[RD] Are Employment Requirements Reasonable For Access to Welfare?

[Hygro]

I personally don't understand why anyone draws a distinction between dependency on a government benefit, and dependency on charity in the form of a food pantry or a shelter.

Different incentives.

 

[Lexicus]

Their parents should charge them for their services by taking out loans on their behalf. Set the interest rate equal to that of student loans, generously grant them an 18-year childhood deferment as they accumulate a load of interest, and sell them to Chase and Citigroup to be rolled into Child-Backed Securities. Leave no services uncommodified!

Did you happen to see this proposal?
https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2018/02/13/immigration-visas-economics-216968

Different incentives.

What do you mean by that?

 

[metalhead]

Different incentives.

For whom? And why does that matter?

 

[Bootstoots]

So you're saying if my kids stay in my house past their 18th birthday I can have them repossessed by a bank?

Go on . . .

The bank would still have to find them worth the cost of repossessing them, plus the thin gruel, water, and shackles they need to be productive debt peons. So be sure to train them well!

Did you happen to see this proposal?
https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2018/02/13/immigration-visas-economics-216968

That's brilliant - monetize your American privilege by sponsoring an immigrant to work for you at arbitrarily low wages, or sell your sponsorship rights to a corporation to do the same! An idea only a neoclassical economist could love. They should consult with construction firms in the Gulf States to find out how to maximize the return on their investment.

 

[innonimatu]

It would be ideal if the system were revamped to be more individualistic. Welfare recipients should have social workers that meet with them regularly to discuss their life and what would lead them to fruitful participation in society in a way that takes their reality into consideration. But this would require that welfare become redefined from a trap for the temporarily embarrassed millionaire and instead become a system of personal well-being. I have little hope something like this would ever come to pass.

Might it have been a bad idea to do away with the social roles of the family, the clan, the corporation, the union, the party, or the club? Any of those support groups where people were theoretically able to move around and eventually assume any role. And replace them with a social security bureaucracy where the roles are static: there's the overseer and the overseen and they're not going to trade places ever. And with the market also, always the market: politics becomes a think-tank business, clubs and floated in the stock exchange, the corporation becomes a multinational ran "for the stockholders", the clan is evil, the family is a relic, and so on. We're all individuals now, and should be happy about it!

This has not triumphed everywhere and with everyone. Unlikely it ever will. But where it has triumphed, you'll find the same kind of dehumanization. Detached individuals are unhappy.

Social security is a necessary temporary help for people with temporary problems. Social security will never be a solution for people with a lack of meaning to their lives. Nor will paying "basic incomes". The fix would be to have a society with room for socially useful activities that were not commercial nor bureaucratically state-organized. That requires decentralizing power. But all the big ideas to fix social problems have been doing exactly the opposite: centralize and commercialize people's lives.

 

[Synobun]

What goes unmentioned in your ideal world of relying on family and the "clan" is that you are locked into a very specific lifestyle and output. It is exactly the same as your bureaucratic nightmare except with additional gimmicks like "blood" and "your kind". Those that deviate from the standardized path have always been marginalized. Defining a social net by individuality is a (presumed in my scenario) necessity because everyone is an individual but not everyone acts a certain way (even if that certain way is the norm).

Meaning is secondary to the core issue, I think. As it stands, you need to be a specific shape to fit in a specific hole if you hope to not be thrown to the proverbial wolves. Your purpose in life is irrelevant until the very basics of survival are no longer beholden to a standardized model of intent. A universal basic income allows for survival while anything additional would fall under "meaning" territory, and you cannot find meaning in a society if you are just a case file with a faceless arbiter who can arbitrarily determine whether or not you are entitled to additional protections/benefits.

When you are within the system, you are told what your path is. There is no room for deviating from that path unless you employ the golden bootstraps philosophy. Welfare was indeed just a temporary crutch until you got back on your feet if that's the case, but others are not so fortunate. There are thousands of people who will require welfare for life in some shape or form and there is no instance in which family or clan can somehow cover for that. It does not even need to be a numbers game. It can simply be an existence game. Not everyone has family or clan. I don't. What's my alternative to social security besides suicide in your world?

 

[Valka D'Ur]

Same thing here. If you somehow manage to not spend every dime of your monthly cheque (unlikely given how small it is, but in theory) you're not allowed to save it for an emergency. If you have a sudden cost, you're told to get family to pay for it. They openly assume that you have a support structure that can handle your emergencies. There's also an application where the government will cover an emergency, but they put the situation under scrutiny and then every future cheque will be $25 less until you've paid it off.

