t make it permissible to prohibit everyone from talking about their job as well.
3) But, again, (and I think we’ve begun to go in circles) it’s a violation of the individual liberty of the recipients. For example, it would be utterly immoral for the state to require that welfare recipients attend church. Or be white. You can’t simply attach arbitrary requirements to state-sponsored charity. They need some justification.
1. Existing world.
2. Yes it is. If the state can fuck Jane for a good reason, it can fuck Joe for a good reason.
3. You can’t attach constitutionally or morally objectionable requirements to state charity (as racial or religious tests would be objectionable). Any functional requirements (“no spending money on booze”) are perfectly fine, and they do not require any justification beyond passing Constitutional muster and not pissing off the taxpayer.
I just thought of an analogy that might be helpful. American citizens have the right to free speech, the right to free association, etc. Yet, American soldiers are starkly limited in their access to those rights. This is completely unobjectionable. By signing up for the military, civilians give up a bunch of rights. Yet we do not worry that citizen-soldiers are having their individual liberties violated, and if the citizen-soldier is unable to bear this burden, they have a relatively quick and easy remedy: quit.
Welfare recipients who find restrictions on their spending of welfare $ an unbearable burden have a quick and easy remedy: stop taking the aid.
Having sat down and thought about it, I think I can understand your argument better with the analogy of freedom of contract. (Correct me if at any point I go off the rails.) You’d argue that any contract freely agreed to is moral, right? (Except, of course, contracts to kill and such.) Then, the state’s offer of welfare constitutes a sort of contract: in exchange for nothing at all, qualified people can receive money, and any arbitrary restriction on that receipt is permissible.
Is that right?
If so, does this scheme leave room to evaluate certain contracts as “douchey?” For example, if your grandmother, whose perfume you despise, will only give you birthday presents if you hug her for ten minutes, that arrangement would be obnoxious, though freely entered into. It’d be a reasonable position to say that she shouldn’t impose those requirements on your present, even if you’re entitled to refuse.
I think your contract analogy is right on, although I’d say there are some implicit restrictions; it’s actually a contract more along the lines of “in exchange for you trying to better your situation, taking care of your children, not committing crimes of violence, etc., we will give you $X which you can spend on p, d, q.”
And yes, I think you can consider the contract as douchey as you want, and can advocate quite reasonably “hey this contract should be less douchey!”
Amp – I jumped a bit over the line. I’m not one to get into personal attacks; I apologize to Robert for the snark.
All I can say to Robert and the others who share his views on here is this:
You’ve pointed out the misuses of tax payer money that can occur when it’s handed out to poor people. And you all seem quite convinced that these misuses are commonplace and must be addressed in a rigorous legislative fashion.
When will you also go into detail about all the ways that tax payer money is misused by wealthy people? When will you detail all the “gambling” that occurs amongst corporate leaders who get government subsides? How about the mostly hidden drug use amongst high end corporate executives whose companies are getting tax breaks? Where’s talk about all the alcoholics just barely functioning in their leadership roles? When will you call for detailed invasions into these people’s lives in order to make sure they aren’t wasting taxpayer money?
Because frankly, I can’t recall in all my years of reading political analysis and commentaries the kind of parsing out of rich people’s lives, and how they spend money given to their companies or organizations, in the way that is regularly done to poor folks.
I’m all for people being responsible, and not wasting our collective money and resources. But this discussion is like so many others – completely lopsided.
Every last behavior of a person in poverty is somehow indicative of how they might use government given monies. Whereas, no one says shit about the behavior of the CEO and leadership team of the company or organization that was given millions in tax cuts and subsidies unless their actions are so illegal that they can’t be ignored anymore.
Nathan –
See @25. I have no brief for corporate welfare; cut them all off at the knees and laugh when they try to walk on the stumps, is my motto. Well, one of my mottos. If we must have corporate welfare (I have seen exactly zero compelling arguments for it) then by all means let’s start putting in drug tests for CEOs and strict controls on what they do with the money etc.
I quite agree that attention on the awful moral deficiencies of the poor is very often used as a smokescreen to take attention away from the awful moral deficiencies of the rich and powerful.
Soooo … is the deal that welfare recipients ought not be allowed to use it to pay their rent?
Because 1) I know I can’t do that with a debit card, 2) it’s one of the largest chunks of my expenses, 3) a fixed expense, unlike food and utilities, and 3) unlike utilities, it’s an expense I’m unable to blow off for a month.
