In a prosperous modern nation, there's a place for a minimal social safety net, to provide a hand up - not a handout - to the poorest, to ensure they have some manner of roof over their heads, to keep them from starving, maybe even to provide them with some minimal skills to allow them to move into employment and independence. The incentives for such a system should all be attuned to that: Independence. Not remaining on the dole. There should be some societal onus. Not that long ago, there was. My parents, who both grew up during the Depression, used to talk about the shame many felt when forced to ask for government assistance, or "relief" as they called it.
At least, that's how a welfare system should operate. But now, today, not only do many in the dependency class feel a Pantagruelian sense of entitlement, but the system is set up so that welfare recipients can live better than many in the middle class, because of the idiotic manner in which we calculate income levels. And that's not all; as we have learned in recent weeks, the welfare system is a regular target for massive fraud.
A recent piece in the Wall Street Journal by Phil Gramm and John Early has given us some troubling details.
First, the idiocy of how the various levels of government calculate income in these programs, namely, that they don't include the monetary amount of the benefits themselves, which can be considerable:
The government’s failure to count its largess as recipients’ income allows welfare households to blow past the income level above which a working family no longer qualifies for government help. Take a single parent with two school-age children who earns $11,000 annually from part-time work. The government considers this household in poverty because its income is below $25,273. But this family would qualify for benefits worth $53,128. It would receive Treasury checks of $3,400 in refundable child tax credits and $4,400 in refundable earned-income tax credits. The family would also receive Food Stamp debit cards worth $9,216 a year, $9,476 in housing subsidies, $877 of government payments for utility bills, $16,033 to fund Medicaid, $3,102 in free meals at school and $6,624 in Temporary Assistance for Needy Families. All this puts the family’s income at $64,128, or 254% of the poverty level.
That's a significantly higher standard of living than advertised, and much of it is coming from the pockets of Americans who aren't living anywhere that well. We hear a lot of apocryphal stories; there are many, many accounts floating around of people buying enormous cartloads of expensive foods with an EBT card, then going outside and loading them into a new Cadillac. These are apocryphal, yes, but there's an awful lot of smoke for there not to be a fire somewhere in there.
Second, the entire system is set up to be inviting to fraud.
In light of the mounting evidence of rampant benefits fraud, Congress should institute a comprehensive audit of all means-tested programs. But it should start with removing the largest fraud in welfare—the government’s gross overstatement of poverty. President Trump should issue an executive order requiring the Census Bureau to count all welfare benefits received from the government as income to the recipients. Then Congress should codify the executive order and require that all means-tested programs use the corrected Census income definition to determine eligibility for welfare payments.
This audit is a great idea - but there must also be an accompanying effort to root out and rigorously punish fraud, and we may note that the Trump administration is already moving along these lines:
Read More: Trump HUD Hunts Down Fraud in Colorado: 221 Dead People Were Getting Housing
This isn't a new thing. Many years ago, in the early '80s, my first wife was working nights in a nursing home as a nurse's aid. She had a co-worker who worked only part-time, and who regularly bragged that her live-in boyfriend and the father of her two children made a very good living as an engineer at the John Deere tractor works, and that she refused to marry him because she would lose her (as they were then called) food stamps and rental assistance benefits. Well, they did eventually get caught, and she was forced to repay thousands in fraudulently obtained benefits, but for every one that is caught, many more get away with it, sometimes for years.
These programs are costing the nation, not a small fortune, but a huge one (emphasis added):
Look at what government programs cost minus any dedicated revenue they collect and interest on the debt, which government is obligated to pay. Payroll taxes fund 87% of Social Security spending, requiring an additional $188 billion, or 4% of unobligated spending. Medicare is 45% funded by payroll taxes and uses $478 billion of unobligated spending, or 11%. Defense spending of $851 billion is 20% of unobligated spending. Means-tested welfare programs absorb $1.4 trillion, 34% of unobligated spending, and the rest of the federal government spends $1.3 trillion, or 30% of unobligated spending.
To call that unsustainable is the greatest understatement since Napoleon Bonaparte told his army, "We're going to take a bit of a stroll to Moscow."
All of this has to change. Fraudsters should be rooted out, aggressively prosecuted, imprisoned, and/or deported as appropriate. The means-testing has to change to reflect not only the amount of income from employment but also the monetary value of benefits received. There should be conditions on eligibility: Work conditions. Any recipients with clerical or other useful skills should be required to work in the program itself, to save the various agencies money on employees. If the recipients have no such skills, give them an orange vest and some trash bags and set them to collecting litter along the highways. There is always trash that needs picking up. Is that demeaning? It shouldn't be; it's honest work. If any welfare recipients complain about it, the answer should be "fine, get a job then."
Food aid programs should be spare and simple: A weekly issue of dry beans, rice, potatoes, some lean turkey or chicken, milk, and cheese if there are children. No candy. No sugary drinks. No take-and-bake pizzas. No premium meats. The purpose of a food aid program should be to keep the recipients from starving, and nothing more. If any of the recipients complain about it, the answer should be "fine, get a job then."
Housing aid programs should likewise be spare and simple. I wouldn't disagree with the notion of some kind of government barracks for anyone who has been on aid for more than a year. Not a condominium, not a dormitory: A barracks. With daily inspections for cleanliness, order, and contraband. If any of the housed therein complain about it, the answer should be "fine, get a job then."
Look, I get that this is the Christmas season. It's a time to be generous; it's a time to be giving. But this isn't generosity. It's enabling. It's a generational abuse of the American taxpayers. It's a blatant and transparent way for leftist politicians to sell votes, to promise the dependency class more of other people's stuff, and that worst part is that it works all too often; it's hard to run a campaign against Santa Claus.
Which brings us to the last reform: If you're on the dole, you lose the franchise. No skin in the game, no vote.
Welfare, in the span of a couple of generations, has gone from a sparse, survival-oriented, shameful last resort to a comfortable lifestyle breeding a massive sense of entitlement. The greatest health problem among America's "poor" is obesity. Some families have been on welfare for multiple generations. All of this has to stop. The incentives have to change. Nothing else will change until that does.