Been there. It's absolutely infuriating when some bureaucrat says, "You MUST have family/friends/neighbors to help you/drive you around/give you money/help you move."

Well, no. That's not a requirement. Do excuse me because nearly everyone in my family is dead and the ones who aren't consist of an elderly father in a nursing home due to dementia and an elderly cat who is dependent on me for her food, shelter, medical care, and quality of life.

I have to go through annual reviews, and when that happens one of the questions is that they want to know, down to the penny, how much money I have. If I happen to have a bit extra, I make sure it doesn't show up in my bank account where it can be verified (I'm talking about tens of dollars, not hundreds or thousands). My current case worker would be okay with it, but some of her bosses wouldn't be. When I fill in the amount from my bank account, they ask if there's any more. They want to know about stocks, bonds, other investments, accounts in other banks... and each department has its own rules about how much you're allowed. At least after all these years, I no longer have to go through monthly reviews. And a couple of years ago, when AISH decided to conduct "home visits" (to make sure people weren't suspiciously living beyond their cheques or had an undeclared roommate/partner living with them), I was relieved not to have been one of those chosen. Not that I have an undeclared roommate, but some people look at a bunch of second-hand books and a cat and say, "You can sell that and the cat is an unnecessary expense."

Well, they can go to hell with that attitude. People on welfare and people on disability assistance should be allowed to have some entertainment and quality of life. Yes, the cats have limited my options for housing, as there have been lots of places that would have been nice and a more convenient location but they wouldn't take cats. But there are plenty of days when Maddy is my reason for getting up in the morning, and if not for her, I wouldn't bother.

If you do run into money and want to keep it for an emergency, you're forced to go the "money under the bed" route. Hope you live somewhere safe.

The underground economy has been a thing in Canada for decades, for a variety of reasons. It really ramped up with the imposition of the GST, nearly 30 years ago (it's depressing to think that a whole generation has grown up with this, and I thought it was bad one year when I was selling needlework at a craft fair and a 6-year-old girl asked if there was GST on top of the $2 I was charging for one of the 3-D needlepoint toys I had on offer).

This is insane

and exactly why a good social safety net should form the basis of any modern society

There's a saying: "It doesn't HAVE to make sense. It's government policy."

 

[Bootstoots]

Might it have been a bad idea to do away with the social roles of the family, the clan, the corporation, the union, the party, or the club? Any of those support groups where people were theoretically able to move around and eventually assume any role. And replace them with a social security bureaucracy where the roles are static: there's the overseer and the overseen and they're not going to trade places ever. And with the market also, always the market: politics becomes a think-tank business, clubs and floated in the stock exchange, the corporation becomes a multinational ran "for the stockholders", the clan is evil, the family is a relic, and so on. We're all individuals now, and should be happy about it!

This has not triumphed everywhere and with everyone. Unlikely it ever will. But where it has triumphed, you'll find the same kind of dehumanization. Detached individuals are unhappy.

Social security is a necessary temporary help for people with temporary problems. Social security will never be a solution for people with a lack of meaning to their lives. Nor will paying "basic incomes". The fix would be to have a society with room for socially useful activities that were not commercial nor bureaucratically state-organized. That requires decentralizing power. But all the big ideas to fix social problems have been doing exactly the opposite: centralize and commercialize people's lives.

What goes unmentioned in your ideal world of relying on family and the "clan" is that you are locked into a very specific lifestyle and output. It is exactly the same as your bureaucratic nightmare except with additional gimmicks like "blood" and "your kind". Those that deviate from the standardized path have always been marginalized. Defining a social net by individuality is a (presumed in my scenario) necessity because everyone is an individual but not everyone acts a certain way (even if that certain way is the norm).

Meaning is secondary to the core issue, I think. As it stands, you need to be a specific shape to fit in a specific hole if you hope to not be thrown to the proverbial wolves. Your purpose in life is irrelevant until the very basics of survival are no longer beholden to a standardized model of intent. A universal basic income allows for survival while anything additional would fall under "meaning" territory, and you cannot find meaning in a society if you are just a case file with a faceless arbiter who can arbitrarily determine whether or not you are entitled to additional protections/benefits.

When you are within the system, you are told what your path is. There is no room for deviating from that path unless you employ the golden bootstraps philosophy. Welfare was indeed just a temporary crutch until you got back on your feet if that's the case, but others are not so fortunate. There are thousands of people who will require welfare for life in some shape or form and there is no instance in which family or clan can somehow cover for that. It does not even need to be a numbers game. It can simply be an existence game. Not everyone has family or clan. I don't. What's my alternative to social security besides suicide in your world?

