Welfare
no text 2/18
see welfare queen
AN 1 26
feds told walz they wd pull out if he gives welfare and voter data?! 1 26/26
Trump blames welfare fraud investigation for 'violent' protests in Minnesota
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Tragic End of the Woman Bill Clinton Exploited As Poster Child for Gutting Welfare
Zaid Jilani AlterNet Zaid Jilani
May 06, 2015
We are approaching the 20th anniversary of the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act—also called "welfare reform"—which was passed by President Clinton working with the Republican-controlled Congress. This welfare reform law changed the terms of federal aid to the poor. Among other things, the law replaced Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) with Temporary Assistance for Needy Families. The new TANF program...
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https://theconversation.com/ai-algorithms-intended-to-root-out-welfare-fraud-often-end-up-punishing-the-poor-instead-131625
President Donald Trump recently suggested there is “tremendous fraud” in government welfare programs.
Although there’s very little evidence to back up his claim, he’s hardly the first politician – conservative or liberal – to vow to crack down on fraud and waste in America’s social safety net.
States – which are charged with distributing and overseeing many federally funded benefits – are taking these fraud accusations seriously. They are increasingly turning to artificial intelligence and other automated systems to determine benefits eligibility and ferret out fraud in a variety of benefits programs, from food stamps and Medicaid to unemployment insurance.
Of course, government agencies should ensure that taxpayer dollars are spent effectively.The problem is these automated decision-making systems are sometimes rife with errors and designed in ways that punish the poor for being poor, leading to tragic results.
As a clinical law professor who has researched safety net programs and has represented low-income clients in public benefits cases for over 20 years, I believe it’s essential these systems are designed in ways that are fair, transparent and accountable to prevent hurting society’s most vulnerable.
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$4-40K over sev years vs 150K in one yr RR
https://kpfa.org/episode/letters-and-politics-august-28-2019/
many aliases, mixed race
Guest: Dean Baker, Visiting Professor at the University of Utah and Senior Economist at the Center for Economic and Policy Research.
Guest: Josh Levine. national editor at Slateand the host of the sports podcast Hang Up and Listen. He is the author of the book The Queen: The Forgotten Life Behind an American Myth.
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Star Parker, an African-American Republican with Tea Party ties and killer cheekbones that serve her well on frequent Fox News appearances, looks younger than the fiftysomething she is. In her run for a congressional seat in California, Parker has been known to show up at campaign events with a flower tucked behind one ear. There’s nothing of that softness, though, in the titles of her three books, White Ghetto: How Middle Class America Reflects Inner City Decay (2006), Uncle Sam’s **Plantation:** How Big Government Enslaves America’s Poor and What We Can Do About It (2003), and Pimps, Whores and Welfare Brats: From Welfare Cheat to Conservative Messenger (1998).
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As the last title indicates, Parker also happens to be a former welfare recipient and single mother who has talked publicly about her four abortions, all of which occurred before she became a born-again Christian and subsequently attended college for a degree in marketing. Since then, she has further remade herself as a far-right commentator and founded the Coalition on Urban Renewal and Education, meant to combat poverty by encouraging private ownership and personal responsibility. She’s been on The View, Oprah, and, according to her bio, spoke at the 1996 RNC (though her name doesn’t appear on the official docket of floor speeches). Parker not only blames welfare for the**financial crisis** but cites it as a major reason for her decision to run for office.
To the constituents in her own district—which includes Compton, Long Beach, parts of Watts, and Signal Hill—she is a radical departure from the district’s traditionally liberal candidates. But Parker may be aiming for a national platform. She represents a type that often pops up as companion to right-wing movements fixated on personal responsibility: The welfare mother turned bootstrap success, come to tell all others dependent on government how they should free themselves. Democratic incumbentLaura Richardson, a member of the Congressional Black Caucus, won the seat by a comfortable margin in a 2007 special election. But recently she’s been plagued by a personal financial scandal—Richardson defaulted on a subprime mortgage and has been accused of receiving preferential treatment from her lender—the perfect foil for someone who wants to trumpet that message of personal responsibility.
In addition to her books and television appearances, Parker regularly writes a syndicated column forScripps Howard News Service, which runs on the prominent conservative Web site Townhall. * She recently held a “campaign” event in Wichita, Kan., a location that seems slightly inconvenient for the good people of Compton. Still, she’s raised $318,930, an impressive amount for someone without a shot in hell. (By way of comparison, former Slateblogger Mickey Kaus raised $54,936 in his recent, similarly quixotic California Senate primary bid, and Richardson’s raised $369,449.) Parker’s top donors include several Orange County real estate investors, a prominent Tea Party activist, the Susan B. Anthony List, Huck PAC, and SarahPAC. As befits a brand-building vanity candidacy, there are precious few local luminaries who’ve endorsed her, but her campaign site boasts that she’s backed by figures like Phyllis Schlafly, James Dobson, Karl Rove, and Grover Norquist.