I mean, am I missing something? Can this money be used for rent?
—Myca
From a moral perspective Robert’s position is certainly defensible, though not the only correct one.
But from a practical position it fails, because it assigns error in a manner that will not be efficient.
For sake of argument and to make Robert happy (for a moment), I’ll call them “steal” and “starve” error instead of type 1 and 2:
If you give money to someone who uses it for an unacceptable purpose (like gambling or buying beer) then that’s “steal” error; they have stolen Robert’s money to buy beer. Oops.
But if your rules mean that someone who would otherwise use money properly FAILS to get/use/access/find/be able to spend it (all of which are the same, from their perspective,) that’s “starve” error. Robert’s rules have caused them to starve. And that means not only that someone is starving, but that the entire point of the charitable program has been made useless. DOUBLE oops!
So: In most systems (and I have no reason to believe this one is so different) the two types of error are at least somewhat traded off…. as long as you’re not too close to the margins. When you approach the margins (in this case, by trying to get “steal” error close to zero) it means you have to implement a very strict decision matrix.
And…. at THAT point, you find that making a small step results in a very unequal tradeoff. Costs of each step increase almost exponentially, and the other error goes way up. You can get the theft error down from 20% to 17% without being nasty and strict and making starve error go through the roof. But trying to move from 5% to 2% is going to cost you. A lot.
That’s where we are now. It’s not that this program is necessarily immoral. No, it’s that the program is stupid. It’s stupid because it’s going to increase “starve” error much more than it’s going to decrease “steal” error. We’ve already got very low “steal” and comparatively high “starve” errors as it is; we’re obviously approaching the margins. And the stupidity is compounded by the fact that starving is WORSE than stealing; physically, morally and economically and socially.
I agree that it’s perfectly reasonable–in theory–to impose restrictions on charitable funds. But it’s not reasonable to be stupid about the practical means you select. When the applied costs of the restrictions start gutting the reason for the charitable program, it’s time to reassess.
Myca – I believe that in Minnesota welfare recipients are generally qualified for housing assistance programs and aren’t expected to pay the rent using welfare money. (The amounts given are so small that it’s hard to see how they would.)
G&W – that’s another fair criticism.
Nathan:
This is because there’s nobody saying that corporate welfare is awesome, and that we should have more of it, and that corporations should be able to spend it however they want. When people criticize corporate welfare, the argument is almost invariably that we should cut it off entirely, not that we should more closely monitor how it’s spent.
I promise, though, if Jeff ever writes a post railing against right-wingers trying to restrict businessmen’s right to spend their corporate welfare checks on unfair-trade coke and non-union sex workers, I’ll be there to call him on it.
“This is because there’s nobody saying that corporate welfare is awesome, and that we should have more of it, and that corporations should be able to spend it however they want.”
Hmm, you’re kidding right?
I agree with you that most criticism of corporate welfare is of the cut it off entirely variety.
However, I think it’s quite easy to find folks saying corporate welfare is “awesome.” Almost every handout is tied to the “jobs, jobs, jobs” mantra. And plenty of people buy that, even when said company has failed in the past to actually spin a subsidy or tax cut into reliable, sustainable employment.
Perhaps I’m missing something in your statement?
I’d also agree with gin and whiskey in that there is a lot of “stupid” in our current welfare system. The time (and thus tax money) spent on redundant paperwork alone – paperwork that doesn’t aid people in getting jobs, training, or schooling – is astounding.
It’s getting frustrating how many times a good discussion in which we could have debated better alternatives gets derailed into “everyone has to correct/discuss what Robert/RonF have to say.” I don’t mean disrespect to either Robert or RonF; it’s just this – it’s a liberal blog. I come here for a liberal slant, and while a little debate is nice, smashing our heads on the same brick wall isn’t really beneficial for either side. Perhaps I’m alone in this, but it has caused me to stop reading as much as before.
I realize this isn’t as on-topic as I would like and I apologize. I didn’t see an open thread and I feel like this one is especially heavy with, “Let’s all respond to Robert” vibes.
Robert was right that the original post wasn’t as accurate as it should have been; I think it’s valuable to have right-wingers around to point stuff like that out.
It would be easy enough to moderate out all the right-wingers, but I don’t want that. OTOH, moderating to just a certain level of right-wingy-ness is NOT easy to do.
