It has come to my attention today that, despite my frequent politically charged posts and the proliferation of garbage that passes for news on the 24-hour news networks, many of my friends out there have absolutely no idea what just happened or why our government just shut down. That's okay. No judgment. Here's the breakdown.
Every year Congress adopts a budget. Simple enough. They decide how much money is going to be spent on different government programs for the next 12 months. That funding runs from October 1st through September 30th. If the Congress can't agree (I know, you'd think that never happens, huh? But, yeah, it totally does) on how much money they want to spend on certain government functions by October 1st, they usually agree to just keep funding those programs at the same level as the previous year. Kind of like saying, well, I know our phone budget for last year was $150 a month and we are really hoping to save some money on telephone bills this year, but until we figure out how to do that, we'd better keep planning on spending $150 a month. This is called a "Continuing Resolution." It simply lets the government continue to function until lawmakers can do what we pay them do, which is to compromise on solutions that benefit the greatest number of us, in theory.
For the last several years, a far right faction of the Republican Party has discovered that they can hold the rest of the Congress hostage by refusing to support the bills put forth by their own party or the opposing party unless their very specific demands are met exactly. This happened last year with the continuing resolution, and again with the debt ceiling increase last fall and again in December. Last year the Tea Party members of the GOP were demanding continuing tax breaks for the wealthiest Americans and refusing to allow even a small increase in tax rates for corporations or high income citizens. This year, they want to "defund" Obamacare.
Now, let me be clear. I am not a fan of the Affordable Care Act. I would have preferred a single payer system. In my opinion, requiring health insurance coverage is about 180 degrees from insuring that every American has access to affordable health care. The mere presence of health insurance companies dramatically increases the cost of care by requiring even small doctor's offices to employ a virtual army of claims processors. Insurance companies are very skilled at bleeding money out of the general population, out of Medicaid and out of Medicare. I mean, once your Medicaid claim is processed and paid, do you ever go back and examine the bill and see what the government actually paid ? Of course not. It's not your money. It got paid, and that's all that matters. Every health insurance claim I have had processed in the last 3 years required at least once call to the company to correct an error and insure that I was paying the appropriate bill, or that the doctor's office was paid the correct amount. A ridiculous chunk of my precious time was spent arguing with insurance companies over the last year to convince them that they should, in fact, pay for my health care, which is their job.
I will go on to say that, just because someone has health insurance, doesn't mean they can afford to use it. A $2,500 deductible for someone making $18,000 a year may as well be $100,000. Its more money than they will ever have available to pay for medical care. And before you say it, no, a person making $18,000 a year does NOT automatically qualify for Medicaid just because they are poor by your standard. That is technically above the poverty line and in most scenarios in North Carolina, would not qualify for Medicaid.
However, even with its inherent failures, the ACA also did several really great things, like end the lifetime caps on coverage, do away with denials of coverage based on pre-existing conditions, and make preventative care 100% free to anyone with a policy. For that reason alone, I purchased a policy. Free physical, free pap smear, free mammogram, free birth control? Bring it on, Obama! The law is flawed, terribly flawed, but it was a grand compromise designed to get the most benefit for the greatest number of people while still managing to pass both houses of Congress, which seems to take a friggin act of Congress lately!
So, the GOP says they hate the ACA and they ain't havin' it! The House is held by a GOP majority who says that the only way a continuing resolution is getting through their chamber is if we fully strip the funding provisions for the ACA. Even if this could get through the Democratic held Senate (which they know it can't), it would never be signed into law by President Obama, so really, it's just a great big game of grandstanding. Which is great. Politicians grandstand all the time. They grandstand until they come close to the brink, and then they do what we pay them do. They think and discuss and compromise and come up with a solution. But not these guys.
When their first proposal was turned down, they countered today with a provision that would have allowed your employer to claim a "conscientious" objection to your being provided with birth control. I'm sorry. Wait. What? You want my employer to be able to decide whether or not my health insurance policy will pay for my birth control? Seriously? Is this 1913? Quick, all the 20-50 year old women in the room who think birth control should be restricted, raise your hand! Anybody? Nobody? No? Didn't think so.
The GOP is going to have to get this rogue bunch of Tea Partiers under control before they sink the entire nation. And they certainly better have a quick Come-To-Jesus session with them to explain that their overarching strategy this election cycle is to overcome the appearance that they are waging a war on women. Sure looks like a war on women to me. You better keep your grubby paws off my birth control GOP, cause Lord knows I can't afford to have more children right now, and you sure as hell don't want to pay for them if I do. Sweet Baby Jesus! I cannot wait to go register voters.
Monday, September 30, 2013
Monday, September 2, 2013
From the tiniest voice, "Help! Help!"
I don't consider myself to be a radical. I don't think that my values, while more liberal than some of my friends, are so far to the left that people think, "Wow, look at that wacko. There she goes spouting off her crazy talk again." In fact, I'd like to think that I'm pretty middle of the road.
I think we need welfare reform. The current system does allow some abuses to happen, although they are not nearly as prevalent as the right-wing media would have you believe. Why is it that we still have more than 20 different kinds of "welfare" (think food stamps, cash assistance, social security, disability, Section 8 housing, Medicaid, WIC, daycare vouchers, tax credits, etc.) administered by a bakers dozen of government agencies, all with different income requirements? Why do we require every needy family to meet with administrators from each of these separate agencies to apply and then recertify for benefits every year, or multiple times a year in many cases? Why can't we simplify this process? It wouldn't be hard to create a singular federal form to apply for government benefits, similar to the way the FAFSA allows you to apply for both Federal and State education assistance, to apply for all available government assistance programs. One application should link you with all of the programs for which you qualify. And then, shudder to think, we could assign actual social workers who could help actually lift families out of poverty!
I think we need tax reform. If my congressman can't fill out his taxes without the assistance of a paid professional, the code needs to be simplified. One of the most interesting things I learned on my recent trip abroad is that filing taxes in France takes all of about 90 seconds. The income data is electronically submitted by employers. Taxpayers log on to an online system, answer a few questions, confirm the information submitted by their employer and then, press send. That's it. Done. I want that.
I want women to make their own health care decisions. Whether you agree with their decision or not, it is theirs to make. Whether or not you choose to use birth control, it is their decision to make, not yours. You certainly shouldn't have to resort to back-room political side-stepping to restrict women's access to abortions. In case you haven't ever read anything, ever, it is damn near impossible to force a women who is opposed to giving birth, to give birth, even if that resistance means that she dies in the process of seeking out a dirty, back-room abortion. Conversely, if you give women unfettered access to birth control and education, the number of abortions decrease substantially, go figure.
I think we should legalize marijuana and end the costly and unjust war on drugs. I don't smoke pot, but the people I know who do, aren't criminals and I prefer that my tax dollars not be spent housing and feeding them, when they are perfectly capable of doing that themselves.