Ideally, of course, we could figure out some way to provide a basic safety net for everyone irrespective of whether they had a family, religious group, club, party, secret society, union, or whatever to rely on. A strong welfare state does not substitute for the systems that actually create meaning, and it isn't designed to. It should complement them so as to provide the means of survival, so that people do not suffer from being deprived from food, shelter, etc.

But I share inno's reaction to the way all of the informal, smaller group social support systems have collapsed. A system where we all exist as atomized individuals, members only of multinational corporations where we work and a large central government, is not a society that is conducive to human happiness. I don't know how we figure out a path back to a society where most people have strong local connections while also maintaining a central welfare state that can provide for the basic needs of everyone. Even the latter thing seems like a tall order these days.

 

[FriendlyFire]

Unless you are willing to impose the death penalty for paupers and debtors, you're never going to avoid the problem of "creating dependency."

I personally don't understand why anyone draws a distinction between dependency on a government benefit, and dependency on charity in the form of a food pantry or a shelter. We decided a long time ago that modern society should not be leaving people to starve and die without food, shelter, and emergency health care - even if what is provided is largely inadequate.

It's insane to me that somehow government directly providing these things is considered bad despite the fact that government can and will bring the force of law against those who refuse to provide these things.

I was thinking about three generations of a family all on welfare, without education school drop outs and dependent on welfare. What can be done about this situation ?
We can link welfare tier to at least getting the recipients to graduating school to give them a chance at employment as well as rewards for doing well at education.
I dont want anyone to starve or become homeless, we are in a first world country and are more then wealthy enough to provide this at a minimum for everyone.

Iam trying to think of how to fix these problems within society and help break the dependency cycle

 

[FriendlyFire]

Been there. It's absolutely infuriating when some bureaucrat says, "You MUST have family/friends/neighbors to help you/drive you around/give you money/help you move."

Well, no. That's not a requirement. Do excuse me because nearly everyone in my family is dead and the ones who aren't consist of an elderly father in a nursing home due to dementia and an elderly cat who is dependent on me for her food, shelter, medical care, and quality of life.

I have to go through annual reviews, and when that happens one of the questions is that they want to know, down to the penny, how much money I have. If I happen to have a bit extra, I make sure it doesn't show up in my bank account where it can be verified (I'm talking about tens of dollars, not hundreds or thousands). My current case worker would be okay with it, but some of her bosses wouldn't be. When I fill in the amount from my bank account, they ask if there's any more. They want to know about stocks, bonds, other investments, accounts in other banks... and each department has its own rules about how much you're allowed. At least after all these years, I no longer have to go through monthly reviews. And a couple of years ago, when AISH decided to conduct "home visits" (to make sure people weren't suspiciously living beyond their cheques or had an undeclared roommate/partner living with them), I was relieved not to have been one of those chosen. Not that I have an undeclared roommate, but some people look at a bunch of second-hand books and a cat and say, "You can sell that and the cat is an unnecessary expense."

Well, they can go to hell with that attitude. People on welfare and people on disability assistance should be allowed to have some entertainment and quality of life. Yes, the cats have limited my options for housing, as there have been lots of places that would have been nice and a more convenient location but they wouldn't take cats. But there are plenty of days when Maddy is my reason for getting up in the morning, and if not for her, I wouldn't bother.


The underground economy has been a thing in Canada for decades, for a variety of reasons. It really ramped up with the imposition of the GST, nearly 30 years ago (it's depressing to think that a whole generation has grown up with this, and I thought it was bad one year when I was selling needlework at a craft fair and a 6-year-old girl asked if there was GST on top of the $2 I was charging for one of the 3-D needlepoint toys I had on offer).


There's a saying: "It doesn't HAVE to make sense. It's government policy."

^ That is pretty standard for Japan, Iam surprise to see Canada is also doing the same things
You think that is strict in Japan they had case worker order that elderly people not use Air conditioner and just use a fan because it was deemed too luxurious and lead to heat stroke death.
Its also a deep part of their culture of work which is necessary to be a full member of society and status of employment. Thats why you have unemployed people pretending to be employed and goto non-existing jobs just to escape the shame associated with being unemployed. And you cant get welfare if you are able bodied

I think checks are fine, because people claiming to be single welfare recipients turn out to not be, and people on welfare have jobs so random checks are made. Its annoying but thats the way it is a few bad actors and a few cheaters makes all the honest people have to put up with new regulations and strict checks.