Brandon @75: Well, nobody *here* is. Certainly corporations are, or at least their advocates; I heard a recent interview with the head of the US Chamber of Commerce about his reaction to Obama’s reaching out to CEOs, and his comment was that while obviously they were very far apart they completely agreed with Obama on the need to improve infrastructure.
You know. To spend tax money on systems that corporations use instead of having to directly pay for them.
I do wonder how all the poor people who are not allowed to spend assistance money on cigarettes are supposed to magically quit smoking. I mean, I assume there isn’t also a huge assistance program providing them with nicotine patches and counseling. From what I’ve seen, it’s pretty hard to quit smoking even when you don’t also have the stress of being poor.
Ledasmom – the same way they are supposed to quit drugs and get jobs, by exercising sheer force of will that middle and upper income people don’t have to have thanks to their ability to access treatment programs and career counseling/advanced training, even after which many of them still remain addicted/un- or under-employed.
In a word: BOOTSTRAPS.
Mythago:
Initial response: People on welfare think welfare is great. Story at eleven.
Considered response: Depends on what they mean by “infrastructure.” Pretty much everyone except those crazy libertarians agrees that government should be responsible for building certain kinds of infrastructure like roads and sewers. If they’re talking about infrastructure that facilitates commerce generally (e.g., highways), I don’t think it’s reasonable to call that corporate welfare.
Ledasmom:
Not being able to obtain the cash to buy cigarettes seems like it would be helpful.
Brandon Berg @83: Don’t be silly! That isn’t welfare. That’s using our public resources wisely to encourage American business and create jobs.
I thought it was those crazy libertarians who were also in favor of a laissez-faire, free-market, pro-business economy. One would think that they would also be in favor of businesses handling their own intellectual-property protection, prosecution of employees who steal things, and other functions that benefit businesses. Can’t the private sector do all that better and cheaper?
Re cigarettes, seriously, don’t be an ass. Maybe we should also limit poor people to 1200 calories a day so they don’t get fat.
One would think that [libertarians] would also be in favor of businesses handling their own intellectual-property protection, prosecution of employees who steal things, and other functions that benefit businesses.
If you actually think this, you are revealing a deep ignorance of what libertarians believe. Perhaps you should do some reading.
This isn’t the site for Libertarian 101, but here’s the course catalog description: While there is considerable variation in the theoretical underpinnings of the various schools of libertarian thought, libertarians broadly believe in a free-market economy with as little governmental management as is compatible with the continued stability and existence of social order. They strongly believe in a government limited to a set of enumerated powers, rather than in a government with a general grant to promote the good as it sees fit. The principle legitimate role for the state is in the prevention, detection, and punishment of the use of force or fraud by or against members of the polity: essentially, the military or militia, the police and courts, and the establishment of weights and measures.
Protection of property (of whatever type) is one of the core functions of government that nearly all libertarians will accept as legitimate.
While the headline is inflammatory and has some curb appeal (those darn GOP jerks), the actual bill is somewhat more common-sense than Scrooge. MN issues electronic debit cards to low income welfare recipients to purchase food. The cards are debit cards to be used for food, only. Not cash. Not tobacco products. Not alcoholic beverages. The proposed amendment to the bill would limit cash withdrawals for this card to $20 per month. This all makes a great deal of sense. And nobody gets prosecuted unless they 1) use someone else’s card to obtain cash (fraud); 2) they withdraw more than $20/month in cash using the card (again – the card is for food). Seems reasonable. Pass it on.
If we’re recommending educational courses, Robert, I’m still suggesting that you take Rhetoric 101; you’ve never managed to learn that a condescending tone is pretty poor stuff for papering over gaping logical holes in your arguments.
“Of whatever type” carefully avoids pointing out that certain things are defined as property, and protected, purely by the exercise of government power. (You know, force.) So, for example, public highways rather than privately-owned turnpikes, or patents (that’d be a government-enforced monopoly) or corporations (which are an entirely government-created entity.)
Seems to me a real libertarian would be in favor of replacing the civil courts entirely with arbitration, of selling off public roads to private companies to manage and charge for as they see fit, and eliminating patents – rather than expecting the Nanny State to take people’s money at gunpoint to pay for all that.
“Of whatever type” carefully avoids pointing out that certain things are defined as property, and protected, purely by the exercise of government power.