I think we should scale way, way, way, way, way, way, way, way back on the amount of money we spend on the NSA, CIA, FBI, Army, Navy, Airforce, Marines, Homeland Security, etc, etc, etc. The truth is, we are pretty much the safest and most over-prepared country on the face of the earth. Most of the money we force down the throat of this plethora of government agencies serves only to line the pockets of shareholders in major companies supporting the war machine. If you believe in small government, lets start the shrinking process here.
I think we need to reform the way we provide subsidies to big Pharma, big Agro, and big Oil. If you gross more than $1 Billion a year, you don't need a government subsidy...for anything. Can I get a' Amen!?
I think we need to increase mandatory paid maternity leave, require paid paternity leave, and pay for pre-k for working single moms and families with two working parents. At some point, we need to recognize that there is value in providing care. Just because it's "women's work" doesn't mean we should continue to devalue it. If we valued child-rearing the same way we valued "stock-rearing," this nation would be a far, far better place to live.
I think we can find the funding to pay elementary school teachers at least as much as I pay my plumber. Lord knows they put up with just as much shit. And, if our economy has evolved so that nearly every job in the workforce requires an advanced degree, we should pay for 2-4 year college educations for everyone and ensure that our entire workforce doesn't start working with $50,000 in debt before they ever purchase a house or a car or have a baby or a major medical procedure.
While we're at it, we ought to provide universal health care. Doing so will create thousands of new jobs, and stop the hemorrhaging of money from the working class into the pockets of the health insurance industry. Obamacare is crap. The private health insurance industry has done absolutely nothing to control costs and the entire system is designed to funnel even more money from the working, middle-class in this country into the pockets of the rich and further widen the expanse that exists between the classes.
I think we should provide an exemption so that teenagers can be paid a lower minimum wage than working adults. If you, as an adult, work full-time at McDonald's or Wal-Mart to support your family, you should gross more than $1,055 a month and my tax dollars shouldn't have to pay for your food. You should be paid an actual living wage for laboring 40 hours a week. But, if you are a 16 year old teenager living at home with your parents, I'm sorry, but I think you can scrape by on $5.00 an hour instead of $7.00. Seriously, it's not gonna kill you.
While we're talking about wages, how about if we stop subsidizing billion dollar profits for companies who pay their workforce next to nothing. If 20% of your workforce qualifies for "entitlement" programs because you keep their wages so low, your company should pay a hefty tax penalty to cover the cost of those programs.
I think we should expand the earned income credit (the exact opposite of what was done in North Carolina this year when the state legislature abolished the earned income tax credit) and pay it to workers weekly instead of paying it out at the end of the year in one lump sum. Give people money to live on, money to support their families, to buy groceries and pay their electric bill instead of vacation money or tattoo money or flat-screen-tv-money.
Am I spouting off crazy talk? Have I spewed gross inaccuracies that are begging for correction? If so, please enlighten me with your comments so that I can reconssider my positions. Whether you agree with every point I make or not, surely you can agree that I do not spout off from some uninformed, entrenched, ideological viewpoint. These are well-reasoned arguments that, according to the current political paradigm, should not be allowed to all occupy the same brain. Most people I know do not easily fit into a solidly "conservative" or "liberal" box, which is itself a major national problem that we must someday address. Not that we need to all fit more nicely into the two available boxes, but that we should have far more boxes to choose from.
There are many, many topics I have not covered here, like the abolition of the estate tax in North Carolina, the inability of the US Congress to reach an agreement about imigration reform, civil rights of the LGBT community, the wholesale seizure of public water assets for the sole purpose of later privatizing the system, large scale environmental cover-ups to support fracking, etc. There seem to be so many directions to which I can shift my focus that I cannot narrow it down and write about just one thing. There are so many public misinformation campaigns going at once. There are so many problems to solve. There is so much injustice, and I am, after all, just one person. One person, with a very tiny voice, and a family and a job and very little time for protesting, or calling representatives, or writing nasty letters. I sure hope someone hears this tiny little voice, yelling out, like the Mayor to Horton, and hoping that someone hears us, down here in a tiny small town in a rural southern state, yelling, "Help, Help!"
Institutional Failures
The world's major religions share many important teachings, the most important of which is that we should give to the poor. Jesus, Buddha. Zoroastra and Ghandi all advocated living a simple life with few physical possessions and giving all that one did not need for survival to others. None of them required that we first evaluate the merit or virtue of the recipient. None of the scriptures say that we should give to the poor, but only if they are able to first demonstrate that they are really working hard to pull themselves up by their own bootstraps.
In the US, we responded to these commandments by establishing a social safety net in the form of Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, SNAP (Food Stamps), Public Housing & Section 8 rental assistance, unemployment and TANF (welfare). We created these programs to support the needy because we consider ourselves to be a moral society that does not want to see our brethren suffer and die in a land of plenty and excess.
The problem is that these systems, as currently designed, disincentivize work and increased wages. This only feeds the public perception that the poor are lazy and undeserving of our assistance. In truth, there are very few people who desire to subsist only on handouts from the government. This is not a pleasant way to live. But, the programs are designed by people who have never had to use them, by bureaucrats who fail to see how one program interacts with another.
The poor, especially the working poor, must always work to keep their earnings below the levels set by the various programs they collect so that their benefits will continue, so that they do not work themselves further into poverty. If a person is physically disabled and in desperate need of Medicaid coverage, he must apply for Social Security Disability and, once receiving that benefit, must keep his earnings less than about $500 a month. Failure to do so could mean a complete loss of lifesaving medical care. But, what if this person wants to work, at a desk, using a brain that is not so disabled? Our system doesn't allow for that, and that is a travesty.
A working single mother offered a $.50 raise by her employer must be cognizant of the fact that her raise is going to increase her bring-home pay by less than $75.00 per month, but could result in a combined reduction of more than $100 a month in her non-cash benefits. So, she is likely to refuse a raise and remain on government programs so that she doesn't have to figure out how to make dinner with $25.00 less in groceries. This is not her fault. This is an institutional failure, a failure of the programs' designers to see how the programs are utilized in the real world.
The Earned Income Tax Credit is one of the most targeted and beneficial of our safety net programs. It is so unfortunate that NC's state legislature decided to do away with this program this year instead of finding a way for it to function in a more useful manner. It is unfortunate that our national leaders decided years ago to do away with the Advanced Earned Income Credit which allowed a wage-earner to choose to receive the tax refund incrementally over the course of the year. This again represents a failure on the part of our leadership to recognize what makes a difference for people in the real world or the way one program affects another. Currently, families can receive as much as $7,000 in EITC tax refund. This money, when added to an annual salary of $20,000 could mean a substantial increase in the family's quality of life, except that it is given in one lump sum instead of distributed over the course of the year. Not only does this fail to account for the gigantic exercise in self control you are asking of a person who has struggled for a year to make ends meet, choosing to buy bread and milk instead of paying an electric bill, who now has 4-5 months worth of take-home pay sitting in a bank account, but it also fails to account for the fact that having such a large sum of money in the bank is likely going to mean that he is suddenly disqualified from receiving any other public benefits until the money is spent. He is forced to spend this money on large purchases in a short time which does not overall increase his family's quality of life for the coming year. Again, this is not his fault, it is a failure of the system.
