Posted on 06/07/2009 12:15:44 PM PDT by Zakeet
With empty pockets and maxed-out credit, California is debating whether it can continue honoring all parts of its social contract with the state's most vulnerable residents.
The state faces an unprecedented drop in tax revenue and a widening budget deficit amid the deepest recession in decades, prompting Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger to propose cost-cutting steps that once seemed unthinkable.
At stake are programs for the poor, elderly and frail, placing millions of people in the nation's most populous state at risk of falling through a decades-old social safety net.
Ending the welfare-to-work program for mothers and their children would affect some 546,000 families, and health insurance could be eliminated for 1 million children from low-income families. Services for Alzheimer's patients, disabled and other frail recipients of in-home care also would be greatly reduced under the governor's latest budget proposal, leaving more than 400,000 people without such support.
Schwarzenegger acknowledges that his proposals will be painful.
[Snip]
California spent 5.4 percent of all its state and federal funding on public assistance in 2007, compared to a national average of 1.7 percent. That doesn't include Medicaid and other social service spending.
[Snip]
Conservatives say states still have a long list of assistance programs and few people would be left without any help.
Federally mandated programs such as food stamps, low-income housing and Medicaid — the U.S. health program for low-income people, seniors and the disabled — will continue ... Those programs received financial boosts under the federal recovery act.
(Excerpt) Read more at news.yahoo.com ...
100% of all welfare should be eliminated!
Change the ruling of the law and declare all anchor babies illegal ailens!
She thinks waiting for handouts is her job.
What's needed for SSI, is for the fraud to be rooted out. But that would step on toes and likely be deemed racist.
You betcha!
Not only that, but it would put a big dent in the democrat voting base.
Wasn't Rush saying something a month or two ago about how welfare costs break down to 70% administrative and 30% to the purported beneficaries?
Comports with something I saw in NR in about 1980: In 1976 (the last year for which figures were available at the time), federal poverty aid cost enough to give every poor person (not family -- person) in the country $20,000 for the year. I was in grad school at the time (making $3,000 a year on a teaching stipend, plus whatever I could make on summer jobs), so I don't know what a "normal" salary was then. I'm guessing it wasn't $20,000.
For CA, I'm guessing those welfare workers are unionized and won't be laid off.
I do work on one that is a 3 beedroom,3 bath that they are payinf $1,850 and the tennant only poays $50, it’s criminal!
The 22-year-old single mother said she is looking for a job and does not qualify for benefits herself because she crossed the U.S.-Mexico border illegally as a teenager.
And yet LEGAL aliens are not allowed means-tested aid.
They'll all be here sooner or later, anyway.
“The 22-year-old single mother said she is looking for a job and does not qualify for benefits herself because she crossed the U.S.-Mexico border illegally as a teenager. She doesn’t know what she will do if core state assistance is eliminated for her daughter.”
Maybe she can be a “wise Latina woman” and haul her unmarried baby making butt back across the border to her true homeland?
OTOH....the underlings of society are easy targets...how about the over paid fat arces that occupy all the govt jobs....
cut the govt jobs, just a little, and reduce their benefits and pensions, even just a little, and the budget would right itself....
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