Campaign Issues :: Solutions 2016 :: Welfare

http://political-rehabilitation.blogspot.com
http://work2gather.us
21 JULY 2016 - about 9pm PST



This post is on the Welfare chapter in the Heritage Foundation report called Solutions2016.  The purpose of their report is to encourage reforms in government and in the next election -- it is their way of trying to save America in its financial crises and, I suspect, in the lives of those who fund it.  Below is the statement used in the report to define what Welfare is ::

Today, the federal government operates roughly 80 means-tested welfare programs that provide cash, food, housing, medical care, and social services to poor and lower-income Americans.

There is no description of the programs included in the 80, or what makes them "means-tested" for funding purposes.  Later in the text there is a reference to food stamps and public housing, to cash grants (Called Aid to Families with Dependent Children when I entered the system, and changed to TANF in 1996 I think, when there was a welfare reform event.)  Personally, I don't know all of the aid programs that are available, only the ones I accessed or heard about.  I am aware of General Relief, WIC for pregnant women and their young children, several different housing programs that may even include homeless shelters, and community clinics for those who don't have regular state medical policies or need items not on the approved lists.  These may be some of the programs being referred to, but there is no way to know because nothing is said about them.

I am sure the reference to 80 programs is to say there are too many welfare (entitlement) programs available.  My concern is the details of those programs.  I would want to know the list content... the name and purpose of each "means-tested" program.  It could be they are a variety of programs that meet the needs of very different recipients, from infants to disabled veterans.  It could be one is for eye glasses, another for hearing aids, some for food, several for housing options, etc.  We know that all of the people who are in need are not cared for, so are these programs efforts to do as much as possible for as many as possible, or is a small group benefitting by all of them?  It is an important difference. 


Welfare is an important topic for me because it was the only survival resource we had as a single-parent family over the years.  If you read my blog bio, you will see that I entered the US welfare system in 1975.  I have been associated with it in some way for most of the years since...through a large variety of circumstance, but always trying to find a way out, suffering when I did try, and learning that poverty is a terrible pit that is not easy to escape. 

Solutions for "entitlement programs," in the eyes of conservative Republicans, always seems to be the same one ::  "...these people just need to work!"  (That's my paraphrase of their views, no one actually said that - to my knowledge.)  Work is good, but it isn't always a simple solution.  There are very complicated issues attached to poverty. 

To my knowledge, Welfare programs were started to help struggling families of soldiers who died in WWI or II.  In that time of our country's history, women were often housewives that had never worked outside of the home.  The children in these fatherless households were becoming juvenile delinquents and costing the government a lot more money than the costs of a Welfare program would.  I believe they wanted to help mothers stay home to care for their children as a preventive measure. 

That part of poverty hasn't changed.  Single-parent households are still troublesome.  It is still better to have one loving parent home with their children than to have them raise themselves while their parent works, or grow up in daycare settings.  Naturally, it would be better to have a nuclear family, with father and mother raising their children, but that hardly exists anymore.  As a nation, as a world, we are dealing with the effects of our family structures disintegrating.  Welfare may help people to survive, but it doesn't solve the real problems.


The cash amounts and other related benefits of Welfare have changed over the years, too.  When I entered the system, I think the benefits available were small amounts of cash primarily for housing and utilities and general living requirements, food stamps for groceries, and Medicaid for basic medical needs. 

It is hard to remember all the details now, after so many years, but I know I struggled to make it through every month.  What you may take for granted as normal, poverty households may have to do without.  You may have a washer and dryer, poverty households use a Laundromat, and that costs money, which they sometimes don't have. 

There were no funds for childcare back then.  No transportation (bus passes) help.  I remember there was sometimes a single emergency grant a year.  I believe that was for housing costs if you were being evicted because your money didn't make it that far, or utilities that were in jeopardy of being turned off because you let the bill go too long so you could get food, or school supplies, or clothes, or Christmas or something normal households could afford.  Eventually these "programs" were added to the Welfare formula.  Things like WIC didn't always exist.  Yearly utility programs for the high costs of winter didn't always exist.  It may be these are part of the "80 means-tested programs" that were referred to earlier.

In the early days, you had to report every penny you acquired by any means every month.  They had home visits to make sure you didn't have any saleable assets to provide for your own needs...that you lived where you said you lived...and that no one "extra" was living with you.  Monthly reports were required, signed to allow for fraud proceedings if needed.  If something happened to your report, there was no check to pay rent, which sometimes led to evictions, which led to no house to live in if there wasn't an emergency fund.  It was a difficult life.  Today you are encouraged to make money and don't have to report it until you reach a certain amount... your poverty rate I think.

I didn't mean to get into all this detail, but I hope it gives you some perspective on what the definition of Welfare programs are.  Today, with computers and internet access, receiving benefits from the government means you give them total access to your life, to any information that may exist about you.  You don't have a choice in this requirement if you need to survive with Welfare funds.  They will also have access to information about anyone on your application.

The problems of poverty are not easy to fit into a government form. Women alone often take men into their family's life that shouldn't be there.  Looking for help, for a whole family, for love, for security and safety, women seem to choose men that become financial burdens to them instead of helpers, or they become perpetrators of crimes against them or their children. 

