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Posted on 04/27/2007 4:20:36 AM PDT by theothercheek
For the second time in a month The New York Times is touting a 10-year old Mexican anti-poverty program that New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg wants to import. The social engineering program essentially offers bribes to adults to get jobs, and to make sure their children stay in school (second item, The Daily Blade). According to The New York Times:
The payments are tied to changes in behavior intended to lift families out of poverty. So the program requires families to keep their children in school and take them for regular checkups. Parents must also attend talks on health, nutrition and family planning.
In addition, pregnant women, infants and breast-feeding mothers receive an iron-fortified supplement to ward off malnutrition.
Earlier this month, the mayor traveled to the town of Tepoztlán (pronounced teh-pos-LAHN) to see the cash exchanging hands (AKA "fact-finding trip"):
[H]undreds of women from surrounding villages, many tugging along children by the hand or carrying infants slung at their waists in rebozos … come in by bus or foot and gather in the cool shadows of the municipal auditorium, where government workers sit at tables on the stage, ready to hand out cash. …
[A]bout 800 women waited for three hours or more in the auditorium to go up to get their money. If the women and their children have kept all their medical appointments, and if their children have stayed in school, the money is theirs to use as they wish. The awards range from 360 to 3,710 pesos (about $36 to $370), enough to buy food or shoes or other necessities. The size of the award depends on how many children they have and what level of school the children are in.
The program is 10 years old, has a budget of more than $3 billion a year and covers almost a quarter of all Mexicans. …
But since this program got its start in rural Mexico in 1997, it has been heralded by the World Bank and others as a powerful model for fighting chronic poverty.
But here’s the $64,000 question: Despite whatever arcane measures the World Bank uses to gauge the success of the program, shouldn’t the acid test be a demonstrable decrease in the number of Mexicans who cross into the U.S. illegally day in, day out to find work so they can send money back to towns like Tepoztlán? The 10 years the program has been doling out cash coincide with 10 years of unprecedented levels of illegal immigration into the U.S.
Even the New York Times reporter managed to intuit the disconnect: "[T]here is the question of whether they can find a decent job locally, or whether they will feel forced to migrate to the United States." Ah, but the program’s "principal architect," Santiago Levy, a former undersecretary of finance, has a ready answer: "Progresa is a program to improve human capital; it is not a jobs-creation program."
So when you come down to brass tacks, the Mexican anti-poverty program fails the real-world test. Nonetheless, Bloomberg – once an astute businessman before he got into politics - remains undeterred in his desire to give poor families ion New York up to $5,000 a year to meet such "goals" as attending parent-teacher conferences, getting regular medical checkups and working full time.
A privately financed pilot program is scheduled to begin in September with 2,500 families chosen at random to get the bribes just for doing the things they should for their own and their children’s well-being. The New York Times reports that New York City "has already raised $42 million of the $50 million needed to cover the initial costs. If it is successful, Mr. Bloomberg hopes that public money will eventually go into it."
NOTE: This is the second article in a feature called The Daily Blade, and follows an article titled, "Terrorist Mouthpiece Disbarred."
I’m sure it will work as well in NY as it does in Mexico.
If you are going to pay people for doing things they should be doing anyway (like taking their child to the doctor or going to a PTA meeting) then Sheryl Crow would have had more success with her cockamaimie toilet paper idea if she just offered to pay people for not using the stuff (she’s got the money).
More proof of why Upstate needs its own state.
“I’m sure it will work as well in NY as it does in Mexico.”
How much to pay the Mexicans to go back to Mexico to get jobs?
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As an upstater myself I agree with you. If the Republicans in NYC can’t do any better than running somebody like Bloomberg, they might as well not run anybody at all.
It DOESN”T WORK in Mexico. Long lines of Tlapaneco women wait in the Sun in remote villages of Guerrero, to receive their monthly dividends. They have to come out in droves to sweep the streets, pick up trash, and get their Earned Income, (help the poor). After the women get their money, they hand it over to the HEAD of the household, the MACHO who takes the cash, walks 20 yards to the street where CORONA beer trucks follow the CASH give away in armoured cars. Beer is purchased by the case, men sit on one case, put a case in the middle for a deck of cards, and gamble and drink it all away. At the end of the day, everyone is dead drunk, beat up, and PROGRESA we here in Mexico gave the term POBREZA..meaning poverty. I wrote the Mexican President and told him he ought to just extend a check direct to Corona Beer and avoid the hassle of armoured cars, bullet proof vests, and tons of paper work.
WHy don’t you write to Bloomberg, too? Maybe you can head him off at the pass. And while you’re at it write to the NY Times so it stops writing articles about this failed program.
Mexican social engineering program????
Pair of Nikes and a map?
I know it DOESN’T WORK in Mexico. I was being sarcastic.
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