I don’t know how much time you’ve spent with people on welfare but your experiences don’t seem to be much like mine. Yes, some of these people have and continue to make bad choices but many of them are simply consumed by the struggle to survive poverty. Most of the welfare mothers I’ve known were quite savvy and had solid life skills like figuring out to get where they need to get when they need to get there on public transportation, trying to make food stamps stretch, keeping the kids in school and clothes and out of the hands of gangs, drug dealers, and pimps, searching for the holy grail (which would be getting into section 8 housing). These things interfered with their job-getting and holding skills a lot more than not knowing how to do a timecard.

Oh and the private non-profit organization in my county that was running an adult literacy program just announced that they were closing down because they lost their grant due to federal cuts in the adult literacy program.

Did anyone even suggest that to be able to find a job and not live on welfare, one has to be a near-college grad?

You are also mistaken on the reason people found your description of people on welfare outrageous. Well at least, speaking for myself, I didn’t even find it outrageous or offensive, but so clichéd and reductive it approaches absurd.

Again, besides the “knowing which numbers to call in case of emergency”, and knowing you have to show up in time for work appointments, you did mention things like “figuring out how many tomatoes we need for the chicken” so that “fewer acres of tomatos have to die for naught”. You genuinely don’t see why it looked like you were taking the piss?

But let’s take that statement seriously, well the people who routinely buy a lot more tomatoes - or chicken, or milk, or eggs, or any food that deteriorates if not consumed - than they’ll end up using are people who *do* have money to throw away and don’t mind that they end up throwing away food every week because it’s rotten or past its sell by date and they haven’t eaten it yet. It’s not a matter of “skills”, it’s a matter of luxury. Do you genuinely think welfare grants that kind of luxury? Is that your idea of being in touch with reality?

As for showing up late for work appointments, do you genuinely think that is a matter of *not knowing*, ie. lacking the cognitive capacity or the social skill or acquired information via training to know you’re expected to show up at an appointment at the time set? Not other reasons? Have you never known or heard of people with higher education and maybe even from wealthy families who showed up late at an appointment? Come on…

You were equating complete idiocy or ineptness or carelessness and lack of discipline with being on welfare. That’s quite different from lacking skills, be they job skills or social skills.

For the record, I find nothing offensive in saying someone is unskilled if they are. Duh. But that’s not what you were saying, first because of that peculiar notion of “basic skills” you picked, and secondly because you picked that as the reason why people are on welfare.

You also deliberately chose to ignore factors that go beyond the individual, external factors and circumstances.

I’ll give you an example. My dad started working as an electrician, then moved on to work for a big multinational construction company, not doing the manual work on site, he was working in the offices, good position and good salary, well at least for his level of skills and standard of living. Then the company closed down those offices and laid off a lot of people, and my dad ended up on welfare for a whole year. And good thing my mom had a job. Dad also had the bad luck of getting a severe life-threatening illness that very same year so search of another job was delayed. That’s one case where ending up on welfare is not up to skills, but external circumstances.

Even when it comes to skills, well, getting a job is not exclusively a simple matter of having the skills. Wish it were so. It doesn’t work like that even for college graduates! You don’t automatically get a job because of education or job training, unless it’s a specific training programme where the job placement is already part of the programme. You don’t automatically get a job even if you’re the smartest savviest person in terms of life and social skills that have nothing to do with education. There’s such a thing as context, social and economic, that affects employment rates. It’s not *all* about the individual.

Any welfare programme that makes sense has to aim at (and even require) work placement and has to distinguish between different cases to offer targeted approaches, and to avoid people taking advantage of the system and make it less efficient. I don’t see welfare as a kind of charity handout or disability pension (which is a whole other matter). I see it as a means, not an end.

By the way, I also do think it is better for a single mother to work than stay at home on welfare (which perhaps is not always a choice?) - but there’s a few things that need to be added to that sentence: work *and* have access to child care facilities. What point V in the post says. That is going to benefit the children of both single mothers and single fathers and those who live with a partner.

Also, I don’t think the reason a working single parent is better for the child is the “model” effect — children do not live in a shell where they only see their parents’ behaviour and copy it mindlessly when they’re adults. If anything, being born to a poorer family can give you much more of an incentive to achieve something better. But life is not all about being driven or being good at competition or achievement. There are a lot of unpredictable variables that have nothing to do with ability or drive to succeed or even education or training. It’s not a linear process and you just can’t tell which children are going to be more likely to do good, based on their parents behaviour. The principle of child care access is a good principle on itself, regardless of the specific situation of the parent and children.

Only 15 times in 20o years?! Poor Mister Spock. That explains a lot.

(Fifty quatloos on the newcomers!)

Live 200 years and have sex 15 times? Pass.

I’ll be the James T. Kirk of political discourse, instead.