Most prominently, Sarah Palin has officially endorsed Parker as one of her Mama Grizzlies.To date, Palin has endorsed four African-American candidates, all with Tea Party ties—Parker, Allen West, Tim Scott, and Angela McGlowan, who, like Parker, is a Fox News favorite and had little chance of winning (though her résumé is far less flimsy than Parker’s). All four endorsements came in either April or June, which also happened to be when accusations of Tea Party racism were bubbling up most ferociously (and in advance of Palin’s “don’t retreat … reload” exhortation to Dr. Laura Schlessinger after the radio host came under fire for using the N-word).
In some ways, the Tea Party needs Parker more than she needs them. Backing candidates of color is at least partly a way for Palin, and the Tea Party generally, to get some plausible deniability on those charges. And, of course, it’s not remotely the first time the GOP has fetishized a black candidate to overcompensate for the fact that its platform has traditionally been so unappealing to African-Americans. But Parker’s image as an ex-welfare mother turned anti-welfare/immigration activist is particularly resonant—an update on an old trope, adapted to respond to new conservative anxieties about work, government assistance, and race.
That stereotype of welfare recipients as black and female started in the ‘60s and ‘70s, withRonald Reagan’s racially coded description of awelfare queen driving her Cadillac around Chicago’s South Side. (In fact, a 1998 poll showed that just about 10 percent of welfare recipients are black and female.) Conservatives have often grappled with the “welfare queen” stereotype not by objecting to it but by holding up a few outliers to prove that black women could break out. Most prominently, during the mid-’90s welfare-reform debate, Eloise Anderson, a black former welfare mother, now a conservative scholar at the Claremont Institute, received a great deal of press as “the queen of responsibility” for her personal history and her hard-line stances on welfare as director of social services in both Wisconsin and California. There are also women on the left, like Theresa Funicello, Rep. Lynn Woolsey (both white), and (African-American) Rep. Gwen Moore, who drew upon their experience and cred as welfare mothers to advocate for the continuation or expansion of government help.
Critiques like Anderson’s and Parker’s are embraced joyously by the right: If even former welfare mothers know the system is terrible, it must be really terrible. “I lived the lie of the left,” Parker tells an interviewer, detailing “sexual promiscuity” and her decade in the welfare system. “I lived the culture that the administration … wants the rest of the country to live.” And if those women themselves are black, it’s harder to accuse them of wrapping racial prejudice up in that critique.
Since 1996, the battle over welfare reform had largely faded out, but lately the Tea Party has put its own bizarre twist on it, and revived welfare as loaded shorthand for government handouts. Carl Paladino (he of the racist e-mail forwarding), said he wanted to convert some of the state’s prisons into dormitories for welfare recipients, where they would work for the military or the parks or other public services. “Instead of handing out the welfare checks, we’ll teach people how to earn their check. We’ll teach them personal hygiene … the personal things they don’t get when they come from dysfunctional homes,” he said, but also emphasized his plan would help people who’d recently been forced into asking for handouts, not just the long-term recipients (presumably the people whose toothbrushing technique he’s so concerned about).Paladino also stressed that his plan was based off the 1930s Civilian Conservancy Corps—never mind the socialist tinges of that program; it’s the last time the face of government assistance was white. It’s a scrambled message: Welfare recipients need to be punished, hence the prisons, but there’s also an odd strand of sympathy, a realization that jobs don’t fall from trees.
It’s harder to villainize anyone who receives government handouts in an era when, for instance, an estimated one in eight Americans are on food stamps. So for the Tea Party, immigrants are the new welfare queens. Paladino’s campaign site says that “many [immigrants] jumped on New York’s Medicaid and social welfare systems the day they arrived.” Parker, for her part, is rerouting some of her welfare obsession to drive home a similar message. She trumpets that her district is home to the third-largest Cambodian population in the world—hard-working escapees of communism, she emphasizes—but she wants to shut the border to Mexican immigrants and build a wall. (Meanwhile, her district is currently about half Hispanic.) On Parker’s campaign Web site, under the heading “job and the economy,” she lumps “Amnesty for illegal immigrants” under other “government takeover” programs.
