Posted on 11/17/2014 4:52:50 PM PST by grundle
This is what poverty sometimes looks like in America: parents here in Appalachian hill country pulling their children out of literacy classes. Moms and dads fear that if kids learn to read, they are less likely to qualify for a monthly check for having an intellectual disability.
Many people in hillside mobile homes here are poor and desperate, and a $698 monthly check per child from the Supplemental Security Income program goes a long way — and those checks continue until the child turns 18.
“The kids get taken out of the program because the parents are going to lose the check,” said Billie Oaks, who runs a literacy program here in Breathitt County, a poor part of Kentucky. “It’s heartbreaking.”
This is painful for a liberal to admit, but conservatives have a point when they suggest that America’s safety net can sometimes entangle people in a soul-crushing dependency. Our poverty programs do rescue many people, but other times they backfire.
Antipoverty programs also discourage marriage: In a means-tested program like S.S.I., a woman raising a child may receive a bigger check if she refrains from marrying that hard-working guy she likes. Yet marriage is one of the best forces to blunt poverty. In married couple households only one child in 10 grows up in poverty, while almost half do in single-mother households.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
Down South they are known as “crazy checks”.
Like Democrat politicians?
He makes some good points about how anti-poverty programs work in a way that harms children.
We’re a country that spends billions on corporate welfare but is miserly when it comes to the poor - particularly children.
And we fail to do what we can to support marriage and education - two of the strongest anti-poverty and anti-crime things that we can do.
We pay women to be single mothers and their kids grow up without a father, without a future and they wind up either perpetuating the cycle of poverty or they wind up in prison.
Our country pays for all that in the long run.
Painful to say that conservatives are right or painful to admit that liberals are wrong?
Once you are tracked as English as a Second Language (ESL) or with a reading problem, it is almost impossible to be un-tagged.
Cash follows you for being tagged that way. No Administrator is going to untag you.
But...they’re from the Government, and here to help...
Sounds like a winner, as long as they can read enough to press the button next to the “D”.
There was a comedian, who was very impressed at first when visiting my state, In particular, he was amazed at how many people were artists. He would ask them what they did for a living, and they would tell him that they “draw”.
That liberals are wrong.
Our social welfare programs are hated not because Americans aren’t concerned about the poor but because they don’t work in way that reflects American values.
They have perverse built-in disincentives that discourage people from seeking a better life.
They are in need of reform. Its not whether we can spend more money on them but rather how we can and should make work the way they should.
But as long as liberals think its only about what goes into social welfare programs and not about the results they deliver, we will never build a truly strong social welfare net in this country.
There really is money in victimhood, for everyone involved.
Yep. Crazy checks. The relatives even coach the kids so they can get the checks. Woe be unto any kid that tries to behave and do good in school. So sad.
And the bureaucracy too - and the vested forces around it which are more concerned with keeping things as they are rather than seeking to improve people’s lives.
We simply can’t spend our way out of poverty. We’ve tried that approach since the 1960s with little to show for it.
“Down South they are known as “crazy checks”.”
I have seen billboards east of here from lawyers ready and willing to “fight for you” with Social Security...in order to get a cut, of course.
I was up North in East Kentucky when I heard it reffered to as a “crazy check”. My sister says it’s very common in her 2 county area and it had the local population voting democrat until they finally figured out the democrats were the gun grabbers.
Many of those people once made their living in the coal mines. Now Obama has declared a war on coal and shut down many of those mines. The people have nothing left but dependency on the government.
A friend who taught in a 100% black school here in NJ mentioned how black parents strongly opposed having their children “tagged”; they knew it was a gimmick to write off their children while providing funds for the local “education industry”. While they may not have been the best parents, they hoped their children would get more out of school than a padded room with coloring books...
“Painful to say that conservatives are right or painful to admit that liberals are wrong?”
Both
unbelievable
An anti-poverty program should be paying poor people to get married and stay married and put their kids through school.
What we’re doing is the exact opposite. We telling people if they want a check they should break up and make sure their kid doesn’t finish high school.
That’s neither compassionate to the people involved nor it is frugal on the taxpayers since there are hidden costs that come into the picture they and politicians elected to serve don’t see. And we’re penny wise and pound foolish on all the wrong counts here.
Locking them in the library would have better results than public schools.
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