Express lane Discrimination?

[buckyb88]

<--------- Never seen a food stamp

[NT!]

z28,

i will have to look around for the best info for you, i have seen some studies, but there is a lot of slanted info out there on both sides.

in general, welfare recidivism has been lowered by TANF, which was clinton's 'end to welfare as we know it.' federal welfare is now limited to five years, and usually comes with a work requirement of one type or another. this reform is still new enough that results are sketchy, but needless to say a lot of people in my profession are not thrilled with it.

some of their complaints are legit, some others i can't really say one way or the other. one thing that IS a legit complaint about welfare to work programs (which TANF usually incorporates) is that they don't actually give people useful experience to get them into the workforce, and in some cases are pretty exploitative.

a good example of this is the WEP program in NYC. a lot of the welfare recipients in this program would get city jobs, like in the parks department, etc, but they wouldn't get paid the same wages as the city employees. (working for the city is a relatively decent gig for a low-skilled worker - mostly union jobs, good benefits, good pay scales). the WEP participants get minimum wage for their work, and they are usually discouraged from using the experience in their references - it isn't considered a 'real job.' however, they are expected to do the same work, keep the same hours, follow all the same rules - but they get as little as half the pay, they have no union reps or recourse if there is a problem on the job, and they don't get things like uniforms or sick days.

in short, if the program is designed to prepare people for the work force or give them a leg up, it doesn't. if it's designed to undermine the unions in the city departments or keep costs down, it does. you can quite reasonably disagree in principle with the stated premise of the program, but you can't dispute that it fails laughably at accomplishing what the pols say it does.

in terms of welfare as a disincentive to work, yes it does behave that way at times, and it is a problem. but the people who it discourages from working are not those who you might think. generally, if you can get a decent full-time job, it is highly preferable to welfare. however, people who have a history of being underemployed, marginally employed, etc have a disincentive to start working part time and developing work skills, because that income may reduce eligibility for collateral public assistance programs like food stamps or housing subsidies. young, single mothers are a good example of this. however, TANF now requires people to work part time, but again, that work is fairly useless in terms of reducing unemployment and teaching job skills.

in terms of existing welfare being more attractive than full-time work, no, it's typically not. i saw a pretty good explanation of this using basic economics, indifference curves, etc, but i am still learning this material so i'm not sure i want to try and piece it back together. but basically it would take a very atypical indifference curve for those people who are currently on welfare to start working more than a few hours a week on average if you slashed all their benefits.

if i could make one recommendation about welfare it would be to do a better job of subsidizing child care, which would give people a real incentive to get more job training and start finding desirable employment. one of the biggest disincentives under the current system is that moms who go to work part-time have to pay for child care, which completely negates the benefit of working due to the high cost. people are afraid to leave their kids with neighbors or relatives, because of the perception it's so easy to get an abuse or neglect case brought against you while you are trying to go out and make a living (and, unfortunately, in some cases this is true). right now we are basically giving people just enough to keep them alive, but limiting mobility within the system through disincentives to work and poorly devised 'work training' programs that mostly end up turning people away from the labor market, or into unstable, low-wage employment.

in terms of gaming the system, public assistance isn't really where that happens. it's pretty scant, and really does mostly go to people who have few job skills and are likely to be unemployed otherwise. the popular way to try to cheat the system now is by applying for SSI or SSDI due to mental illness or other disabilities, and trying to get kids diagnosed the same way when they are old enough. this ends up being sort of a trap, though, because disability isn't usually enough to live off, and once you have those diagnoses you have to comply with all these treatment requirements that get in the way of work, and kids with these diagnoses are waaay more likely to get placed in special ed at school.

usually people who game the system this way end up losing their SSDI because they don't comply with treatment, or they end up losing their kids because they get them diagnosed with mental health problems but have no intention of treating them. in general, all the ways people have to 'game the system' end up hurting them more and more in the long run.