You can pretend not to be assigning your own personal morality in much the same way that others do, but it’s obvious to anyone with half an eye that you do exactly that. When folks like La Lubu explain to you why what works in your particular class and social sphere — and through your own male-centered prism with which you view reality– might not work for others, you ignore or dismiss them. So go on and pretend you’re the Ambassador Spock of political discourse, since it means so much to you, but don’t expect the rest of us to constantly humor you while you do it.

“This was very clear. And you wonder why working politicians on the leftish side of things don’t want to address your issues?”

Actually, they don’t want to address these issues for the same reason you don’t want to. The status quo keeps them superior to millions of others. They are insulated and protected, with minimal effort, from the worst outcomes of their decisions and practices. So naturally, they move heaven and earth to keep the status quo in place, while they cloak their selfishness and myopia in buzz-words like “compassion,” “choice,” what have you… Again, it’s easy enough to see, once a person opens her eyes.

Noodles, there is certainly room for disagreement about which skills people in bad economic circumstances are lacking, just as there is room for disagreement about which external conditions might be holding them back. But there is agreement that skills are lacking, and agreement that there are external conditions in play. You note “the people who don’t even know what 911 is for are not called “people on welfare”?. They’re called idiots…” - is it your serious contention that people who don’t know what 911 is for are less represented on the welfare rolls than people who are more informed? If that is your contention, then your input to any serious policy discussion is going to be a negative one; you’re out of touch with reality. If that’s not your contention, then what’s your point?

It would be nice if everyone on welfare were a near-college grad who divided their time between helping the homeless and tutoring neighborhood children in algebra. But that isn’t the reality. The reality is that a lot of people on welfare lack basic skills. Getting outraged that people have the temerity to notice this isn’t productive.

You have a conservative with very modest but real connections to power who wants to talk solutions, and get some input from the utterly disenfranchised radical wing. Do you want to talk solutions, or do you prefer to just shout louder so that your bubble chamber doesn’t get contaminated with the bad thoughts?

Why don’t you get down off your pulpit/cross long enough to specifiy exactly what in this thread you have shared with us that is any more “fact-based” than what your opponents have written ?

Oh, and you’re ot sitting down at a table discussing policies to enforce. You’re just discussing things on the internet. No laws have ever been passed and no policies have ever been enacted out of a blog thread.

Hope that helps. If you need more help with your reading skills, let me know.

Yes, I said that most welfare mothers are people with relatively low levels of life skills. After which you and several other people went apeshit about how incredibly offensive this statement is. And then YOU said:

See, there isn’t really much difference between welfare recipients and those who aren’t…-except education

Would you mind explaining the difference between my “they need more skills” assessment, and your “they need more education” assessment? ‘Cause from where I sit, we said the same damn thing, but it’s offensive when I said it.

In my view, one of the main reasons for the marginalization of left-wing voices in social policy debates has been the impossibility of discussing the facts on the ground with such folks. When you can’t have a discussion about facts with folks without it turning into personal attacks - even when the facts being discussed are agreed upon by all parties - then those folks are pretty much dead weight in any actual attempt to set policy. Liberals and conservatives can sit down at a table and talk about the problems with welfare and work out solutions - but radicals apparently won’t be able to do that.

Small wonder that its the liberals and conservatives who ended up setting the terms for the discussion and making the decision, then.

Yes, so would a thirty-hour work week with a living wage. So would a return to the pre-Reagan notion of affordable college tuition.

But to rally for a living wage requires challenging the powerful –who are still mostly male. It just isn’t as simple and fun as demonstrating your compassion [sic] by bullying women and kids. :/ Besides, without a permanent underclass, whose gonna’ clean house off the books for all those “compassionate conservatives”? Tsk.

See, there isn’t really much difference between welfare recipients and those who aren’t—-except education. Welfare recipients don’t tend to have more than a high-school education, and that keeps them very vulnerable economically, since our economy no longer provides living wage jobs to people with high-school educations. Not earning a living wage means no hope of creating the type of savings that is able to tide one over the rough spots. There isn’t anything left at the end of the month to sock away for a rainy day.

The biggest obstacle for most welfare moms is child care. Both affording it, and having access to it. And what happens when your child gets sick? Well, you have to leave work, that’s what. That keeps welfare moms on the job merry-go-round, as they lose jobs to take care of sick kids, then have to scramble to find another one.

This has repercussions for the future, because our school systems are funded by property taxes. If you are well-to-do, you’ll have a well-funded school with all the trimmings for your children to attend. If you’re on the skids, the school your children will attend will have oversized classes, inexperienced teachers, out-of-date textbooks, and no amenities such as a school library (my city’s school district has no elementary school librarians—there’s no money in the budget). Folks who have the option of moving to the suburbs do so. The rest of us have to make do. This just exacerbates the problem.

The biggest problem I have with vouchers, besides the fact that I think no tax dollars should ever go towards funding religious institutions (and do we really need more schools in this country that teach the Earth is only 5000 years old and that dinosaurs died in the Flood?), is that it will amplify the trend toward economic segregation that is already visible and damaging. Not to mention the racial re-segration of schools.