It doesn't have to be this way. The system could be fixed. We could take a moment and put some real thought into the design of our safety net. We could have a conversation about what we expect our safety net to provide for people. What is its purpose? What are we trying to accomplish? We could find a way to incentivize work and stop penalizing people for earning a higher wage. We could find a way to wean people off of the safety net programs without decreasing their quality of life in the process. We could streamline the administration of programs so that there is less paperwork and more person-to-person social work. We could pay a social worker to give a family the resources that will lift them out of poverty. We could help them to find those elusive bootstraps.
"If anyone has material possessions and sees his brother in need but has no pity on him, how can the love of God be in him? Dear children, let us not love with words or tongue but with actions and in truth." I John 3:17-18 (Christianity)
The problem is that these systems, as currently designed, disincentivize work and increased wages. This only feeds the public perception that the poor are lazy and undeserving of our assistance. In truth, there are very few people who desire to subsist only on handouts from the government. This is not a pleasant way to live. But, the programs are designed by people who have never had to use them, by bureaucrats who fail to see how one program interacts with another.
The poor, especially the working poor, must always work to keep their earnings below the levels set by the various programs they collect so that their benefits will continue, so that they do not work themselves further into poverty. If a person is physically disabled and in desperate need of Medicaid coverage, he must apply for Social Security Disability and, once receiving that benefit, must keep his earnings less than about $500 a month. Failure to do so could mean a complete loss of lifesaving medical care. But, what if this person wants to work, at a desk, using a brain that is not so disabled? Our system doesn't allow for that, and that is a travesty.
A working single mother offered a $.50 raise by her employer must be cognizant of the fact that her raise is going to increase her bring-home pay by less than $75.00 per month, but could result in a combined reduction of more than $100 a month in her non-cash benefits. So, she is likely to refuse a raise and remain on government programs so that she doesn't have to figure out how to make dinner with $25.00 less in groceries. This is not her fault. This is an institutional failure, a failure of the programs' designers to see how the programs are utilized in the real world.
The Earned Income Tax Credit is one of the most targeted and beneficial of our safety net programs. It is so unfortunate that NC's state legislature decided to do away with this program this year instead of finding a way for it to function in a more useful manner. It is unfortunate that our national leaders decided years ago to do away with the Advanced Earned Income Credit which allowed a wage-earner to choose to receive the tax refund incrementally over the course of the year. This again represents a failure on the part of our leadership to recognize what makes a difference for people in the real world or the way one program affects another. Currently, families can receive as much as $7,000 in EITC tax refund. This money, when added to an annual salary of $20,000 could mean a substantial increase in the family's quality of life, except that it is given in one lump sum instead of distributed over the course of the year. Not only does this fail to account for the gigantic exercise in self control you are asking of a person who has struggled for a year to make ends meet, choosing to buy bread and milk instead of paying an electric bill, who now has 4-5 months worth of take-home pay sitting in a bank account, but it also fails to account for the fact that having such a large sum of money in the bank is likely going to mean that he is suddenly disqualified from receiving any other public benefits until the money is spent. He is forced to spend this money on large purchases in a short time which does not overall increase his family's quality of life for the coming year. Again, this is not his fault, it is a failure of the system.
It doesn't have to be this way. The system could be fixed. We could take a moment and put some real thought into the design of our safety net. We could have a conversation about what we expect our safety net to provide for people. What is its purpose? What are we trying to accomplish? We could find a way to incentivize work and stop penalizing people for earning a higher wage. We could find a way to wean people off of the safety net programs without decreasing their quality of life in the process. We could streamline the administration of programs so that there is less paperwork and more person-to-person social work. We could pay a social worker to give a family the resources that will lift them out of poverty. We could help them to find those elusive bootstraps.
"If anyone has material possessions and sees his brother in need but has no pity on him, how can the love of God be in him? Dear children, let us not love with words or tongue but with actions and in truth." I John 3:17-18 (Christianity)
"There will always be poor people in the land. Therefore I command you to be openhanded toward your brothers and toward the poor and needy in your land." Deuteronomy 15:11 (Judaism)
"Do you know who really rejects the faith? That is the one who mistreats the orphans. And does not advocate the feeding of the poor." Quran 107:1-7 (Islam)
"One may amass wealth with hundreds of hands but one should also distribute it with thousands of hands. If someone keeps all that he accumulates for himself and does not give it to others the hoarded wealth will eventually prove to be the cause of ruin." Atharva Veda 3: 24-25 (Hinduism)
"Possessions are ephemeral and essenceless
Know this and give them generously to monks,
To brahmins, to the poor, and to your friends:
Beyond there is no greater friend than gift." Bhikshuni Thubten Chodron, from 'How to Free Your Mind: Tara the Liberator' (Buddhismn)
Know this and give them generously to monks,
To brahmins, to the poor, and to your friends:
Beyond there is no greater friend than gift." Bhikshuni Thubten Chodron, from 'How to Free Your Mind: Tara the Liberator' (Buddhismn)
Saturday, August 24, 2013
Narci-Citizen
Stephen Colbert coined a phrase earlier this year, well, a word really, on his popular segment, "The Word". The "Word" was 'narcicitizenship'. He, of course, meant this to be comedic, but I think the word conjures up and encapsulates a very accurate picture of what has developed in the American consciousness in recent years. It's all about me. We don't need welfare programs because if other people just worked as hard as I do, they wouldn't need it. We don't need single-payer health care because if other people would just eat and exercise and buy insurance the way I do, they would have adequate medical care. We don't need gun control laws because I am a responsible gun owner and I want to buy whatever crazy ass kind of automatic weapon I can dream up, and because I will be responsible with it, everyone should have a right to have one. It's all about me. I am the center of the American Universe. Everyone should be a straight, white, middle-aged, card-carrying, picket-fenced homeowner, and if they would just get on the bandwagon, everything else would fall neatly into place without the big, bad, mean ol' government interfering in my life!
Obviously this worldview leaves out droves of Americans who would love to eat more nutritiously and go to the gym, see a primary care physician every time they feel sick, and drive their kids to church every Sunday, if only they could afford to. It fails to even make an attempt to understand the everyday experiences of more than 16 million Americans living in poverty. It fails to contemplate that another person's experience might be different from our own. And the only cure is for us to educate people and connect people. We must put the "narcicitizen" in a room with the impoverished, inner-city, teen mom who, despite her predicament, scored a 1400 on her SAT and now can't figure out how to go to college and raise her child at the same time. Or with the veteran who was doing just fine until he came home to a broken economy that doesn't want to employ him. Or with the 75 year old retiree who worked, saved, bought and paid for his home, and who has now lost everything because his wife has Alzheimer's. We have to connect with each other. We have to foster compassion and empathy. We must show our fellow citizens who are so vigorously supporting "entitlement reform" that those entitlement programs affect people who aren't lazy or incompetent or immoral. The future of our country is going to depend on our ability to do so. Reach out. Speak to your neighbor. Sit on a park bench next to someone who looks just a little outside of your demographic and strike up a conversation. Get of your bubble! Who knows, you might just make a friend or, better yet, change a life.
