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Monday, January 9, 2012

A response to {someone} who wants to be in charge.

A blog post from New Hampshire came to my attention through Facebook.Since it's chock-full of tried-and-true, old-school, right wing claims, I thought I would take the opportunity to do some mass disputing. 

A little background. First, please feel welcome (not just free) to disagree with me. I think the greatest loss to our society has been actual discourse in politics. We used to talk to each other and moderate our views, even in ongoing disagreement. Now we shut ourselves up in our respective thought bubbles and scream through the glass at people who can’t hear us because they’re surrounded by reverberating agreements in their own bubbles. We become ever more entrenched and convinced of our own rightness and lose the "marketplace of ideas" that the Founding Fathers trusted us with.

OK, soap box dismantled. Why do I think I’m such an expert? I don’t. I think I’m someone who has engaged with many of these issues in various contexts and is willing to keep doing it. That’s all. I do have a degree in political science from Rutgers and a law degree from Lewis and Clark, work for the state, and follow national politics more than any healthy person should. So take it for what it’s worth – just another opinion in the blogosphere. But even if you disagree – scratch that- especially if you disagree, PLEASE talk about it! There’s a comment section and as long as there’s no name-calling, I won’t delete things. Unless you call me (or someone else) a socialist, then I won’t delete it, I’ll explain to you why you don’t understand what that means (because if you did, you wouldn’t call me that based on anything in this blog).

So let's go! The blue text is the source blog - ostensibly from a nameless 21 year old female in Waco or from someone named Alfred W. Evans in the same paper.It's circulating the Interwebz, so you can find a version of it numerous places.

"Put me in charge . . . "
Put me in charge of food stamps. I’d get rid of Lone Star cards; no cash for Ding Dongs or Ho Ho’s, just money for 50-pound bags of rice and beans, blocks of cheese and all the powdered milk you can haul away. If you want steak and frozen pizza…

> OK this sounds great, except that rice and beans (or any other limited diet) is no healthier than anything else. I have two responses to this principle. First, the lefty response is that this is a punishment with no purpose. For the critically poor, those little treats are often the only indulgences or joys that a family has. When you have to tell your kids "no" to everything else and you have a chance to just let them have a cupcake - of course you will! And why not? It isn't like recipients just turn on the tap and money pours out! They get a fixed amount per month, so nothing they buy with it costs taxpayers more than anything else. 

Of COURSE we'd all like everyone to be eating better, but that's hardly limited to the poor. Obesity is costly and epidemic and so far we've done a miserable job of fixing it, but cutting off food stamp recipients won't solve it. Again, there are just as many obese people who live on rice and beans as not. The solution is higher level and actually easier. Our national food subsidy programs are wildly out of whack and so deeply entrenched with industry representatives that we're subsidizing high fructose corn syrup and sugar but not tomatoes and broccoli. Go higher, don't tell poor kids they can't even have Fruit Roll-ups. The other end of the problem is food deserts. Large swaths of urban areas without grocery stores where the residents have no choice but to shop in convenience stores. Michelle Obama is trying to help, so support her. If people could get better food, at least some portion would.

Second, the practicalities fail utterly. Starting with classification of foods. For heaven's sake, Congress just classified pizza as a vegetable! LAST SUMMER! So leaving it to the government to classify "covered" foods when they're dominated by the people trying to sell the stuff is a recipe for failure. And an expensive one. The time and effort required to try to do this, to keep up with changes, and to manage the system programming would be astronomical. And that brings me back to the point above - this wouldn't save any money. It would, however, cost billions.  

…then get a job. 

> Great idea. Unemployment is all the way down to 8.5% so no problem here. Not to mention that states are cutting-cutting-cutting public transportation which disproportionately harms the poor and closes off what few employment opportunities there are. And by the way - a very significant number of food stamp recipients DO work. They HAVE to. Even being a student doesn't qualify. The only way to get food stamps without working is if your child qualifies, then you only get the benefits allocated to the child, not the whole family. There's a 20 hour/week minimum by federal law. There may be some allowance for those searching for work or on unemployment, but in general - 20 hours or get out. If that didn't solve the problem, then "get a job" ... well, umm ... yeah.  

Put me in charge of Medicaid. The first thing I’d do is to get women Norplant birth control implants or tubal ligations. Then, we’ll test recipients for drugs, alcohol, and nicotine and document all tattoos and piercings. If you want to reproduce or use drugs, alcohol, smoke or get tats and piercings, then get a job. 

> I get the "it's voluntary" argument, but that's wildly oversimplified. Medicaid is not an easy thing to use and doesn't cover much. It's definitely a minimal-care proposition. the general idea is that when people are protected from communicable diseases, we all benefit. And the general social zeitgeist is that babies are good; babies grow up to become workers who pay into Social Security and Medicare to support the retirees who are living 30 years past their actuarial life spans.This isn't necessarily a hill I'm willing to die on - I'm not a big "babies are always a blessing" person, but I really don't want us heading down "no health care or forced sterilization" road.

What I don't get here is the tattoos and piercings thing. Not quite sure where that gets anyone. And rather than spending billions on testing and documenting (again, a massively expensive "solution" to a problem that doesn't cost anything), I actually agree that Medicaid should pay for smoking cessation and weight loss programs. They're infinitely cheaper than heart disease and diabetes. 

