A Better Way to Fight Poverty
A Better Way to Fight Poverty
What does it say: The current welfare and entitlement systems are not working. The current systems are set up to reward complacency and not those who want to strive for something better. Reward work, Improve school and skill training, match benefits to people’s needs, plan for retirement, demand results.
What does it mean: If you want to not be poor, get a job. Scrap all of the disparate welfare programs and create one big organization that can handle all programs. Find ways to privatize social programs for poor. Create a way of measuring the real benefit of private programs and tie funding to those metrics.
What Will and Won’t Work: Some top level ideas should work, such as providing education and training programs to get people back into the workforce, and consolidate the disparate programs and create one that can be tailored to fit most situations. However, privatizing social reforms has already begun and helps to keep people poor. It also creates numerous quasi-legal ways to game the system similar to Medicare and charity scams that are difficult to discover and prosecute. The regulations, monitoring metrics, providing specialized benefit plans for each person based on need would require a gargantuan budget to do right, or can be done poorly for much less. I thought Republicans were for smaller government, less regulation and a more free-wheeling economy?
Progressive Twist: I’ve always have been a “Teach a person to fish” type of guy, so I like the idea of getting people back to work. The easiest way to reduce the Welfare budget is to make people not need it. However, the biggest drawback of Speaker Ryan’s “Better Way” is that it is about denying benefits to those without jobs rather than figuring out how to actually find them jobs. How do you find 15-20% of the population jobs? Especially if they have not had one in years? Ever?
This is a wild idea I like to call “Workfare”. Start with a very basic “Welfare” program that provides non-working adults enough money and resources to live. The next step is to provide free training and job placement services. Once a person gets a job, they will continue to earn benefits from the government to supplement their initial income. These benefits will be in the form of health care, child care, food stamps, housing allowances, savings plans, etc. These supplemental benefits will taper off slower than their income increases until they are out of poverty. The idea here is to provide a realistic path to go from poverty to middle class by incentivizing and rewarding moving up.
I’ll have a bigger blog on Workfare, Minimum Wage and Jobs Programs later, so keep reading.