Sunday, January 27, 2013
Wayward teens
Young people need mentors. They need guidance. They need
more than their parents can usually offer. In fact, I think they are
genetically predisposed to take any action that is in direct conflict with any
advice their parents have given them. But they will listen to a mentor. They
will latch on to another adult with whom they feel can more closely relate. In
a bygone era, when people lived primarily in villages, or even in a more recent
time when more extended families tended to live in the same town on neighboring
farms, this role would have been filled by an aunt or uncle, or even older
cousin or next door neighbor. A young person who wasn’t quite making their own
way in the world would have easy access to a plethora of grown-ups who were
willing to introduce them to a trade, point them in the direction of a career,
coach them in their personal finances and even in their personal relationships.
I’m
afraid that the more we connect with each other in the virtual realm, the less
we really connect with each other in a real and physical sense, and our young
people are suffering for it. When they buck against all of the advice their
parents (assuming they have parents who care enough to offer advice) are trying
to give, they’re so disconnected from their extended families and community
that their unmet needs continue to go unnoticed. And as they flounder, unhappy
with the advice their parents are giving them and unable to connect with
another mature individual, they soak up the advice of other teens who also lack
any real level of mature guidance. Eventually we find that they are
20-somethings with no sense of what life is like in the real world, no ability
to manage money or prioritize tasks and goals, and absolutely no idea who they
are or what they want to be when they grow up.
I feel
strongly that this calls for a very concerted effort in our community. We, as
community members, need to reach out to the teens in our local high schools.
They need to feel important. They need to recognize that they have value. They
need to be taught that there is value in working for a living and contributing
to their community. They need to be shown how to manage money. They need to be
taught simple tasks like how to fill out a job application, draft a resume,
speak with a manager, interview for a job. They need to be shown that they have
an inherent self worth that is not tied to anyone else’s perception of
themselves. Our girls need to be shown that their self worth is not tied
directly to their sexuality and that they are valued without making themselves
into objects for the sexual gratification of others.
I wish
I could take them all in – every one of the 12-15 year old girls on my Facebook
profile who are trying so desperately to be women already, who think that the
measure of their value is directly proportionate to the amount of eye-liner
they wear. I wish I could take every one of them under my proverbial wing, to
coach them and teach them all the things no one was able to teach me at 14 …
before they find themselves in the same position I was in at 15.
Friday, December 14, 2012
Meaningful Action to Prevent Tragedies
My heart absolutely breaks for the parents and families of the 20 children killed in Connecticut today. The grief must be absolutely unimaginable. It is hard to deny that these mass shooting events have been on the rise for the last fifteen years. Just this week there was another mass shooting at a mall in Washington state. There have been 9 mass shootings in the US since January, 2011, according to Think Progress.
We, as a nation, are to blame for these tragedies. We acquiesced. We allowed our elected officials to systematically dismantle the nation's mental health facilities. Counseling facilities and inpatient mental health facilities have been closed, one by one over the last 15 years or so. Funding has been withdrawn. The Medicaid rolls have been cut. And this is the result. This is what happens when we lose compassion, when we tell people to "pull themselves up by their bootstraps." Unfortunately, there are people in our society whose boot straps just aren't strong enough to hold them up. They snap.
If you really want to help prevent these tragedies, if you really want to see "meaningful action" taken, as President Obama called for today, demand that your government begin reinstating our mental health system. We must provide in-patient care for those who are too unstable to function on their own, or who need more extensive therapies than can be provided with outpatient care. We must provide outpatient care, free of charge, to those who need it and cannot afford it.
Call your representative. Call your senator. Write to them. Write letters for the editor of your local paper. Call on them to provide funding for mental health treatment. And if you know someone who has been struggling with depression or sadness, take a moment from the constant hustle and bustle of your life to call them up and tell them how important they are in your life. That they mean something to you. That you love them.
And keep the families of those 28 victims today in your prayers. God knows, they need it.
We, as a nation, are to blame for these tragedies. We acquiesced. We allowed our elected officials to systematically dismantle the nation's mental health facilities. Counseling facilities and inpatient mental health facilities have been closed, one by one over the last 15 years or so. Funding has been withdrawn. The Medicaid rolls have been cut. And this is the result. This is what happens when we lose compassion, when we tell people to "pull themselves up by their bootstraps." Unfortunately, there are people in our society whose boot straps just aren't strong enough to hold them up. They snap.
If you really want to help prevent these tragedies, if you really want to see "meaningful action" taken, as President Obama called for today, demand that your government begin reinstating our mental health system. We must provide in-patient care for those who are too unstable to function on their own, or who need more extensive therapies than can be provided with outpatient care. We must provide outpatient care, free of charge, to those who need it and cannot afford it.
Call your representative. Call your senator. Write to them. Write letters for the editor of your local paper. Call on them to provide funding for mental health treatment. And if you know someone who has been struggling with depression or sadness, take a moment from the constant hustle and bustle of your life to call them up and tell them how important they are in your life. That they mean something to you. That you love them.
And keep the families of those 28 victims today in your prayers. God knows, they need it.
Sunday, September 30, 2012
Entitlement Reform: A proposal to begin a conversation about meaningful reforms and end political lipservice
It came to my attention last week that there are a great number of people in this country who have absolutely no idea how the government’s welfare programs work. I’m not entirely sure why this surprised me so much. Probably because all of my life, nearly everyone I knew was on some form of welfare. It is nearly impossible for me to fathom what it would be like to grow up in a family that knew no poverty. But, having learned that there are many of you who aren’t familiar with these programs, I find myself called to educate you about what these programs are, how they function and how we might improve them without punishing the poor for being poor. This is a long one, but I hope you will stick with it and hear me out. There really is valuable information here.
I get pretty amped up over the issue of entitlement reform, in the same way that my mother used to get amped up about welfare reform in the 90’s. Even Bill Clinton, whom I admire tremendously, did no favors for the welfare system with his reforms. Sure, he greatly reduced the number of people receiving benefits, but that is not because they were lifted out of poverty. For many people removed from the welfare rolls, their plight was made much, much worse. His “welfare reform” has evolved in recent political discussions to be called “entitlement reform”, meant to encompass any benefit passed along to individuals through the federal or state government, expanding the commonly thought-of welfare reform to include reforms to Medicare, social security, student loans and grants, and unemployment insurance.
