Free Republic

Kansas is poised to put a stop to the practice of welfare recipients using government aid to pay for psychics with a bill that cracks down on the use of welfare for fun. It aims to encourage those receiving government aid under the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program to spend "more responsibly," as Kansas state Sen. Michael O'Donnell told the Topeka Capital-Journal. Having a great life, per the bill, means that welfare recipients cannot spend their government aid on body piercings, massages, spas, tobacco, nail salons, lingerie, arcades, cruise ships or visits to psychics. The bill also forbids spending...

re you sick of seeing “welfare leeches” in the grocery checkout line with carts stuffed full of junk food snacks, soda and even porterhouse steaks and crab legs? So is Missouri House Rep. Rick Brattin, who has begun pushing for legislation prohibiting welfare abusers from buying foods that most hard-working Americans can’t always afford. After Brattin heard a food stamp recipient say, “This is the way I want to live and I don’t really see anything changing,” he knew something needed to be addressed. “The intention of the bill is to get the food stamp program back to its original...

... California lawmakers, responding to the state’s nation-leading poverty level, are considering the creation of a state EITC program. Already, half of the states and the District of Columbia offer such refunds and credits. Montana legislators are also considering a state EITC this year, and a several states are evaluating expansions of their state credits. Some of the state credits currently add as much as 50% to the federal benefit. EITC programs aren’t popular in all quarters. Critics, including many fiscal conservatives, say the federal program is expensive, amounts to a handout to the poor and is subject to errors....

Al Sharpton’s National Action Network has released the schedule for its annual convention in New York City this week, and some of the panel titles may raise eyebrows. On Thursday, attendees can attend a panel titled: “Corporate America: Shake Down or Shake Up.” A day later, there’s also an “economic development panel” called “Redistribution of Wealth: How Do We Get It & How Do We Keep It.”

Despite President Obama's efforts to cool the nation's views on illegal immigrants storming over the U.S.-Mexico border, Americans have reached a new level of anger over the issue, with most demanding a more aggressive deportation policy — and reversal of a law that grants citizenship to kids of illegals born in the U.S. A new Rasmussen Reports survey released Monday also finds Americans questioning spending tax dollars on government aid provided to illegal immigrants. A huge 83 percent said that anybody should be required to prove that they are "legally allowed" to be in the country before receiving local, state...

The Obama administration and Florida are negotiating over a $1 billion Medicaid funding stream. lorida's negotiations with the Obama administration over Medicaid—and by extension, Obamacare's Medicaid expansion—got even more complicated Monday, when Republican Gov. Rick Scott walked back his previous support for expanding the low-income health-insurance program. The Associated Press first reported Scott's change of heart Monday. In a statement, the governor effectively blamed the Obama administration's posturing in the ongoing negotiations over a Medicaid funding stream, the Low-Income Pool, which helps pay for uncompensated care. "Given that the federal government said they would not fund the federal LIP program...

Kansas welfare recipients will be unable to get more than $25 per day in benefits under a new law sent this week to Republican Gov. Sam Brownback's desk by the state legislature. The bill also prohibits welfare recipients from spending their benefits at certain types of businesses, including liquor stores, fortune tellers, swimming pools and cruise ships. "We're trying to make sure those benefits are used the way they were intended," state Rep. Michael O'Donnell (R) said, according to the Topeka Capital-Journal. "This is about prosperity. This is about having a great life."

Sen. Ted Cruz, Republican from Texas, a few days ago became the first formally declared presidential candidate for next year’s election. Although Cruz is a Latino of Cuban-American background, I want to give five reasons (there are more) why most Latinos will not or should not support Cruz, who was just elected two years ago. The first reason is that he seems to have little affinity with Latinos, including the large Mexican-American population in his own home state of Texas. Indeed, Cruz is an anomaly in that state due to his Cuban-American background. He was raised outside of the state...

Benefits and welfare schemes are often blamed for making people less likely to want to work. But a study has found that the opposite may be true. A Europe-wide survey of 19,000 people revealed that the more a country paid to the unemployed or sick, and invested in employment schemes, the more likely its residents were to want a job.

“I am a servant of the Lord. I am a servant of the Lord. He has opened doors all of my life. The Lord has. He has pushed me over the mountain this time. I don’t know why, but I have no doubt that he has.” Ted Cruz could not have said it better during the official launch of his presidential campaign on Monday. He could not have said it at all, in fact, because uttering those words would have made him guilty of plagiarism. They were spoken by Ohio Gov. John Kasich during his first inaugural address in 2011....