Besides, Florida started drug testing welfare recipients (of course, at the clinics owned by Gov. Rick Scott) at a cost of millions to the state taxpayers. What they discovered was that the "rampant drug problem among the poor" was actually 1/4 as bad as the drug use in the general population. An average of 2% of users tested positive compared to up to 8% of the general population. The state had to pay for all of those negative tests.  

Put me in charge of government housing. Ever live in a military barracks?
You will maintain our property in a clean and good state of repair. Your "home" will be subject to inspections anytime and possessions will be inventoried. If you want a plasma TV or Xbox 360, then get a job and your own place. 

Military barracks? Or military housing? Barracks are temporary group accommodations, not places intended to be lived in or to raise families in. Military HOUSING is a different story. Most government housing contracts do contain clauses related to repair and inspection, even more so than other apartments. It's actually rather oppressive. Nevertheless, it's there and people agree to it and I don't pose an argument to the idea. Why doesn't it mean that the facilities stay pristine? Lots of reasons. Including, of course, the misplaced anger and lack of respect of some residents and guests. But also consider what you're asking of the reasonable people who live there. You're saying to people who can't afford even the most basic apartment that they have to pay for carpets, walls, windows, appliances, cabinets, and all the other things that wear out or get damaged in even the best situations. Lovely thought, but where do they get the money for that? And the people who deliberately do damage don't care, don't leave forwarding addresses, and don't have any money or property to pay for it anyway. These people ARE often evicted, but then what? Blood and turnips and all that ... But once again, we come to the financial problem. People don't want to pay taxes, so there's no money to keep up giant human warehouses. There's no money for security guards or police, and certainly no money for inspectors to come see who did damage. What do they win for that anyway? They found damage - yay. It would have been found anyway, it's done anyway, and THERE'S NO MONEY! So in the end, it's cheaper to fix up the place on the cheap (and these places are NOT top-of-the-line) than to patrol it. Despite the rare but not-unheard-of cases of people with toys, consider the options. People in good situations can get into bad ones. That doesn't mean they have to lose everything they once had. Lose your job, your house, your self-respect, your ability to support your family and just wait! There are spiteful, jealous people just waiting to judge you and make you feel greedy because you didn't sell your kid's X-box to pay ... what? You'd get $50 for it - not exactly rent money. People also inherit family castoffs and barter services for goods. None of these things is sufficient to justify trying to throw someone out of their home or demanding explanations.

In addition, you will either present a check stub from a job each week or you will report to a "government" job. It may be cleaning the roadways of trash, painting and repairing public housing, whatever we find for you. We will sell your 22 inch rims and low profile tires and your blasting stereo and speakers and put that money toward the "common good." 

> Great idea. I actually like this, and I know plenty of people who would be willing to do this just for the sake of personal pride. But once again, who pays for it? These "government jobs" will still be subject to (at least) minimum wage. They'll probably also require quite a bit of outlay for equipment, paperwork, worker's comp insurance, transportation, water for outdoor jobs, portapotties for road crews, and a host of other expenses required to design, run, and track the program and its participants. "We" don't get to seize and sell private property. If we did, there's no reason why anyone's property is safe. Anyone who works, pays their own bills, and gets a tax refund that exceeds their payments would face the same argument. Isn't personal property being safe from the government a pretty basic American idea? 
 
Before you write that I’ve violated someone’s rights, realize that all of the above is voluntary. If you want our money, accept our rules. Before you say that this would be "demeaning" and ruin their "self-esteem," consider that it wasn’t that long ago that taking someone else’s money for doing absolutely nothing was demeaning and lowered self-esteem.
If we are expected to pay for other people’s mistakes we should at least attempt to make them learn from their bad choices. The current system rewards them for continuing to make bad choices.
AND, while you are on Gov’t subsistence, you no longer can VOTE! Yes that is correct. For you to vote would be a conflict of interest. You will voluntarily remove yourself from voting while you are receiving a government welfare check. If you want to vote, then get a job.

> Only someone who's never lived in public housing or tried to get an appointment with Medicaid or had to explain their lives to a caseworker just to feed their children can call any of this a "reward". It's not all about self-esteem or feelings, it's about society and practicality. It's violently offensive to me that anyone would claim that beneficiaries should be denied the vote when we all benefit from what the government and our neighbors provide. By that logic, anyone who lives in a town with police, schools, firefighters, sidewalks, roads, parks, trash removal, clean water, or birds shouldn't be allowed to vote. And no one who works for the government at any level, including soldiers who eat and sleep in the line of fire so we can all vote and so other cultures have the opportunity to do the same. It's just absurd. Although it would eliminate every senior citizen in the country and give the rest of us more ability to move this country forward. 

The bottom line is either the government grows by leaps and bounds to pay for these inspectors, programmers, managers, directors, employees, and drug tests, or we realize that poverty and desperation are not choices that most people make - they are situations people find themselves in for myriad reasons. There are some who deliberately make choices that they know will leave them in terrible circumstances but they don't care. There will always be people like that in any society. The divide really is just whether we - as a society - are OK with leaving people to die in the streets because a few of them might try to take advantage, or whether we're willing just accept that there are some who choose not to do better, and those people are a cost of doing business. I don't want us going back to the days of Dickens when the have-nots lived in desperation and the have-nothings got tossed into alleys to die. I'm willing to roll my eyes and accept that part of being civilized means that we have to provide minimal services for those among us who are unable to care or provide for themselves for whatever reason. I'm just sayin'