It will likely surprise many people who read my blog to learn that I am not entirely against “entitlement” reform. In fact, I agree completely that the system is broken and requires reforms. I just disagree entirely with the reforms that have been proffered thus far by politicians who have no idea how the programs work, who they actual benefit, or how to potentially make them function better. I also have a problem with the political conversation in this country which requires politicians to vehemently bash “entitlement spending” or bash their opponent’s plans for “entitlement reform” without ever offering a single detail of how those reforms might take shape. The fact that they continue to offer-up “entitlement reform” as a campaign catch-phrase in a context that has the average American conjure up an image of Reagan’s infamous Welfare Queen (Google it, seriously), while really planning to gut programs like education grants and Medicare, programs which greatly benefit the middle class is not just wrong, it is downright deceitful. It is the reason that no one in this country can seem to have an intelligent conversation about this election. Instead we all stand around and shout at our TVs, or watch late night comics make fun of Romney’s latest “foot-in-mouth” episode, neither of which are adding anything intelligent to the political discussion. The truth is that there is need for, and room for, so-called entitlement spending in our nation. And the programs can work if we can decide to use them more wisely. By way of example, I offer my own story.
When I was 14, I got pregnant. It happened. I had to deal with it. I decided to have the baby and raise him myself. Now, being a mother at 15 meant that I needed a LOT of help. A lot of that help came from my family and even more from the father’s family. But a great deal has come from the government, both federal and state. It would have been impossible for me to navigate the path that has led me into my current profession and out of poverty without these programs. They were essential to my journey, and not because I was lazy or refused to work, but because I did work, hard, to lift my family out of poverty.
At 15, I couldn’t even drive, and state law restricted the number of hours I could work in a given work week. My mother was not available to support me. I applied for TANF (Temporary Assistance for Needed Families). This program used to be called AFDC and is what most people think of when you say “welfare.” I got a check every month for $253 to be used for whatever I needed it for. There is no mandate that says it has to be used to pay utilities, or that you can only use it to buy clothes at Goodwill, but it is a miniscule amount of money and it is up to the family to use it wisely. There are limits, imposed under the Clinton administration, that require TANF recipients to be either employed, enrolled in school, or actively seeking employment. And even under those circumstances the amount of time a person can receive the benefits is limited to 2 consecutive years, and 5 years in total over your lifetime.
I also applied for Medicaid, a North Carolina state program which is partially funded with federal dollars. Medicaid is different from Medicare, which we all pay for and expect to receive when we retire or become disabled. Medicaid covered my medical expenses so that I could have good prenatal care. I continued to be covered by Medicaid until I turned 21, at which time I was picked up by my employer’s health insurance. My children are currently covered under NC Health Choice, a modified version of Medicaid that requires small co-pays for services they receive. For the last 3 years, I paid a $50 premium per year per child for them to be covered. We pay $1 for prescriptions and $3 for doctor visits. These co-pays could stand to be modified. In truth, I could well afford to pay as much as $20 per doctor visit and $10 for prescriptions. In my opinion, the co-pays should be calculated on a sliding scale based on income.
I also applied for WIC, a program offered through the US Department of Agriculture which provides specific, essential grocery items free of charge for pregnant women and to families with children under 5. This program serves two purposes. It provides foods that contain vital nutrients to pregnant women and children to try to improve their health, and it allows the federal government to subsidize dairy farmers, a task our federal government has loved very much over the last century (anybody remember government cheese?). I received three WIC vouchers per month while I was pregnant that provided me with milk, eggs, cheese, peanut butter, cereal, juice and dry beans. Once Dylan was born our WIC vouchers also provided formula, rice cereal, and baby food in addition to the other items. I continued to receive WIC benefits until Daniel was 5 years old, 10 years altogether. In order to receive WIC, the kids and I had to meet with a nurse every three months to be weighed, have our iron tested and receive nutrition counseling. I understand that the program has been expanded in recent years to also offer several fresh produce items, canned tuna, yogurt and a variety of other foods. It is one of the few government programs to experience such expansions in the last decade.
We also received food stamps, now catchily called SNAP by the federal government. Unlike the WIC program, food stamps can be used to purchase any grocery item regardless of its brand, cost or nutritional value. Food stamps cannot be used to purchase household goods such as toiletries, sandwich baggies, paper towels, etc., nor can they be used to purchase hot foods from the deli. It’s hard for me to recall the amount of my food stamp benefit because it changed every time I switched jobs or got a raise at work. But I believe it ranged over time from about $300 per month to a low of about $150 per month before it ended completely because of my pay increases. Unlike the TANF program, there are no requirements that the head of household be working or seeking work and no limits on the amount of time you can receive food stamps. Also, the amount of benefit received is not calculated on gross wages as other programs are, but are calculated on gross wages minus certain housing and childcare costs which makes far more people eligible to participate in the program.
We also received, and still do receive, childcare vouchers for assistance with daycare expenses. In our area in Western North Carolina, childcare costs average about $500 per month per child for children 1-5 and are even more expensive during the first year of life. The childcare voucher system is set up so that families are expected to contribute a percentage of their monthly gross income toward their childcare and there is a requirement that the parent(s) be working or enrolled in school before even being placed on the waiting list. Luckily for me, there was more funding for this program in the 90’s, the waiting lists were not terribly long, and I had a priority placement on the list because I was a high school student. Had it not been for the assistance provided in this program, had I been required to pay for the full cost of daycare for Dylan and Daniel, it would have been impossible for me to finish school or get a full-time job. Funding for childcare subsidies has declined dramatically over the course of the last 10 years. If a single mother, or even a young two-parent family, has to stay home with a child instead of working they are automatically going to be dependent on other government welfare programs. Let’s be real about the figures here. A single mother working a full-time job at $8.00 per hour is going to gross $320 per week and probably bring home about $280. That means her real income is $1,120 per month, when you subtract the cost of her childcare, her actual income is $620. Can we really justify asking her to sacrifice 40 hours per week with her child to bring home $620? Heaven forbid she be the mother of two children! Then she could spend her entire month working to bring home $120. For many women, it makes much more sense to stay home with their children and draw income from other available government programs. What incentive do they have to work without assistance with childcare costs?