 

[Valka D'Ur]

^ That is pretty standard for Japan, Iam surprise to see Canada is also doing the same things
You think that is strict in Japan they had case worker order that elderly people not use Air conditioner and just use a fan because it was deemed too luxurious and lead to heat stroke death.

I don't have an air conditioner here, and I don't think anyone does. It would have to be cleared with the manager, and all expenses assumed by the tenant.

One of these years I might get a fan. There's a ceiling fan, but I don't use it since it's in the room beside the kitchen. I discovered that using that fan means the cat's drinking water would evaporate (Maddy's dishes are beside the fridge), so the fan doesn't get used.

I had a hell of a fight last year, though, to get my safety rails moved from my old suite to my new one. I didn't move because I wanted to; there was mold in the old suite and it wasn't safe there anymore. I was told that I'd have to leave them behind, but I pointed out that since they planned to completely gut and redo the suite anyway, why couldn't I have my rails back? Then it was a fight over who would be responsible for sanitizing and re-installing them, and I discovered that the contractor they hired can't count as high as two.

I couldn't go back to my case worker for extra funding because I'd already used that up with having to hire a mover to move the heavy stuff (the rest of it was moved by me, my housekeeper/organizer person, and a helpful neighbor).

So yeah, I guess in Japan they don't care if seniors die of heat stroke, and here I had to fight to get people from the property management company to pay attention to the letters written by the occupational therapy/Aids to Daily Living people, stating that these safety rails were a medical necessity that I couldn't do without.

But a lot depends on the particular social worker. I've had a fantastic one, and I've had a couple who did their best to let me know exactly how little respect they had for me. One of them was determined that I should leave the house with the clothes on my back, maybe a couple of shopping bags of stuff (a few books and other things), and one cat (I had two)... and preferably not the cat. I put my foot down and refused.

She was rather put out that I wasn't willing to allow her to dictate where I lived and how, or even who I associated with. During this time she was actually driving past the house on Saturdays, to see if her colleague (my first caseworker) or her boyfriend were there. It turned out that my first caseworker and I had gone to the same school many years before (she was a few years ahead of me) and knew a lot of the same people. So our sessions were partly personal catch-up visits... which didn't sit well with the second caseworker. Finally I told her that it was my business who I had as visitors, and if my visitors offered to help me pack and move, I'd be an idiot to say no - since I really did need the help.

I think checks are fine, because people claiming to be single welfare recipients turn out to not be, and people on welfare have jobs so random checks are made. Its annoying but thats the way it is a few bad actors and a few cheaters makes all the honest people have to put up with new regulations and strict checks.

Yes, there are some people who are pretty blatant cheats, but then again there are some situations that only look that way and are actually within the rules. I'm allowed to earn a limited amount of extra money before having benefits clawed back, but since I never know from one day to the next if I'm going to be good for anything - even if I can stay awake for any decent length of time.

 

[Yeekim]

Are employment requirements reasonable for access to welfare?

As a rule of thumb, yes.

 

[hobbsyoyo]

I'm starting to think America as a whole was not thought out all the way through.. but I realize that is not going to be a popular point of view

To be fair, the only states in the US that have the 'no-savings allowed' requirement for food stamps are Missouri and Louisiana.

That said, the rest of the welfare system is pretty shoddy here, especially after the reforms of the 90's. Basically the federal government turned a lot of welfare aid over to the states to distribute and many of them have turned it into a bonanza for abstinence programs for college kids and family counseling to push parents towards marriage at the expense of real help for people in need.

If that sounds stupid on the face of it, well yeah, that's the conservative version of welfare.


Then there is the push to put 'pregnancy crisis centers' on every block. The problem with these crisis centers is that majority are not staffed with medical professionals and offer no real services and tons of really bad medical advice (use the rhythm method!) to pregnant mothers. They masquerade as real clinics and the staff will often wear scrubs despite holding no degrees in medicine. They also straight up lie to pregnant women - they convince these women to not get abortions by claiming they will be there to support them with diapers and food but then fail to deliver after the women have delivered their babies.

California has 'clamped' down on these clinics by forcing them to display signs that declare they are not real medical clinics and informing the patients of how to access real medical services (i.e. planned parenthoood). They don't actually shut them down which is why I put the scare quotes on clamped.

The clinics have fought back by saying this infringed on their rights and the case has gone to the Supreme Court.

 

[metalhead]

Ideally, of course, we could figure out some way to provide a basic safety net for everyone irrespective of whether they had a family, religious group, club, party, secret society, union, or whatever to rely on. A strong welfare state does not substitute for the systems that actually create meaning, and it isn't designed to. It should complement them so as to provide the means of survival, so that people do not suffer from being deprived from food, shelter, etc.

