Posted on 11/20/2015 12:21:47 PM PST by PROCON
Mary Mayhew, commissioner of Maine’s Department of Health and Human Services, knows her politics aren’t always popular.
“I can’t stress enough what an attack campaign it has been from the media for four and a half years,†Mayhew said Thursday at an anti-poverty forum in Washington, D.C., hosted by The Heritage Foundation.
Then there are the more personalized critiques: “There is a poet, or he calls himself a poet, and he sends me poems all the time,†she added. “They are not nice poems.â€
Mayhew claims that detractors—who mostly take issue with welfare reforms enacted by Gov. Paul LePage, a Republican, since his election in 2011—have gone so far as to call her “Commissioner Evil,†and her and LePage’s policies a “War on the Poor.â€
(Excerpt) Read more at dailysignal.com ...
That's an incredibly sad statistic
'The welfare hurricane doesnt just destroy one family; it destroys generations of them,' Tarren Bragdon, president and CEO of the Foundation for Government Accountability, said at the event Thursday.
And it's never too late to fix this generational welfare problem.
Many of the blue states are reluctant to do this, supposedly out of an act of so-called compassion, but I think that once people become self-sufficient, they tend to shun liberalism and will vote against it.
I think a workfare system makes more sense. If you are on public assistance of any kind, but can still fog a mirror, you show up at 7AM to clean toilets, sweeps the halls...whatever needs to be done. You should also be subject to random drug testing. I think we’d be amazed how many deadbeats would start looking for better jobs. Also, if you pay no federal taxes, you don’t get to vote in federal elections. After all, nothing in the game, why should you have any say in its rules? Finally, if you are a Congressman and vote for a budget that results in an increase of 3% or more in the federal deficit, you cannot run for reelection. Betcha we’d see programs like free cell phones for deadbeats disappear.
Great points and Maine seems to be at the forefront of some of these reforms, especially the workfare rule.
Every Red State needs to enact similar reforms in order to drive the “gimmedats” into the Blue States before next years election and double down on it before the next census.
Let the Blue States reap what they’ve sown with bankrupt budgets and high crime rates associated with the entitlement class.
wasn’t Maine ok until the Somalis took over ?
A large mass of Somali 'refugees' were waylaid on Maine 15-20 years ago, IIRC.
And to think 0bama wants more of these welfare leeches and potential terrorists brought in.
It's not compassion, it's needing a bigger voting bloc.
Woman sitting next to telephone as her husband comes in:
"Oh, dear! For 20 minutes this terrible man on the phone said the most awful things to me!"
FRiend, are you on the right thread?
Well, give the Libs an "A" for consistency but an "F" for lack of originality in these attacks.
I would subdivide welfare from “food relief”, because they are extremely different in purpose and practice.
Welfare is easy to understand: payment to individuals. As such, reform is also *technically* easy.
However, “food relief” is counter-intuitive, bizarre and surreal. I’ll try to describe some of its oddities:
1) More than half the programs are not about getting food to the poor, but are part of an agricultural balancing act to stabilize prices to keep farms working. Farming is just an insane line of work, where a modest year can be far more profitable than a bumper crop year, which can wipe farms out by crashing prices.
Farmers get paid a LOT of money when they deliver crops, but most of it is immediately paid for their seed, fertilizer, pesticide, rental machines, leases, and workers. So a farmer might have a gross of $1.5m and a net of only $30k. Everything they do is on credit.
2) Food aid needs to be mostly unprocessed foods, because it could then be used to dump crop overages and seasonal surges. Ironically, giving all this unprocessed food away does not effect the market for unprocessed food at all. This is because those who buy their food much prefer processed food.
3) America has a hyperabundance of food. Mountains of it rot every year, purchased by the government and expensively warehoused, because to leave it on the market would crash food prices, put farmers out of business, then drive prices sky high.
Even during the Dust Bowl of the 1920s, that wiped out tens of thousands of farms from Texas to Canada, there was still way too much food from the farmers outside the region, which made an economic deflation a catastrophe.
4) Welfare money is a good motivator. Food is not. If a person does not have food, their only priority is getting their next meal, not in improving their life.
So the bottom line to all of this is at the state level. That is, block grants from the feds to feed the poor should be augmented with local crop surpluses. This would help farmers in the state as well as the poor.
I vacation in Maine every year. The locals have really educated me on the welfare state there. Not only that, many of the lobster fisherman are drug addicts. So sad, it is the most beautiful state with such wonderful people.
They looked around for which state had the easiest welfare (at the time) and the Catholic Charities dumped so many on Maine that the localities had to raise the property taxes to pay for it all.
It would make a good article for some reporter up there to see how many of these "refugees" got jobs - and what kind they were.
No it wasn’t. Maine had some of the most generous welfare benefits in the country and many people had been flocking to Maine and demanding benefits.
You must visit me
Maine is actually two Maines, the wealthy coastal and lake side properties and everything else.
Food aid needs to be mostly unprocessed foods, because it could then be used to dump crop overages and seasonal surges. Ironically, giving all this unprocessed food away does not effect the market for unprocessed food at all. This is because those who buy their food much prefer processed food.
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I think everyone in Maine over the age of 30 remembers the government trucks that came through with government cheese, pasta, and other sundry items. That cheese fed many a kid and many a pig.
I would love to visit you!
I want to move to Maine - the coastal area. You can still buy a house for under $150,000 there. I’ve been visiting Tenants Harbor since I was a child.
It would make a good article for some reporter up there to see how many of these “refugees” got jobs - and what kind they were.
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I would love to see if any got non refugee jobs, ie translation.
I hear that they are being hired without skills as nurses aids and other kinds of assistance to provide cheaper translation skills.
Well let’s make some plans. Would love to meet you and enjoy the thought of visiting with beloved Freepers.
From a bird’s eye view.
Thank you.
You know that homeless have internet through local libraries.
Well there are places that leftist social workers have set up telling them where to go for services and Maine has been at the top of the list.
why else would you go to a place that is encased in ice for almost half the year?
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