This Heritage report asks for reforms that would not penalize families with a married and committed man and woman who seek help from the government.  I was always a single parent, so I don't really know all of the penalties for couples they are referring to, but I do know that part of the conversation was the difference in grants for single parents and married couples...  it caused some parents to split up so they could receive more Welfare resources to better care for their children.

This report also shares that most of the funding for poverty programs is mostly from federal taxes, and this creates a lack of accountability in State oversight of poverty programs.  Heritage Foundation believes the burdens of Welfare responsibility need to be transferred wholly to the States.  In our current way of doing taxes, this would give the federal government more money to spend elsewhere... the real motive I am sure.

In my mind, taxes are taxes, and there are too many taxes already.  Each government entity wants to raise their taxes or fees, create new ones, make "temporary" taxes that never go away, and continually expand their control of the domain they have.  The realization that the same citizens are paying all of these different taxes seems to elude their attention.  The burden that is crushing the government right now is not Welfare, it is the entire government structure and the way it has failed to consider those citizens by being more careful with the funds they had.  People who are poor have become the easiest target to blame, and a revolving legislature makes it hard to hold anyone in government accountable for the mess we now face.

I think I will end this with some comments on one of the "Facts and Figures" cited at the end of the chapter, as an example of misleading information that you really have to think about before becoming frightened by the "statistics" they share.

Today, the U.S. spends 16 times as much on welfare as it spent in the 1960s -- about four times the amount needed to pull every poor family out of poverty -- yet the federal poverty rate remains nearly unchanged.

I have made bold the main parts of this statement I want you to think about.  There are some variables that aren't defined in this statement, but it gives you the idea that spending has grown while poverty has not.  I tried to understand where this statement came from, and then I thought about population changes from 1960 to the present and I thought about the effects of inflation on the amounts being cited.  The number of programs that are funded might somehow affect Welfare spending, too.

One of the huge problems I noticed in my years of poverty, struggling to find a way to make it meet our daily needs and help us to get away from that kind of life, was the issue of inflation.  The grant amounts never rose to meet the inflation rates, so you got the same amount of dollars, but couldn't buy as much with it... year after year after year.  This is part of the pit of poverty and government programs that try to change its effects.

I was surprised that the poverty rate hasn't changed.  I am not sure how it is computed, but I assume it is a percentage.  If the population increased and the number of households in poverty increased during the same time period, would the poverty rate be the same?

One more point needs to be included here because it refers to food stamps as "one of the largest and fastest growing of the government welfare programs."  This growth in recipients of food stamps is another sign that the economy is in distress... serious financial distress. 

I keep trying to share that housing and food are critical to any interventions we make.  Housing and food will help a family to survive until they can find a way through their crisis.  People can survive without housing, but they cannot survive without food.  Hungry people do desperate things.  It would be a wiser thing for the government to build up the reserves for the food stamp program than to eliminate it. 

Help people to stay in their homes and help them to eat, then find the best solutions for the recovery of their lives.  It may save money in other ways, like public safety costs, court costs, jail costs, prison costs, medical costs, homeless costs, and more.

That is what I have learned in all my years of struggling with poverty and the government.

Solutions 2016 :: Housing

This is where I have decided to add all my comments about Solutions 2016, Heritage Foundation's report on issues for this election.  This blog post is for the chapter on Housing, pages 49-51.

I am not a government expert, so my comments are from my point of view and based on my limited experience with life and the government.  I read as much as I can, but I don't read a lot of the details of all the bills going through our governmental process, including the Dodd-Frank and some of the other government agencies referred to in this chapter. 

I hear the names Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, and FHA (Federal Housing Authority) in the news, but they are just another government reference, like the IRS and Homeland Security and the EPA (Environmental Protection Agency).  There is so much government that doesn't seem to directly affect my day-to-day life, I can't keep up with it all.  I suppose I run on the same foundation as all these government offices, "crisis mode."  When I need to know about it, I will search it out. 

This is how so many of our laws, rules, regulations, and restrictions get passed... everyone in the country is trying to survive and doesn't have time to check it all out every single day.  We are left to suffer the consequences.

Groups have formed, like the Heritage Foundation, to try to deal with this time commitment, and they are mostly funded by the wealthy because their profits are tied to these decisions.  They are also trying to survive.  This isn't just a Republican process, the Democrats have their own groups, so do other large interests.  If I had money, I would be doing the same thing.  I think you would, too.

I just want to make sure you know that my opinions are about the issues I see, and this may be a Heritage Foundation document, but it could be any other political publication -- even your daily news, in print or on the TV.  Bias is part of the information process.  We have to try to sift through all this data as best we can... and make our decisions as best we can with that information.
recent

In this chapter of Solutions 2016, there are many references to subsidy applications and government guarantees that bind the tax structure.  We have committed our tax income, or maybe I should say it has been OVER committed, and now Washington is struggling to deal with the consequences of their actions in the past.

