native wrote:blueballs wrote:
...Another thing.... ALL governmental assistance like welfare, food stamps, section 8 housing, etc. should bring with it mandatory drug testing and birth control for all recipients.
I always like hearing this argument. I understand the concept, make the regulations stricter to obtain government assistance and reduce abuse by those milking the system... but then I always think about the people who complain about wasteful government spending, who use this as their argument. How much would you be willing to allow the government to spend on drug test before you started complaining about that too? What are you going to screen for? Are you going to use urine, blood, hair? Are you going to test every month? Who's going to do the testing and will they offer a competitive contract? Testing cost aside, how much will we have to pay for the people who are administering the test? It can get pretty pricey. Do we violate civil rights by demanding that those receiving benefits also take birth control?
"You mean now I have to support those do nothing drug addicts AND pay for their birth control/drug test!"
In hard times, Americans blame the poor
Steve Raiken, 45, a former mechanic who fell on hard times and is now on welfare with his wife and two children in Gloucester City, said harsh talk against the poor "doesn't bother me a bit. I don't worry what people say. I've got enough problems."
But Raiken, who spends his days volunteering at a local food pantry, did say he believed that those who criticize welfare might not fully understand it.
Experts agree.
Welfare rolls are down around 60 percent since the mid-1990s, when welfare was switched from an entitlement to a work program that requires recipients to have jobs, said Ron Haskins, who drafted the so-called welfare-reform bill of 1996 as the Republican staff director of the U.S. House Ways and Means committee.
In Pennsylvania, enrollment in welfare (now known as Temporary Assistance to Needy Families) dropped from 486,985 in 1996 to 217,820 last December, with 75 percent of the recipients children, according to the Pennsylvania Budget and Policy Center. In New Jersey, TANF rolls fell from 91,364 in 1997 to 36,738 in 2009, state officials said. Throughout the country, around 4 million people are on welfare, government figures show.
"It's not a way of life," said Kathryn Edin, a Harvard University poverty expert who lived two years in Camden.
Despite belief to the contrary, welfare is a small payout that's difficult to attain, experts say. "You only get TANF if you're poor, poor, poor," said Linda Blanchette, deputy secretary of the Pennsylvania Department of Public Welfare. "A mother and two kids get around $403 a month. You have to work or be in job training 30 hours a week, and there's a five-year limit. Who wants this?"
There is, some say, a deep American anger toward the poor for violating the near-sacred belief that all people can pull themselves up by their bootstraps. It's connected to a notion, rooted in Puritanism, "that the poor must have done something wrong because they weren't blessed by the heavens, as the prosperous are," Blanchette said.
Michael Geer, president of the conservative Pennsylvania Family Institute in Harrisburg, doesn't disagree: "Taxpayers who have money taken from them end up with a sense of disgust with people receiving the help," he said.
Some also believe that many welfare recipients cheat.
"The myth of the Cadillac-driving welfare queen" who defrauds the system lingers even though there's no proof of it, said Erin O'Brien, a poverty expert at the University of Massachusetts, Boston.
In fact, welfare fraud among Philadelphia's 95,456 recipients is "minute," according to Peter Berson, assistant chief of the government fraud unit in the Philadelphia District Attorney's Office.
The 200 to 400 cases of welfare fraud in the city each year - down 50 percent since 2002 because of better enforcement and fewer recipients - are not nonworking women having babies to game the government, but working women receiving welfare and working at other jobs without reporting the income, Berson said.
http://www.philly.com/philly/news/homep ... ?viewAll=y" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