In a video featured prominently on her site, she goes a step further than Paladino. She still rails against Americans who are lazy and unwilling to work—a classic critique of subsidized poverty—but also implies that it’s harder to get a job because immigrants have taken them over: “We created this dilemma in Southern California, everything we should have been training our 12-year-olds to do, whether it was training our boys to cut the grass or girls to do the housekeeping, we put it off on someone else.” Parker adds that immigrants then “perhaps take advantage of our welfare state” after “birthing children”—implying that children are the collateral that immigrants, like welfare moms before them, are using to coerce money out of the government. Parker’s not the only prominent African-American woman who’s now employing her cachet as an ex-welfare recipient to try to shape the debate about immigration and work: Carol Swain, who also underwent an evangelical conversion, is now a Vanderbilt law professor who’s become an outspoken, conservative critic of immigration.
It’s impossible to plumb Parker’s psychology and deepest-held beliefs and know what exactly has made her so fervent on the issue—black women in the public eye still have to fight pervasive, terrible stereotypes, of course, and perhaps this is a way of getting as far as possible from the one she most fears. It’s clear, though, that she’s willing to use that stereotype of a lazy welfare mother—as personified by her own past self, as presented by her—to suit her own present-day purposes. Parker might have a problem with what she sees as the ugly consequences of welfare, but she certainly doesn’t object to the ugly stereotypes that have grown out of those experiences—in fact, she might be out of business without them. And unlike Eloise Anderson, who was willing to work within the system for specific reforms in the ‘90s, Parker seems more interested in getting an ever bigger bullhorn to broadcast increasingly angry views. That willingness to Frankenstein-ize old conservative tropes means that even if Parker’s congressional future is unlikely, her Tea Party future is probably bright.
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Trump and Republicans in Congress love to demonize government handouts, which, in fact, their own supporters depend on and are increasingly financed by taxpayers in blue states.
The federal program Temporary Assistance for Needy Families – what we used to call “welfare” – provides cash assistance to fewer than 1 percent of Americans.
But the Trump administration is proposing to lump many social programs under a new agency with the word “welfare” in its title.
A recent White House report on imposing work requirements, for example, put Medicaid, food assistance, and housing aid into a rebranded program called “noncash welfare.”
Defined this broadly, a large chunk of America relies on welfare. Add in disability benefits, unemployment insurance, and medical benefits, such so-called “welfare” amounts to 17 percent of the average American’s income.
Welfare has become especially unpopular in “red” states that vote Republican and support Trump.
But these same states are often the biggest beneficiaries of government assistance.
Include price supports for agriculture, subsidies for land management and forestry, and defense contractors, and you find that a large portion of the economies of red states depend on federal dollars.
Here’s the irony. Residents of “blue” states send more tax money to Washington than they get back in federal help, while residents of “red” states send less money to Washington than they get back in federal help.
In 2015, for example, New Jersey got back only 74 cents in federal spending for every tax dollar it sent to Washington. New York got back 81 cents, Connecticut: 82 cents, and Massachusetts: 83 cents.
But when you turn to the red states, it’s the opposite. Mississippi received $2.13 for every tax dollar it sent to Washington. West Virginia: $2.07. Kentucky: $1.90. And South Carolina: $1.71.
Taking the Trump administration’s expansive view of the meaning of welfare to its logical conclusion to include all those benefiting from federal spending, blue states are sending welfare to red states – the same red states that say they don’t like welfare.
Under Trump’s new tax law, blue states will be giving even more welfare handouts to red states. That’s because the law set new limits to the amount of state and local taxes people can deduct from their federal taxable incomes. And since people in blue states pay much more state and local taxes than people in red states, blue-staters will be paying that much more in federal taxes.
Which means an even bigger transfer from blue state residents to all those red state Republican voters, whose party despises handouts.
Now, I should add that some of us here in blue states don’t mind giving red states a bigger helping hand. The vast majority of Americans also oppose cuts to programs that aid the poor, elderly and sick. Because most Americans figure we’re all in this together, and those of us who can do so ought to help out those in need.
We don’t regard it as welfare handouts. We call it social insurance. Indeed, social insurance is needed and used by almost all of us, when you include Social Security, Medicare, and unemployment insurance. And even programs relied upon mostly by the poor end up helping a large portion of us because roughly one-third of all Americans are poor at some point in their lives.
So remember, attacks on so-called welfare are just another means of attacking the things most of us need, and dividing the country into us and them.
In reality, voters in red states are as dependent on the federal government as voters in blue states, and, truth be told, even more dependent.
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gore vidal ucla 1981 welfare was price we paid to exclude AA from jobs, worked ok for a while; he points out that inmate cost more than college (but does not connect dots to welfare?) --> PIC
https://www.alternet.org/house-republicans-pass-bill-requiring-millions-work-food-stamps
House Republicans just passed major legislation that would
require millions of people who are disabled or possibly otherwise unable to work, to work to be eligible for food stamps. The farm bill passed by a very narrow margin: 213-211. 20 Republicans joined with Democrats to oppose the archaic legislation.