What things are defined as property, and protected thereby, NOT by the exercise of government power? Real estate titles? Enforced by government. Personal chattels? Enforced by government. There’s a natural-law argument to be made for a natural right of property that, in some minarchist fantasy, would require no state power to enforce because everyone would respect everyone else’s rights – but relatively few serious thinkers believe you could really order a society that way. (And the few serious thinkers aren’t, broadly, libertarians.)
You’re positing a left-statist cartoon of libertarianism and wondering why actual libertarians don’t live up to what’s “real”. Real libertarians think government is important, even vital. We just don’t want it running every aspect of people’s lives. You don’t have to think that there should be no patents to think that the government doesn’t have much business telling people what to do with their own resources.
Dianne:
No. Robert proposed that you get together with like-minded people and voluntarily contribute money to the poor. When you pay taxes you are taking money that was forcibly taken from people who may not at all be like-minded. They’re not the same thing at all. I’m rather surprised that you would compare the two.
The question – at least for the United States – was answered well over 200 years ago:
Governments exist to secure your right to life and to pursue what you think is most important without undue interference from anyone else. One would presume that includes food in your belly, clothing for your body, a roof over your head and proper provision for your children if you have any. But they said “pursue”, not “have”. It does not mean that the government will provide these things for you if you do not secure them for yourself. Now, the electorate may think that it is proper for the State to provide some minimal level of such if you do not or cannot provide such for yourself. Fine. But then it’s only reasonable to expect that the taxpayers would want to put restrictions on how you use that money, and find a way to enforce those restrictions.
Julie:
Then whose is it? The State’s? Who then is the State but us? And we have our representatives to decide and regulate how that money is spent?
Erl:
You are seriously comparing a transfer of money as the result of a sale with the transfer of money because of a tax? In a sale money is voluntarily given by one person to another person in exchange for a specific good or product that the other person is supplying to the first person. In the case of a tax the money is a) forcibly taken and b) is then used for a purpose that the person surrendering the money may not benefit from and may greatly oppose. Which is not to say that taxes are not necessary – they are. But they certainly are not comparable to sales.
Richard:
Yep. There’s also laws to hold individuals accountable for misusing guns that (unlike welfare) they have a right to. But we have decided that the consequences of misusing guns are such that we are not content to punish those who misuse them, we have established laws that regulate and restrict those rights, such as those requiring licensing, permits, background checks, etc., to attempt to prevent such misuse in the first place. What we see in this instance is that the representatives of the Minnesota electorate has decided that the consequences of misusing entitlement welfare funds are such that they want laws to prevent their misuse as well.
To various “Why aren’t you deploring how rich people misuse money?” Where it comes to tax money that has been given to them – such as the stimulus money – I did in fact oppose it. If it’s an issue of tax breaks, money that the State has never taken from them != money that the State has taken from all of us and then given to them. Which, again, doesn’t mean that certain tax breaks may not be inappropriate. But they’re not the same thing.
Also – I don’t make any presumptions about why people are poor. Heck, I was on public assistance once. I didn’t get any money, mind you – I got food. Surplus food. Butter, peanut butter, flour, corn meal, etc. I was damn glad to have it and didn’t consider that I had any entitlement to complain because it wasn’t cash that I could use to buy beer instead. I figured that the State had every right to give me whatever it wanted, or nothing at all. This is not an issue of “poor people are dumb/lazy/undeserving/irresponsible so we’ll punish them.” People end up poor for all kinds of reasons. But tax money is a limited resource. Applying controls to ensure that it’s spent in the most cost effective way is a principle that’s as applicable to poor people as it is to defense contractors.
Finally, as Robert said in #5 (and Amp, alone, acknowledged in #79) the actual contents of the bill are much different than they are represented in the original post. Jeff, have you acknowledged this? And where did you get the idea that you can’t use a debit card in Target? I use mine there often enough. You seem to have made that a general assertion, not one specific to these particular debit cards.
Poor people want to go buy a beer? Fine. You know what? If a poor guy walked up to me on the street and said “Hey, I’m just scraping by and I’m tired and need a beer” it’s 50:50 I give him $5. But that’s voluntary, and not a fit use for our taxes.
I don’t think I’ve ever known anyone who quit cigarettes due to cost. For health reasons, yes (and it took a damned long time for some of them to do it, and lots of support). Because their fiancee didn’t like smoking, yes. Because they didn’t like having tobacco be stronger than them, yes. But not because of cost. I’m sure they’re out there. But it is a very strong addiction and not one that people should be expected to quit without help.