Medi-Cal Rolls Could Swell Under Obama's Deportation Relief Plan President Obama Immigrants living in the U.S. without permission can't enroll in Obamacare, but California allows those granted temporary relief from deportation to sign up for Medi-Cal. ( By SOUMYA KARLAMANGLA Medi-Cal sign-ups could soar under President Obama's executive actions on immigration Half a million more Californians could apply for Medi-Cal under Obama's deportation relief plan, a study says President Obama's executive actions on immigration, which have sparked a fierce political backlash nationwide, could also provide an unlikely boost for another of his goals: increasing health insurance signups. Immigrants living in...

A state legislative auditor’s report found that the Minnesota Department of Human Services (DHS) failed to ensure the eligibility of participants in large public assistance programs and that it did not always perform timely inspections of child care centers. The findings mirror those of other recent auditor reports and could fuel calls to reform the way state administrators verify eligibility for programs that together cost nearly $7 billion a year in federal money. For more than a decade, the legislative auditor has reported flaws in the way the state determines who qualifies for Medical Assistance, which provides health insurance to...

Perhaps the decisive factors in combating poverty and enabling upward mobility were not economic but cultural — the habits, mores and dispositions that equip individuals to take advantage of opportunities. This was dismaying because governments know how to alter incentives and remove barriers but not how to manipulate culture. The assumption that the condition of the poor must improve as macroeconomic conditions improve was to be refuted by a deepened understanding of the crucial role of the family as the primary transmitter of the social capital essential for self-reliance and betterment. Family structure is the primary predictor of social outcomes,...

Federal handouts are the latest front in the war on Obama’s amnesty, and House and Senate Republicans are once again clashing over strategy. House and Senate Republicans are once again at odds over how to fight President Obama’s executive amnesty. After Republicans in Congress caved in the battle over funding the Department of Homeland Security last month, a new disagreement in the GOP now looms on how best to prevent illegal immigrants from receiving federal benefits under the president’s executive actions. When Representative Patrick McHenry (R., N.C.) learned that the IRS intends to pay the illegal-immigrant beneficiaries of the president’s...

This week we are moved to ignore the news – which we have done our best to follow without throwing things at the television – take a large step back and consider a question which has been bugging us. Why is it that left are the nice guys – the ones that care – while the right are the heartless, inconsiderate bastards?We think we may have the answer.

Making transparency a condition for receiving selective state subsidies and tax breaks is apparently a foreign concept at the Michigan Economic Development Corporation, which is the state’s corporate welfare arm. At a Feb. 18 meeting of the House Tax Policy Committee, the Mackinac Center for Public Policy recommended that, to provide much-needed transparency at the MEDC, companies accepting tax credits be required to waive a right to privacy related to these transactions. At the conclusion of the hearing, the MEDC's chief executive, Steve Arwood, was asked this question: “Considering the amounts of money at stake, is it likely that a...

**SNIP** “If government dependence on welfare is rising in a good economy, what’s going to happen in a bad economy?” wondered study author Stephen Eide, who said the trend was antithetical to data dating back to around 1960. The surprising uptick, reformers say, is partly by design. De Blasio’s pick to head the $10 billion Human Resources Administration, Steven Banks, is a proponent of loosening welfare restrictions. With Banks at the helm, the HRA launched a series of sweeping changes in its state-approved Biennial Employment Plan, including changing requirements for welfare recipients with kids younger than 4 years old. Recipients...

To listen to President Obama, the U.S. economy is firing on all cylinders. Yet it is hardly creating jobs at a breakneck pace, and too many able-bodied men have grown lazy and show no interest in working. Friday, economists expect the Labor Department to report 230,000 jobs were added in February—down from 336,000 averaged the prior three months. Economists at Wells Fargo expect the pace for the entire year to be only 224,000. The culprits remain slow growth, and Obama’s attempts to remedy income inequality with government programs that fail to lift millions of Americans to dignified work. Since the...

NOT a single welfare payment has been cancelled for terrorist recruits leaving Australia for the Middle East, or those merely deemed a national security threat, since new laws were enacted last October to crack down on the so-called welfare warriors. The Daily Telegraph revealed at the weekend that 96 per cent of the junior ­jihadis who snuck out of the country before last September had been on some form of welfare payment, prompting the introduction of new laws to stop it. ... Subsequent inquiries, however, have revealed that the new laws have yet to be used, despite some 40 more...

The breakdown of the black family is a sensitive topic, though it's not new and it's not in dispute. President Barack Obama, who grew up with an absent father, often urges black men to be responsible parents. Nor is there any doubt that African-American children would be better off living with their married parents. Kids who grow up in households headed by a single mother are far more likely than others to be poor, quit school, get pregnant as teens and end up in jail. But these facts were once inflammatory. Fifty years ago next month, a Labor Department official...