The work requirement, which President Trump specifically praised in a statement via Twitter, would require "millions of low-income Americans who receive nutritional assistance to work at least 20 hours a week or enroll in a job training program," USA Today reports. but Democrats oppose the legislation, especially the work rule, saying "the new requirements would slash benefits to needy families and the elderly, jeopardizing their ability to put food on the table."
The food stamp program is officially known as SNAP, or Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program.
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voodoo tax cut --> austerity:
https://www.alternet.org/holy-grail-republican-tax-cuts-about-paul-ryans-parting-gift-rich
yet another Tax Day in America. Eager to deliver another so-called win ahead of the midterm elections, Republicans are using the occasion to roll out even more tax cuts for the rich.
With fewer than half of Americanscomplaining that their personal tax obligation is too high — the smallest percentage in more than five years — and the recently passed GOP tax bill still significantly underwater, Republican lawmakers somehow think the best way to fend off building Democratic momentum is to reward wealthy GOP donors all over again.
Standing next to anti-tax crusader Grover Norquist (he of "drown government in the bathtub" fame), Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, recently announced his plan to ease the tax burden paid by America’s wealthiest citizens. Mind you, those people have already been helped out tremendously by the GOP’s tax law, which made a 40 percent reduction in the top corporate tax rate permanent while setting a 2025 expiration date on cuts to individual taxes and rates.:{
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“When you’re investing more capital in businesses it means you’re hiring more people, it means you’re buying more equipment, it means you’re raising wages and that you’re driving economic growth,” Cruz said of his new proposal to index capital gains for inflation. The Texas Republican's push for a second part of the GOP tax cuts is certain to exacerbate already growing concerns about budget deficits.
Just last week, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) found that the Republican tax cuts will fuel historic deficits. In March the federal deficit was $208 billion, an increase of $32 billion from last year. The Treasury Department had already said that the deficit increased 18.4 percent in February compared to 2017. GOP tax cuts are estimated to add $1 trillion or more to federal budget deficits over a decade, even after economic growth is taken into account.
Nevertheless, Republicans have stayed calm and carried on with tax cuts.
On Monday, President Donald Trump traveled to Florida where he praised the GOP tax law for driving one of the "greatest booms" to the U.S. economy. But job growth has actually slowed since Trump took office. Introducing his bill to discount capital gains taxes, in effect, to account for inflation, Ted Cruz claimed, “We’re seeing the economic benefits of this tax cut, even just a few months into it. Over four million Americans have already gotten pay raises or bonuses directly as a result of the tax cut.” But most Americans have not noticed a larger paycheck since the law was enacted, according to a CNBC poll released in March. A recent analysis from the pro-reform group Americans for Tax Fairness found that 433 corporations out of the Fortune 500 have not offered any bonuses or wage increase to employees since the passage of corporate tax cuts. Instead, the analysis found, companies spent 37 times as much on stock buybacks.
Even as GOP groups pour money into efforts to sell their tax cuts for the donor class to the voting base, the law remains massively unpopular. (A group linked to the Koch brothers has spent about $30 million in ads focusing on the tax law since August, and plans to run $400 million worth of ads in vulnerable GOP districts leading up to this year’s midterms.) Just 27 percent of Americans think the GOP tax cuts were a good idea, according to a new NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll released on Monday. In other words, the Republican tax plan has actually gotten less popular with voters over time.
ut popularity was never really the goal, was it? The point was to starve the federal government of tax revenue in order to justify slashing the social safety net — something Republicans in Congress and the White House began to address in earnest last week.
Just one day after the CBO released its forecast of a ballooning federal deficit, Trump ordered federal agenciesto conduct a broad review of so-called welfare programs to identify new work requirements to place on recipients. Right on time, House Republicans then introduced the 2018 Farm bill, featuring a stringent new proposal to mandate that adults between the ages of 18 and 59 work part-time jobs or be enrolled in at least 20 hours per week of job training in order to receive food stamps under the SNAP program.
Aside from the fact that SNAP spending is already down — from $79.8 billion in 2013 to about $70 billion in 2017 — the CBO estimates that as many as one million people could be kicked off the program as a result of Republicans’ proposed new rule. Most working-age SNAP recipients who don't receive disability benefits already work, especially those able-bodied, childless adults who House Republicans claim abuse the system.
Meanwhile, the Republican-controlled Congress followed up their corporate tax cuts with a massive omnibus budget that boosts spending past previous budget caps by $300 billion over two years....
