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What rewards for working are involved in these kinds of federally-run entitlements for non-working and poor families in urban minority neighborhoods?

Here Marie, meet your 9% national sales tax at work when federal enterprise and empowerment zones are included into the 999 plan.

http://www.mitchellmoss.com/articles/power.html

During the 1980s, liberals latched onto the enterprise zone concept. They discovered that it offered a way to channel money into impoverished urban communities, subverting the rationale for the enterprise zone by expanding, rather than reducing, government involvement.

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In response to the Los Angeles riots of 1992, there was a burst of public support for federal assistance to cities, and during the summer of 1992 proposals for enterprise zone legislation surfaced in Congress once again, among Republicans and Democrats alike. But it was not until both the White House and the Congress were in Democratic hands that the concept of the enterprise zone - albeit modified and renamed by the new Democratic administration as an empowerment zone - was brought to life as part of the Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of 1993.

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Congressman Charles Rangel of Harlem, then the third-ranking Democrat on the House Ways and Means Committee, was largely responsible for inserting the empowerment zone proposal into the 1993 act, which combined tax hikes for the rich with tax credits for the working poor. Before that. President Clinton had given up on any large-scale public investment program, after failing to pass an economic stimulus package that would have channeled federal money into communities acre’s the country. But Rangel pushed hard to authorize tax credits and funds for empowerment zones in the budget reconciliation act, which was subject to a single up-or-down congressional vote. Once the money was authorized, it took the joint efforts of New Jersey Senator Bill Bradley and Congressman Rangel actually to appropriate funds for the empowerment zone program in the appropriation bill for the U.S. Departments of Labor, Health and Human Services, and Education for fiscal year 1995.

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Although Congress assigned responsibility for formulating the guidelines and administering the empowerment zone program to the Department of Housing and Urban Development, it appropriated the funds for the zones under Title XX of the Social Security Act, which provides block grants to the states for social services.

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Thanks largely to Rangel, the empowerment zone has emerged as the only initiative by the Clinton administration with an explicitly urban focus

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Although the empowerment zone program provided incentives for private investment, it also gave the Clinton administration a new framework for social service spending, not just on job training or welfare-to-work programs but also, under Title XX of the Social Security Act, on emergency and transitional homeless shelters or drug-and alcohol-abuse programs in big cities.

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After a national competition that attracted hundreds of applicants. New York was awarded an empowerment zone by President Clinton in December 1994, an outcome that many felt was preordained given Congressman Rangel’s strategic role in pushing the empowerment zone into law. The other cities to be awarded zones were Atlanta, Baltimore, Chicago, Detroit, and Philadelphia. Although Cleveland and Los Angeles did not get empowerment zones, HUD - in a rare display of bureaucratic creativity - invented a consolation prize for those cities, the “supplemental empowerment zone,” consisting of block grants without the tax credits.

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The Harlem portion of the plan is a remarkable mix of programs to serve local needs for day care, education, social services, and health care, combined with a few large-scale physical development projects, like a new CUNY community college at the Washburn Wire Factory, that will not create private-sector jobs or attract private investment. For example, the proposal envisions a computerized drug referral system, security improvements in public housing, child-care program upgrades, “family preservation, development, and intergenerational programs,” a community health center, and a cadre of community empowerment zone organizers to assist residents in gaining access to empowerment zone - and other government - programs. The proposal also envisions a “Medicaid Entitlement Zone” that seeks to make every resident of the zone eligible for Medicaid. The proposal earmarks 23 percent of the federal empowerment zone funds for children and youth programs, 12 percent for health and substance-abuse programs, 6 percent for other social services, and 17 percent for local administration of the program - 58 percent of the total.

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Almost no one in the press or in public office has been willing to question the logic of New York’s empowerment zone plan. It went unchallenged when Vice President Al Core and other Democratic politicians gathered with empowerment zone leaders from around the country at a Columbia University conference in March. The conference resembled a pep rally for Rangel and the empowerment zone. Little wonder: many of those in attendance were from nonprofit organizations that stand to benefit handsomely from the infusion of federal funds.