I was also fortunate to benefit greatly from the federal government’s Section 8 rental housing program administered by the Department of Housing and Urban Development. Section 8, now called the Rental Voucher program, assisted with my monthly rent payments. Their formula is a little difficult to explain, but stick with me and we’ll give it a go. HUD says that the average family should spend no more than 30% of its monthly income on rent. So, if you are that single working mother grossing $320/week, you should be spending no more than $426 per month on your housing costs. At the time I was receiving Section 8, the minimum wage was much lower and I was actually making $6.00 per hour. So my 30% contribution was only $320 per month. HUD determines, using a complex statistical formula, what the “market” or reasonable expected rent is for the Asheville Metropolitan Area for houses of different sizes. If you are a family with 2 children of the same sex, you qualify for a 2 bedroom house and the current market rent for that house in the Asheville area is currently $704. When I was receiving benefits 10 years ago that was only $585 and I’m glad to see they have increased it to more closely match the current market. So, HUD will pay up to $704 - $426, or $278 for our example mom. She can go out into the market and find any house she wants to rent so long as the landlord accepts Section 8 and the total rent is less than $704. This was, and is, an excellent program. It assists needy families with housing, a basic human right as defined by the UN Declaration of Human Rights, and puts money back into the hands of landowners who paid the taxes to support the program in the first place. Unfortunately, funding for this program saw drastic cuts under the Bush administration, which have not been restored by President Obama’s administration. The waiting list for Section 8 assistance in Asheville has grown so large that they have stopped accepting applications altogether. This is a serious problem, especially when coupled with the fallout from the foreclosure crisis which has forced many families back into rental housing, increasing demand on the market. And in an economy where new construction is extremely limited, the supply of rental housing is not increasing, meaning that rents are going up while assistance shrivels. For our hypothetical single mother making $1,120 per month to shell out even $650 per month to rent a two-bedroom trailer, cheap even by HUD standards, is going to severely limit her ability to provide even the most basic of necessities for her child, and if she is paying $500 per month for her childcare costs, she is already in the hole without spending a single penny on electricity, food, gas or clothing. The solution for many young families has been multigenerational housing. In other words, young families are simply moving in with the folks who are now having to struggle to support their twenty-something’s, their grandchildren, and themselves.
So, now you know all the ways that this teenage, single-mother has mooched off the system for the last 15 years to live lavishly, sometimes even managing to pay the electric bill just before it got shut off, often albeit with the help of Eblin charities. My TANF benefits ended before I graduated from high school because of the time limits imposed, and I was not eligible to apply for Section 8 until I was 18, so I never received both of those benefits at the same time. But, on average, I was receiving roughly $1,200 per month in benefits from the state and federal government (about $300 in food stamps, $250 in Section 8/TANF benefits, $400 in daycare assistance, $100 in WIC vouchers, and about $150/month in health care expenses for myself and for the boys).
I mentioned earlier that there are some smart ways to reform the system. The biggest is in the administration of these programs. They are so splintered and scattered. I had a separate social worker for each and every program. And each program has its own income requirements and calculations for benefits. Each program has a different cycle for recertification and its own set of paperwork to be filled out either annually, semi-annually or quarterly. For years, I had to miss work at least 10 times per year to take paystubs to my various social workers. This may not seem like much, but it means that each one of these social workers, six of them for me, had to send me a notice in the mail, schedule an appointment with me, sit down with me to review my information and have me sign their forms and disclosures, always the same forms I had signed the year before and the year before that and the year before that. They would each tally up my income, notate the difference from the year before, adjust my benefit and send me on my way. At no time were any of them allowed to actually be social workers! They were, and are still, paper pushers whose job is not to help lift needy families out of poverty and off of government programs, but instead to simply tabulate figures, file forms and move on to the next in line. Additionally, it is precisely this splintering of information that allows for people to work the system. Some programs require you to be under a specific gross income threshold, some simply calculate your benefit based on your income, and still others are based on your net income after payment of some basic expenses. Having data collected separately by each program means that individuals can selectively limit which information is provided to each social worker because there is no communication or cross-checking between them.
So, why not reform this system. I see no reason why these programs for the needy couldn’t be consolidated under one umbrella in much the same fashion as the Federal Government restructured a variety of federal agencies under the umbrella of Homeland Security under the Bush Administration. Why require every single recipient to meet with 3 or 6 or 10 different social workers every year to supply each of them with the same information? Why not assign one social worker to the family. Allow that social worker to retrieve the family’s income tax information in the same way that the FAFSA application for college grants does? Design the computer system so that once the tax information is populated from the IRS website into the Social Services program, all of the assistance that the individual or family is entitled to under available Federal and State programs is generated automatically, in one location. Now, this single social worker has done in minutes what it previously took 6 different social workers 6 hours in total to do. How much good can this one social worker do for this family by spending another hour talking about available education programs, job-training programs, parenting classes, early head-start programs for children, and generally supporting the family to encourage and lift them out of poverty? This is what social workers went to school to do. This is what they want to do. We should let them. Simply yanking the benefits away from people and telling them to get out in the world and make a go of it is impractical, ignorant, and lacks compassion. If they were capable of doing so, they wouldn’t have needed these programs in the first place! In addition, consolidating the acquisition and housing of this required information serves to save the federal and state governments in the costs of building space, computer equipment, paper and staffing costs.
Poverty is a cruel cycle which is so very difficult to break out of. Are there people who take advantage of the system, living off of government programs without trying to lift themselves up? Sure, of course there are. But they are not the norm. The vast majority of people using these programs are working parents making less than $25,000 per year. It is not that they are unemployed and lazy for the most part, it is that they lack the skills, education or opportunity to earn more money. (I will refrain from starting my diatribe about the reality that real wages have fallen over the course of the last 30-40 years and every single working family now has to work harder and longer with two wage-earners to sustain the same standard of living previously achieved by having only a single wage earner in every house, but it is worth at least noting.) So let’s talk about real entitlement reform. The kind that could result in meaningful change, in a reduction of the actual poverty rate instead of just putting people out on the street, without food, housing or childcare and telling them to pull themselves up by their tattered bootstraps and get moving.
I am lucky. I was blessed with excellent genes and a mother who taught me to think critically and act with compassion. I have worked so hard to pull myself and my children out of poverty and break that cycle. And for the most part I have succeeded. While we aren’t even middle-class and we do still live paycheck to paycheck, and while they are still receiving NC Health Choice benefits to provide for their medical care and vouchers for a small portion of their afterschool care costs, I am no longer having to use any of the other programs that I was blessed to have been able to utilize along the way, and my children do not remember what it was like to be “poor.” They don’t identify themselves as poor, which in itself will give them a huge leg-up on where I was when I started. Because in this society, if you are poor, there is an implied condescension directed your way, one that weighs on your shoulders and tells you that you are not good enough, that you are reliant on all the rest of the country who are somehow better than you because their circumstances are different than yours and that you should be ashamed. It’s hard to imagine that you are worthy of a better life, capable of providing more, and in fact entitled to earn a real living wage when everything around you tells you that you are not. It is one of my sincerest hopes that this country finds itself doing a serious about-face in the near future when it comes to the discussion of entitlement reform. We should be having real discussions about how the programs work, who we intend to support, how we can direct the benefits to people who need them and help lift people out of poverty instead of shaming them. We have to bring compassion to this discussion. We must. If we don’t I fear that my children may bear witness to the kind of peasant revolts that rocked Enlightenment Era Europe. The poor will only tolerate being shat upon while the rich get richer for so long a time.
I get pretty amped up over the issue of entitlement reform, in the same way that my mother used to get amped up about welfare reform in the 90’s. Even Bill Clinton, whom I admire tremendously, did no favors for the welfare system with his reforms. Sure, he greatly reduced the number of people receiving benefits, but that is not because they were lifted out of poverty. For many people removed from the welfare rolls, their plight was made much, much worse. His “welfare reform” has evolved in recent political discussions to be called “entitlement reform”, meant to encompass any benefit passed along to individuals through the federal or state government, expanding the commonly thought-of welfare reform to include reforms to Medicare, social security, student loans and grants, and unemployment insurance.