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One of the administration’s supposed cost-saving measures is “a bold new approach to administering SNAP.” The way the program currently works, SNAP-eligible households are provided a monthly benefit based on income level in the form of a debit card, which can be used to purchase grocery items. Some restrictions apply (no alcohol, tobacco, or pet food, for example), but SNAP recipients have wide latitude in what foods they can purchase and where they can shop.
The Trump administration wants to change all of this by forcing most SNAP recipients to receive half their monthly benefit in the form of “a USDA Foods package, which would include items such as shelf-stable milk, ready to eat cereals, pasta, peanut butter, beans and canned fruit, vegetables, and meat, poultry or fish.” The Republican White House wants to choose which foods SNAP recipients eat, and it wants to control how they receive their food each month -- so much for “small government” conservatism abolishing the “nanny state.” Through means left utterly unexplained, the Trump administration argues that this new system (which will require massive bureaucratic build-up alongside the establishment of food-delivery infrastructure) will somehow be cheaper and more efficient than simply transferring money to a debit card. White House budget director Mick Mulvaney laughably spun this proposal to send low-income Americans a monthly box of canned goods and peanut butter as "a Blue Apron-type program where you actually receive the food instead of receive the cash."
This idea is so absurd, impractical, and wildly paternalistic that people can’t really believe that the White House is actually proposing it. Politico reports this morning that “the idea that USDA would provide millions of low-income people packages of food on a national scale has not been floated by conservative think tanks, promoted by industry, or sought by previous administrations.” It was “so out of left field,” Politico notes, “that some anti-hunger advocates initially thought it was a joke.”
The proposal didn’t come out of nowhere, though. It’s an escalation of existing right-wing efforts to use SNAP as a means to control the behavior of its recipients. These efforts are rooted in a mythology -- eagerly promoted and disseminated by conservative media -- that SNAP is rife with fraud and that SNAP beneficiaries, by virtue of their status as welfare recipients, lack the moral character to make good decisions on their own.
Right-wing demonization of welfare recipients stretches back decades, fromNewt Gingrich’s high-profile efforts in the 1990s to shame low-income teen mothers to Ronald Reagan popularizing the “welfare queen” slur back in 1976. The running theme of these attacks on the poor is that there exists an epidemic of undeserving welfare recipients who abuse their benefits. That’s a myth, but it carries a potent political message that blends racial and economic resentment with small-government agitation.
When it comes to SNAP, the most common complaint made by conservatives is that recipients are using their benefit to purchase inappropriate foods: “luxury” comestibles like seafood and steak, or junk food like candy bars and energy drinks. This line of attack got a huge boost in 2013 when Fox News put together a special news report called “The Great Food Stamp Binge.” The program -- hosted by Special Report anchor Bret Baier -- spotlighted an unemployed surfer in California who proudly used his SNAP benefit to buy sushi and lobster. Baier dubbed him “the new face of food stamps,” and the program pointedly asked why there isn’t “at least some stigma” attached to SNAP recipients, who used to be called “losers.”
It was a farcical piece of propaganda that actively shunned any sort of data or reporting in order to create a caricature of SNAP recipients as lazy, undeserving parasites on the public. SNAP actually has extremely low rates of fraud and abuse, and “the overwhelming majority of SNAP recipients who can work do so,” according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.
The news program was wildly popular with Republicans. Fox News distributed tapes of the “The Great Food Stamp Binge” on Capitol Hill, and the SNAP-abusing unemployed surfer became the mascot for the congressional GOP’s efforts to gut funding for nutritional assistance programs. Since then, various state governments have taken up measures intended to restrict which foods SNAP recipients can purchase.
In 2015, Wisconsin Republicans passed a bill banning SNAP recipients from purchasing crab, lobster, shrimp, or any other shellfish, citing “anecdotal and perceived abuses.” A Republican state senator from New York proposed legislation to cut off SNAP users from “luxury food items” like lobster and steak, while the Missouri GOP sought to ban “cookies, chips, energy drinks, soft drinks, seafood or steak.” The reality that all of these proposals ignore is that SNAP recipients are not blowing their benefits on “luxury” foods.
The Trump administration’s proposal derives from the same idea that SNAP recipients can’t be trusted and will necessarily misuse their benefit. Rather than banning certain foods, the White House is proposing to force SNAP beneficiaries to eat an approved list of low-cost foods while simultaneously limiting the amount of benefit they have to spend. It’s gross paternalism lightly disguised with absurd promises about efficiency and cost-savings. And it fits right in with the broader right-wing argument that receipt of government assistance is morally suspect and recipients should be penalized through stigma and controlled through loss of choice.