Mythago:
If you want to go full-on anarchist and say that the prosecution of crimes should be fully privatized, I can respect that. I’m not 100% sure how well it would work, but there are valid arguments for it.
If not—if you want to say that corporations should have to pay taxes but should not have the right to use the services that those taxes pay for—then you’re just trolling, and I expect that Myca or Mandolin will be along shortly to thread-ban you.
Well, tell me something. When corporations pay taxes, where does the money come from? In the end it all comes from individuals. When corporate taxes are raised how much of the tax raise comes from the corporations’ owners and how much from their consumers?
RonF:
You know, I don’t, in principle, have any objection to the idea of putting limits on how people spend welfare money–as long as the system of limits makes some sort of logical sense. I vaguely remember, for example, when we were on food stamps when I was a kid, that we were not able to use them for items that were taxable, like toilet paper. I don’t, frankly, know what the logic behind that particular limitation was, but I am willing to accept that it had a logic to it. I don’t, however, get the reasoning behind why buying one beer is an unfit use of tax money. Because it’s a luxury? An indulgence? By that logic, should I not buy my children, ever, a candy bar or cake? Should I never buy something that my family can eat for dessert or as a snack, or a kind of food that gives me pleasure, even though it might not be the healthiest thing I could buy?
I get the fear–though I am not entirely sure it’s justified–behind people on welfare/public assistance losing control and wasting the money that they get from taxpayers, but I wonder just how far and at how micro a level you need to police their lives in order to feel safe allowing them to receive assistance.
I don’t, frankly, know what the logic behind that particular limitation was, but I am willing to accept that it had a logic to it.
Food stamps are part of the Department of Agriculture and are aimed at smoothing out and increasing demand for food products. Your welfare was a secondary consideration.
Robert @88: So, again, we’re back to the question of how limited the Nanny State should be. National defense? I would guess most libertarians agree this is an appropriate government function. But patents, which are an artificial monopoly? Roads? (Surely RoadCorp could run those better and cheaper than the government, given a profit motive.) Courts? (Okay, there’s a good argument to be made for keeping criminal courts, but why not require people with civil disputes to settle them privately, through arbitration?)
Brandon @91: I could be wrong, but I don’t think “Brandon Berg misread you” is a basis for banning around here.
“Brandon Berg’s brand new bird banned Brandy’s bald new nerd.” Try saying that ten times fast!
Robert wrote:
This accords with my limited understanding of Libertarian philosophy.
I have a fair amount of actual experience with the reality of Libertarian views on law enforcement. In my experience, they are very much in favor of it when it falls with perfect justice on other people, and very much opposed to it when it falls (always through mistake, incompetence, or rank prejudice yoked to the Power of the State) on them.
In this, they are very much like almost everyone.
Grace
Grace @97: Well, that’s just it. I don’t have a problem with a company saying “we pay our taxes and we want that to support infrastructure.” (Assuming they do, in fact, pay taxes instead of using expensive accounting firms to not pay taxes, of course.) I do have a problem with the Chamber of Commerce position that government needs to leave business alone except to subsidize it, and litigation is bad except when businesses use it.
mythago:
Various instances of RoadCorp already build and maintain a lot of your roads under contract from the Federal/State governments. The governments own the roads and collect taxes (gasoline road use taxes) and tolls to build and maintain them, but have privatized their actual construction and maintenance.
Of course, you could go like Chicago did and actually lease a toll road to a private company. The leasing company got a 99-year lease, the job of maintaining the road and all the tolls and the right to jack the tolls up 250% in the first 13 years of the lease. Chicago got a lump sum $1.82 billion. The leasing company is merrily jacking up the tolls and Chicago has already burned though most of the payment. But Daley II didn’t have to raise property taxes (he also leased out the parking meters in the city on a 75-year lease with similar terms). And, now that he’s burned through all that money and is running out of assets to sell or lease, he’s retiring from being Mayor and is taking speaking engagements at $50K a whack while Mayor-elect Rahm Emanuel tries to figure out what to do next.
When I was a cashier in a grocery store you couldn’t spend food stamps on booze, tobacco or pet food. I don’t remember if you couldn’t sue them for toilet paper or not, but then they were intended to buy food for people. They were “food stamps”, not “everything stamps”. I would think that there were other forms of assistance if you were too poor to buy toilet paper.