Come to think of it, there wasn’t all this frothing at the mouth about public schools until they were desegregated (which in a lot of Northern cities didn’t take place until the mid-late seventies). Not a coincidence.

First, that’s a solution to a different problem. We’re talking about adults who need help in fixing their lives now; you can make K12 the greatest system on earth and it doesn’t do squat for those folks.

Second, the position that the public schools have a funding problem doesn’t hold up. There’s no connection between funding and school performance. “Give them more money” may be the right solution in some instances of genuine resource shortfalls, but it isn’t the systemic cure. Most schools have enough resources to get most of the job done.

Are you in favor of requiring all private schools who would accept taxpayer dollars under your plan to accept all students, as public schools must do?

No. Egalitarianism may be your kick; it isn’t mine. I’m certainly not going to ask the taxpayers to replicate strategies that are already known to fail; required-admit is a ticket to disaster for most schools.

And abide by all anti-discrimination laws, as public schools must do?

Require it? No. If those anti-discrimination laws are useful and produce good outcomes, then parents and students will support them. If the public schools that still have to follow those rules are doing their job, then they will attract parent and student support and will be able to stay in business.

And get rid of all religious instruction during regular school hours?

Certainly not. Your bias against religion is a legitimate point of view, but not one supported by the Constitution, which requires only fair (non-establishing) treatment of different faiths. That’s one reason that I make my proposal so wide-open; anybody who calls themselves a school and can attract students should have the chance in the marketplace, and that will protect all religious sensibilities by maximizing options and individual choice.

Hey, they forgot lack of bus service, before/after school child care and/or incompatibility with parental work schedules!

link:(2001 study)
http://www.policymattersohio.org/media/edweek.htm

link(2003): http://www.nsba.org/site/doc.asp?TRACKID=&DID=32622&CID=896

excerpt from second link:

“Contrary to the image put forth by voucher proponents, especially during the Supreme Court’s review of the Cleveland voucher program, voucher students are less likely to be African-American or to qualify for the federal free lunch program when compared to their public school peers.

Because of the selection (or lottery) process, higher income families, non-minority families, and families whose children already attend private schools disproportionately end up claiming vouchers.

Many low-income families who receive a voucher via the lottery do not use the voucher, citing limited private school vacancies near their home, lack of special services (including special education and gifted programs) by participating private schools, or out-of-pocket expenses (including tuition not covered by the voucher).”

Are you in favor of requiring all private schools who would accept taxpayer dollars under your plan to accept all students, as public schools must do? And abide by all anti-discrimination laws, as public schools must do? And get rid of all religious instruction during regular school hours?

I’m sure that a bachelor’s degree would do a great service for many people on welfare. I’m also sure that many of those unfortunates who are persistently on welfare are a long way from being able to benefit from a college-oriented program. The skills they lack are more fundamental.

That’s one reason I suggest a massive taxpayer-funded open-ended educational voucher that can be spent at any level of the educational process.

But of course, engaging with that suggestion would not simultaneously permit the luxury of thinking that “conservatives” (represented by me, I suppose) don’t care about anybody but themselves.

But does welfare reform (excuse me, welfare deform) address that? No, no it doesn’t. In fact, after welfare deform, attending college does not count toward the work requirement. This keeps welfare moms from being able to access most scholarships, which require full time attendance. If the goal is to actually help out women and their children on a permanent basis, this is built-in sabotage. However, if the goal is to insure a permanent underclass of undereducated, marginally employed “reserve” workers….it’s ingenious. And this program was created by conservatives of both Democratic and Republican ilk.

La Lubu and I are talking about different populations (me, people who stayed on welfare for years, her, people who get on and off quickly) although I don’t know if she recognizes that. Since her response is a response that doesn’t address what I wrote, what would be the point of arguing back at her? I said what I wanted to say, she said what she wanted to say…it’s hardly walking out in a huff to leave her with the last word.

I’d be glad to defend my thinking against all comers, but it would be somewhat rude of me to do it on someone else’s blog. And given the massive disconnect between my world view and the world view of most posters here, it would be a constant source of contention, misunderstandings, acrimony, etc. What’s the point? Nobody’s likely to convince me; I’m not likely to convince anyone else. So I try (not always successfully) to limit my responses and arguments to topics and posters where I or the respondent will gain something from the exchange; information about someone else’s point of view, clarification of some point of ideology where one side has only a hazy notion, and so on. Once the non sequiturs, generalizations, and deliberate miscomprehensions reach a certain level, there’s no possibility of that happening, and thus no point in burning Amp’s bandwidth.

It is possible, however, that I have misjudged either Amp’s preferences for his blog, or the preferences of the people who are part of this virtual community. Is there a widespread demand that I stand and fight on every post, that I respond to everything written that I consider mistaken, dishonest, or misunderstood? If so, I imagine I can make the time.