I have some of my own opinions about the housing "bubble" we continue to struggle through, but this report says it was caused by government policies that the public sector would not have been involved in.  That may be true, but it was the banks that sold the mortgages.  (I have said elsewhere that I believe someone got the bright idea to sell mortgages like they have sold student loans, but it didn't work the way they thought it would.)  It was the banks that needed to be bailed out... the BIG banks.  A lot of small banks were left to die.

I had to wonder in those days why the banks didn't just work with the homeowners... flex with the crisis... give them more time at the same interest level, or make it better.  Banks had a choice, in my view, to help their homeowners survive their financial struggles so the banks would not have to suffer theirs.  People who had been successfully making their payments suddenly were hit by outrageous interest on their home loans... it didn't have to end in foreclosure, but it did.  Someone profited by this whole crisis... which speaks more to our moral issues than our financial difficulties.

It may have been impossible for the banks to flex with the situation because of regulations about lending, I don't know.  This is one of the things in my "have no idea" files.  I did think that the selling of these loans made the real people in those homes into just a line on a computer printout.  It is easier to force legal rights on people you don't know personally, people who are just a piece of paper.  If they change anything, I think they should change the ability of any financial institution to pass on their loan agreements to anyone.  The ones who make the loans would need to service the loans they make, building their relationship and history with them, and being able to flex when necessary.  I think that would create better decisions and less failure and loss for everyone.

Another issue I see in the conservative viewpoint is with government regulation of business activities, which they seem to think is "intrusion."  If we were all moral individuals and ran our activities in a moral fashion, there wouldn't be a need for laws governing them.  Too much regulation is a hindrance to accomplishing business goals, which includes jobs and profits.  Sometimes these efforts to make the world a better place have a different motivation... to get rid of the competition, to make it easier for them, to control their part of the universe... etc... you get the idea.  In my small efforts to start a business on my own, from a poverty background, I have found the expenses to be very difficult.

When I was living in Hollywood in the early 1980's, some of the people who lived in the neighborhood tried to support themselves by making and selling food to their neighbors.  I imagine that is how they survived in their home countries, and I doubt the health department existed there.  It was wonderful.  I thought it was like the early cart vendors on the corners of busy locations.  They were doing their best to provide for their families in their circumstances.  Not bad people out to poison anyone, just starting from nothing and trying to build a new life.  We have become too regulated when every action to improve one's life is tied to some form of tax income so the government can have a piece of it.

Conservatives hate government housing programs because the people who live in them are just a line on a computer printout.  They have no meaning to them, so they are seen as blights on the taxes they want for their own purposes.  I don't like to live in subsidized housing either... but it is all I have access to at my income level.

I have personally experienced years of housing struggles, with evictions and homelessness, in projects and in programs... they all have their problems and those who benefit by the government's funding to create them.  I call them "planned poverty" because you have to be poor when you sign up, you have to stay poor to qualify when (years later) you finally get contacted, and you have to stay poor (or commit fraud) to keep living in them to remain in the same neighborhood, schools, jobs, and more.  I don't consider subsidized housing to be a good choice for spending tax dollars to "eradicate poverty."

With the tiny home movement, I have been advocating for home ownership for low-income families, homeless individuals and families, and disabled persons.  I have share several of my concepts in other blog posts and at Facebook.  Ownership will bring stability to anyone... and poverty households, especially those with single parents, young children, and those who seem to slip through the cracks of our country's vision for changing the world of poverty, need stability most of all.  It allows them to stay in one place, to have security, to build a life that won't be lost with the next financial crisis.  Tiny homes can be had for a very small investment, and the payments can be made affordable to those who need them.  Using the same 30% of income that subsidies require turns this housing outreach into a profitable investment.

So many options are available, but the government doesn't see them.  All their plans are based on the past models.  I think loans are an election pay-back vehicle, so there may be motives behind these choices.  I really don't know.  Maybe it is too hard to change the way the government works.  I know I had years of failed efforts in trying to do it.

The amounts listed in this chapter are enormous.  One of the ending facts stated that about 5 million people receive housing assistance at an average benefit of $8000 each.  The details are missing so it is hard to judge what the money was spent on. 

In my proposed tiny home biblical loan with a limit of $50,000 over 15 years, the payments would be less than $300 a month... which is affordable for many low-income households, but if there is a financial crisis, the government can flex with it. 

That $8000 expense per person mentioned in the Heritage report would equal over 2 years of homeownership payments, and would be income rather than an expense to the government.  I am guessing that $8000 barely makes one year of subsidized rent payments for the smallest (and usually worst living conditions) apartment in any urban setting. 

In an ownership program, the monthly payments by low-income households would be income for the government.  At the end of the repayment period there would be a small profit for the effort to change a family's life dramatically.  Multiply that small profit by the 5 million participants that go with the $8000 estimate and you have more money to invest in poverty housing. 

This seems like a better idea than budget battles every year to increase tax allocations for poverty housing efforts, with nothing to show for the investment at the end of the year or when a problem rises up to send a family back into the homeless cycle again and again and again....

Subsidies or income, recycled poverty or stability, which do you think are better ideas?