It will likely surprise many people who read my blog to learn that I am not entirely against “entitlement” reform. In fact, I agree completely that the system is broken and requires reforms. I just disagree entirely with the reforms that have been proffered thus far by politicians who have no idea how the programs work, who they actual benefit, or how to potentially make them function better. I also have a problem with the political conversation in this country which requires politicians to vehemently bash “entitlement spending” or bash their opponent’s plans for “entitlement reform” without ever offering a single detail of how those reforms might take shape. The fact that they continue to offer-up “entitlement reform” as a campaign catch-phrase in a context that has the average American conjure up an image of Reagan’s infamous Welfare Queen (Google it, seriously), while really planning to gut programs like education grants and Medicare, programs which greatly benefit the middle class is not just wrong, it is downright deceitful. It is the reason that no one in this country can seem to have an intelligent conversation about this election. Instead we all stand around and shout at our TVs, or watch late night comics make fun of Romney’s latest “foot-in-mouth” episode, neither of which are adding anything intelligent to the political discussion. The truth is that there is need for, and room for, so-called entitlement spending in our nation. And the programs can work if we can decide to use them more wisely. By way of example, I offer my own story.
When I was 14, I got pregnant. It happened. I had to deal with it. I decided to have the baby and raise him myself. Now, being a mother at 15 meant that I needed a LOT of help. A lot of that help came from my family and even more from the father’s family. But a great deal has come from the government, both federal and state. It would have been impossible for me to navigate the path that has led me into my current profession and out of poverty without these programs. They were essential to my journey, and not because I was lazy or refused to work, but because I did work, hard, to lift my family out of poverty.
At 15, I couldn’t even drive, and state law restricted the number of hours I could work in a given work week. My mother was not available to support me. I applied for TANF (Temporary Assistance for Needed Families). This program used to be called AFDC and is what most people think of when you say “welfare.” I got a check every month for $253 to be used for whatever I needed it for. There is no mandate that says it has to be used to pay utilities, or that you can only use it to buy clothes at Goodwill, but it is a miniscule amount of money and it is up to the family to use it wisely. There are limits, imposed under the Clinton administration, that require TANF recipients to be either employed, enrolled in school, or actively seeking employment. And even under those circumstances the amount of time a person can receive the benefits is limited to 2 consecutive years, and 5 years in total over your lifetime.
I also applied for Medicaid, a North Carolina state program which is partially funded with federal dollars. Medicaid is different from Medicare, which we all pay for and expect to receive when we retire or become disabled. Medicaid covered my medical expenses so that I could have good prenatal care. I continued to be covered by Medicaid until I turned 21, at which time I was picked up by my employer’s health insurance. My children are currently covered under NC Health Choice, a modified version of Medicaid that requires small co-pays for services they receive. For the last 3 years, I paid a $50 premium per year per child for them to be covered. We pay $1 for prescriptions and $3 for doctor visits. These co-pays could stand to be modified. In truth, I could well afford to pay as much as $20 per doctor visit and $10 for prescriptions. In my opinion, the co-pays should be calculated on a sliding scale based on income.
I also applied for WIC, a program offered through the US Department of Agriculture which provides specific, essential grocery items free of charge for pregnant women and to families with children under 5. This program serves two purposes. It provides foods that contain vital nutrients to pregnant women and children to try to improve their health, and it allows the federal government to subsidize dairy farmers, a task our federal government has loved very much over the last century (anybody remember government cheese?). I received three WIC vouchers per month while I was pregnant that provided me with milk, eggs, cheese, peanut butter, cereal, juice and dry beans. Once Dylan was born our WIC vouchers also provided formula, rice cereal, and baby food in addition to the other items. I continued to receive WIC benefits until Daniel was 5 years old, 10 years altogether. In order to receive WIC, the kids and I had to meet with a nurse every three months to be weighed, have our iron tested and receive nutrition counseling. I understand that the program has been expanded in recent years to also offer several fresh produce items, canned tuna, yogurt and a variety of other foods. It is one of the few government programs to experience such expansions in the last decade.
We also received food stamps, now catchily called SNAP by the federal government. Unlike the WIC program, food stamps can be used to purchase any grocery item regardless of its brand, cost or nutritional value. Food stamps cannot be used to purchase household goods such as toiletries, sandwich baggies, paper towels, etc., nor can they be used to purchase hot foods from the deli. It’s hard for me to recall the amount of my food stamp benefit because it changed every time I switched jobs or got a raise at work. But I believe it ranged over time from about $300 per month to a low of about $150 per month before it ended completely because of my pay increases. Unlike the TANF program, there are no requirements that the head of household be working or seeking work and no limits on the amount of time you can receive food stamps. Also, the amount of benefit received is not calculated on gross wages as other programs are, but are calculated on gross wages minus certain housing and childcare costs which makes far more people eligible to participate in the program.
We also received, and still do receive, childcare vouchers for assistance with daycare expenses. In our area in Western North Carolina, childcare costs average about $500 per month per child for children 1-5 and are even more expensive during the first year of life. The childcare voucher system is set up so that families are expected to contribute a percentage of their monthly gross income toward their childcare and there is a requirement that the parent(s) be working or enrolled in school before even being placed on the waiting list. Luckily for me, there was more funding for this program in the 90’s, the waiting lists were not terribly long, and I had a priority placement on the list because I was a high school student. Had it not been for the assistance provided in this program, had I been required to pay for the full cost of daycare for Dylan and Daniel, it would have been impossible for me to finish school or get a full-time job. Funding for childcare subsidies has declined dramatically over the course of the last 10 years. If a single mother, or even a young two-parent family, has to stay home with a child instead of working they are automatically going to be dependent on other government welfare programs. Let’s be real about the figures here. A single mother working a full-time job at $8.00 per hour is going to gross $320 per week and probably bring home about $280. That means her real income is $1,120 per month, when you subtract the cost of her childcare, her actual income is $620. Can we really justify asking her to sacrifice 40 hours per week with her child to bring home $620? Heaven forbid she be the mother of two children! Then she could spend her entire month working to bring home $120. For many women, it makes much more sense to stay home with their children and draw income from other available government programs. What incentive do they have to work without assistance with childcare costs?