But I share inno's reaction to the way all of the informal, smaller group social support systems have collapsed. A system where we all exist as atomized individuals, members only of multinational corporations where we work and a large central government, is not a society that is conducive to human happiness. I don't know how we figure out a path back to a society where most people have strong local connections while also maintaining a central welfare state that can provide for the basic needs of everyone. Even the latter thing seems like a tall order these days.

"Strong local connections" are built up over generations of families staying in the same general place, living the same kind of lifestyle. Everyone invests a lot in the local community because it will form the support structure for generations to come.

I don't think you ever get back to that. When I think about reactionary forces in society, I think these are the types of things they're really missing, the ones that probably hit home the most. I think the real reason rural and small town folks are hostile to cities, and suspicious of education, largely boils down to the fact that those are the sirens which lure their kids to move away from home. They don't like feeling laughed at or looked down on, but what they hate 1000 times more is that their kids are dying to leave them behind.

I don't know how you "fix" that. People had to sacrifice an awful lot of opportunity and autonomy to keep that system functioning. In the end, it was too limiting. I think the great hope for the future lies in technology, and its ability to connect people who otherwise have no such connections. I don't know ultimately how you use that to build virtual communities that people get invested in, but surely in a world that is insisting on people being less connected, having less of a sense of local community, government may be the only answer as far as a substitute for the old "community" that previously made things like government aid less prominent in providing for those in need.

 

[El_Machinae]

I think we shouldn't allow the question.

Working to get money is called work. It's called employment. If a government wants to pay money so that someone works, even in an area that's not easily commodified, it's a job. So call it what it is.

A welfare system shouldn't have a work requirement. It should have a minimum standard, maybe. It should have incentives to get off of the welfare (or at least minimize your cost to the system, if possible). But it shouldn't have a work requirement, because then it's not welfare.

If I get paid money to go to the various community centers around town to pick up the trash outside, it's a job. You might want to call it a subsidized job, and that's fine, subsidies are fine unless they're too distortionary, especially if they're improving the quality of life of people (why else do you have government?) But then don't pretend that it's only the person the benefit. So's the community center. So's everyone who receives a benefit from the community center, even if it's indirect.

 

[Farm Boy]

If we're atomized to the point where "old men don't plant trees*" then we've made choices about the form of society that are bad, not good.

Sure, maybe welfare workfare recipients can be given governmental purpose/community substitutes. Have them reduce the fuel imprint of society by doing manual environmental restoration projects. Or "stock" pollinators everywhere like we do with fish. Physical work improves health and decreases depression, so I'm told. There's no end of meaningful work to be generated by the government to provide community and status commensurate with one's calories.

*Invest in the community because it's yours, and you understand human actions mean something and continue to mean something after you, yourself, are dead.

 

[metalhead]

What if the problem is that we aren't wired that way? That people, generally, aren't going to invest in a community their children have moved on from?

Sure, we can all posit a form of society superior to what we have, but you can't make people care about their community if they have no good reason to, where "good" may be defined strictly in terms of evolutionary imperative to set one's progeny up for survival and, ideally, dominance.

We shouldn't run away from our nature just because it's kind of selfish and crappy. Maybe we can't reasonably expect people as a whole to act responsibly or unselfishly if their own volition. That's kinda the whole reason we have civilization, societies, and laws, innit? We see the collective benefit of raising the standard of living for all people, but realize this is in direct conflict with our animal nature. So we invent "government" to rein in the bad of humanity for the benefit of all.

 

[Farm Boy]

Well, considering the people I see move generally move for economic reasons, as always it's a matter of incentives. Which are deliberate. Weird, I was figuring we were both dealing with how to manage the beast, not run from it. I know the nature is often crappy. It's also frequently exquisitely beautiful and giving, even if that takes time to grow. That means you have to give it time to grow, or it doesn't. Or it has distortions where it was forced to adapt to deficiencies.

 

[metalhead]

Maybe you can't incentivize, if the only true incentive most people will latch onto is providing a community that will provide for their own offspring, and their offspring's offspring. Maybe we need an entirely new paradigm altogether of how we define and invest in "community," and collective fear over what that might look like is why the entire globe seems to be in a state of major upheaval and stress.

 

[Farm Boy]

More likely it's that community has been redefined into something that doesn't work very well already. I don't buy for an instant that offspring is the only way to do the first sentence. In eras of less wonderful technological remedy, even that term itself was broader if you look at actions taken, such as childrearing and responsibility for the young.