I was also fortunate to benefit greatly from the federal government’s Section 8 rental housing program administered by the Department of Housing and Urban Development. Section 8, now called the Rental Voucher program, assisted with my monthly rent payments. Their formula is a little difficult to explain, but stick with me and we’ll give it a go. HUD says that the average family should spend no more than 30% of its monthly income on rent. So, if you are that single working mother grossing $320/week, you should be spending no more than $426 per month on your housing costs. At the time I was receiving Section 8, the minimum wage was much lower and I was actually making $6.00 per hour. So my 30% contribution was only $320 per month. HUD determines, using a complex statistical formula, what the “market” or reasonable expected rent is for the Asheville Metropolitan Area for houses of different sizes. If you are a family with 2 children of the same sex, you qualify for a 2 bedroom house and the current market rent for that house in the Asheville area is currently $704. When I was receiving benefits 10 years ago that was only $585 and I’m glad to see they have increased it to more closely match the current market. So, HUD will pay up to $704 - $426, or $278 for our example mom. She can go out into the market and find any house she wants to rent so long as the landlord accepts Section 8 and the total rent is less than $704. This was, and is, an excellent program. It assists needy families with housing, a basic human right as defined by the UN Declaration of Human Rights, and puts money back into the hands of landowners who paid the taxes to support the program in the first place. Unfortunately, funding for this program saw drastic cuts under the Bush administration, which have not been restored by President Obama’s administration. The waiting list for Section 8 assistance in Asheville has grown so large that they have stopped accepting applications altogether. This is a serious problem, especially when coupled with the fallout from the foreclosure crisis which has forced many families back into rental housing, increasing demand on the market. And in an economy where new construction is extremely limited, the supply of rental housing is not increasing, meaning that rents are going up while assistance shrivels. For our hypothetical single mother making $1,120 per month to shell out even $650 per month to rent a two-bedroom trailer, cheap even by HUD standards, is going to severely limit her ability to provide even the most basic of necessities for her child, and if she is paying $500 per month for her childcare costs, she is already in the hole without spending a single penny on electricity, food, gas or clothing. The solution for many young families has been multigenerational housing. In other words, young families are simply moving in with the folks who are now having to struggle to support their twenty-something’s, their grandchildren, and themselves.
So, now you know all the ways that this teenage, single-mother has mooched off the system for the last 15 years to live lavishly, sometimes even managing to pay the electric bill just before it got shut off, often albeit with the help of Eblin charities. My TANF benefits ended before I graduated from high school because of the time limits imposed, and I was not eligible to apply for Section 8 until I was 18, so I never received both of those benefits at the same time. But, on average, I was receiving roughly $1,200 per month in benefits from the state and federal government (about $300 in food stamps, $250 in Section 8/TANF benefits, $400 in daycare assistance, $100 in WIC vouchers, and about $150/month in health care expenses for myself and for the boys).
I mentioned earlier that there are some smart ways to reform the system. The biggest is in the administration of these programs. They are so splintered and scattered. I had a separate social worker for each and every program. And each program has its own income requirements and calculations for benefits. Each program has a different cycle for recertification and its own set of paperwork to be filled out either annually, semi-annually or quarterly. For years, I had to miss work at least 10 times per year to take paystubs to my various social workers. This may not seem like much, but it means that each one of these social workers, six of them for me, had to send me a notice in the mail, schedule an appointment with me, sit down with me to review my information and have me sign their forms and disclosures, always the same forms I had signed the year before and the year before that and the year before that. They would each tally up my income, notate the difference from the year before, adjust my benefit and send me on my way. At no time were any of them allowed to actually be social workers! They were, and are still, paper pushers whose job is not to help lift needy families out of poverty and off of government programs, but instead to simply tabulate figures, file forms and move on to the next in line. Additionally, it is precisely this splintering of information that allows for people to work the system. Some programs require you to be under a specific gross income threshold, some simply calculate your benefit based on your income, and still others are based on your net income after payment of some basic expenses. Having data collected separately by each program means that individuals can selectively limit which information is provided to each social worker because there is no communication or cross-checking between them.
So, why not reform this system. I see no reason why these programs for the needy couldn’t be consolidated under one umbrella in much the same fashion as the Federal Government restructured a variety of federal agencies under the umbrella of Homeland Security under the Bush Administration. Why require every single recipient to meet with 3 or 6 or 10 different social workers every year to supply each of them with the same information? Why not assign one social worker to the family. Allow that social worker to retrieve the family’s income tax information in the same way that the FAFSA application for college grants does? Design the computer system so that once the tax information is populated from the IRS website into the Social Services program, all of the assistance that the individual or family is entitled to under available Federal and State programs is generated automatically, in one location. Now, this single social worker has done in minutes what it previously took 6 different social workers 6 hours in total to do. How much good can this one social worker do for this family by spending another hour talking about available education programs, job-training programs, parenting classes, early head-start programs for children, and generally supporting the family to encourage and lift them out of poverty? This is what social workers went to school to do. This is what they want to do. We should let them. Simply yanking the benefits away from people and telling them to get out in the world and make a go of it is impractical, ignorant, and lacks compassion. If they were capable of doing so, they wouldn’t have needed these programs in the first place! In addition, consolidating the acquisition and housing of this required information serves to save the federal and state governments in the costs of building space, computer equipment, paper and staffing costs.
Poverty is a cruel cycle which is so very difficult to break out of. Are there people who take advantage of the system, living off of government programs without trying to lift themselves up? Sure, of course there are. But they are not the norm. The vast majority of people using these programs are working parents making less than $25,000 per year. It is not that they are unemployed and lazy for the most part, it is that they lack the skills, education or opportunity to earn more money. (I will refrain from starting my diatribe about the reality that real wages have fallen over the course of the last 30-40 years and every single working family now has to work harder and longer with two wage-earners to sustain the same standard of living previously achieved by having only a single wage earner in every house, but it is worth at least noting.) So let’s talk about real entitlement reform. The kind that could result in meaningful change, in a reduction of the actual poverty rate instead of just putting people out on the street, without food, housing or childcare and telling them to pull themselves up by their tattered bootstraps and get moving.
I am lucky. I was blessed with excellent genes and a mother who taught me to think critically and act with compassion. I have worked so hard to pull myself and my children out of poverty and break that cycle. And for the most part I have succeeded. While we aren’t even middle-class and we do still live paycheck to paycheck, and while they are still receiving NC Health Choice benefits to provide for their medical care and vouchers for a small portion of their afterschool care costs, I am no longer having to use any of the other programs that I was blessed to have been able to utilize along the way, and my children do not remember what it was like to be “poor.” They don’t identify themselves as poor, which in itself will give them a huge leg-up on where I was when I started. Because in this society, if you are poor, there is an implied condescension directed your way, one that weighs on your shoulders and tells you that you are not good enough, that you are reliant on all the rest of the country who are somehow better than you because their circumstances are different than yours and that you should be ashamed. It’s hard to imagine that you are worthy of a better life, capable of providing more, and in fact entitled to earn a real living wage when everything around you tells you that you are not. It is one of my sincerest hopes that this country finds itself doing a serious about-face in the near future when it comes to the discussion of entitlement reform. We should be having real discussions about how the programs work, who we intend to support, how we can direct the benefits to people who need them and help lift people out of poverty instead of shaming them. We have to bring compassion to this discussion. We must. If we don’t I fear that my children may bear witness to the kind of peasant revolts that rocked Enlightenment Era Europe. The poor will only tolerate being shat upon while the rich get richer for so long a time.
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