Idea on putting welfare recipients to work

Parents of children receiving free school lunches paid for by tax payers are getting welfare. Applying for and receiving any welfare benefits in which you are not eligible is fraud in my book. If I submitted for and/or received a tax refund from the IRS then could not provide proof that I was entitled to it what do you think would happen to me? I could go to jail for tax fraud. I would have to pay it back.

Most people on welfare are not working as volunteers, doing internships, in sweat equity for new businesses, etc. Show me where you are getting this information.

My "plan" was just a "brainstorming idea" to see if businesses could be persuaded to hire and train potential workers. The businesses weren't paying the workers as that was their incentive for hiring/training but the workers were being paid by tax payers.

I'm calling you out on this one. Prove the Cato study wrong. Converting welfare benefits to cash equivalent and adjusting for them being tax free is exactly how to compare them to gross wages. How else would you do it? Are they taking all welfare benefits received by any welfare recipient and averaging across all welfare recipients? Again, how else would you come up with an average? Again, prove the study wrong.

 

jam, could you share a source for your statement above that

I haven't yet found this in the sources provided.

It seems to me that low-income verification for school lunch programs are materially different from income verification for the tax system.

I fully agree hat some of the parents who don't respond or don't submit acceptable low-income verification would have had incomes too high to qualify for school lunches all along.

However, think abut how many working families, "one or two paychecks away…," have a legitimate, deep financial hit at one point in a year and call on safety nets, but then pull through and recover somewhat within a few months. By the time one of these families gets a verification form for this school lunch program they may not need it anymore; their kid may not be taking it. Normal turnover shouldn't be read as fraud. Meanwhile every school has a large turnover every year, low-income families have large turnover rates in their home addresses – one big reason is moving for work – etc.

I'm not saying that there isn't, broadly constructed, "welfare fraud" in school lunch programs. I will say that we have all sorts of reasons not to treat numbers from these low-income verification audits as a proxy for welfare fraud.

I never said that most were. I said some are. I'll say that many are, especially doing volunteer work. I stand by this.

jam, you just said here that most welfare recipients are not. This includes the claim that most people receiving welfare do zero volunteer work. If this were true it would be material to the conversation. Please either source this or take it back.

Let's say that I would be eligible for welfare but I don't enroll in any welfare program, and I find an $8 an hour on-call job at a restaurant. Like millions of working Americans, I don't have health insurance through a family member or through my work.

If I accepted a Medicaid card, that would put me in your category welfare recipient, and under these operational definitions I'd suddenly be treated as if I were bringing home significantly more than $8 an hour because of the cash-equivalent value assigned to this Medicaid coverage.

But I won't take the Medicaid card. I'll go on uninsured and hope for the best.

Guess what? I'm still getting value from Medicaid. If things really go bad and I have no other recourse, that's my health insurance plan. The same is true for most working Americans earning $8, $10, $12 or more an hour even if they don't currently have a Medicaid card, food stamps, or any other welfare benefits even broadly defined.

The Cato Institute study has informational value, used appropriately. I don't claim that it's "wrong." I do claim that you're misusing it to compare unlike things: (a) for non-welfare-recipients, take-home pay that isn't grossed up with any cash-equivalent values assigned to public services, (b) for welfare recipients, a "package" grossed up with large cash-equivalent values assigned to several non-cash public services.

I value this discussion. I think we're all trying to find good facts and use them appropriately, and we all mean well.

 

We'll have to agree to disagree. I have been providing all the sources. Why don't you provide sources for the statements you are making rather then just saying I am wrong and asking me to provide yet more sources. Unfortunately I don't have any more time to research this topic nor do I think I need to do it.

As far as my statement "Death of a working spouse is also very minimal," this is from my past work experience where I dealt with 100's of families on welfare and can't recall anyone that ended up on welfare due to the death of a spouse. I'm sure it happens, but in my experience it is very low. Why don't you provide your sources that say death of a spouse is a major reason for ending up on welfare?

 

On school lunch audit responses being a poor proxy for welfare fraud, and that comparing the grossed-up welfare package numbers to hourly wages with no gross-up for public services is comparing unlikes, I think I've made logical arguments that don't depend on outside sources.

I will try to find information about welfare recipients volunteering, and about deaths of a working spouse. I think we can all agree that widows of working spouses were one of the first and most important target groups for public welfare in America. I think we can agree that these are a much smaller share of the welfare-recipient population today than they were at this peak early on. jam, you say their number is now so small that it's "very minimal." Maniac (originally, upthread) and I respectfully disagree.


Florence Owens Thompson, widowed mother in the Great Depression. Photo, Migrant Mother, by Dorothea Lange (1936). Hosted by Wikimedia.

 

There's no facts, figures, or references. It's just a "feeling". But, I suspect, you know that.

 

Parent(s) apply for free lunches for children. Children receive free lunches. USDA only requires 3% of households to be audited. Random audit asks parent(s) to provide documentation (confirmation of income or lack thereof, SNAP participation, etc.). A simple copy of a 1040 tax return and/or pay stub if they are working. They fail to provide proof in 6 weeks. They're benefits are eliminated for lack of eligibility. So they received tax payer money when they should not have. My personal experience is leading me to infer the parent(s) did this intentionally.

National School Lunch Program - Iowa Department of Education

Just keep in mind this entire discussion is about working aged adults on welfare. I look forward to seeing your research.

 

Over 260 000 recipients of Supplemental Security Income as of December 2009 – not contributory Social Security, the selective means-tested safety-net income funded from the general Treasury – are widowed excluding remarried. (Source.)

It seems harder to find recent statistics by widowhood status for other welfare programs. For TANF, during fiscal year 2010, "The estimated average monthly number of TANF recipients was 1,084,828 adults and 3,280,153 children… Almost half of TANF families had no adult recipients." (Source.) It's very possible that no one is systematically recording the marital status of adults in these cases. Meanwhile, widows were so central to the early history of what became TANF that many hits for searches on widows and TANF, welfare, etc. are about this history.

The Financial Feasibility of Marriage for Women Receiving TANF: An Analysis of Six States (Sally Margaret Brocksen, Ph.D. dissertation, Virginia Commonwealth University, 2005; pdf). AFDC is now TANF.

 

It's probably harder to quickly document that they're not working. I can see all sorts of headaches for cases with shared custody and/or child support.

Now, I did just use an SSI number which includes some working-age and many over-65 adults. The premise that we're only talking about working-aged adults is new. You excluded retirement (Social Security and Medicare, which are contributory with trust funds) and I think we all agree to do so, but I'd thought you were including all noncontributory, means-tested cash stipend programs, as well as some non-cash programs.

 

I would start by finding the identitiy of every man who fathered a child and is not caring for them in any way and forcing them to contribute half of the expenses for that child. It might not get the mom off welfare but it would save the taxpayers a lot of money.

 

Agreed. Along with the identity of every Mom who has mothered a child and is not caring for them in any way and forcing them to contribute half of the expenses for that child. Do fathers who have paid for children that were not theirs (as in the mother lied about paternity) get a refund under your idea as well?

 

Fixing welfare???

 

There are some promising ideas here.

The Other Milton Friedman: A Conservative With a Social Welfare Program (Robert H. Frank, The New York Times, November 23, 2006)

[video=youtube;xtpgkX588nM]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xtpgkX588nM[/video]

 

Well, under current law, fathers get no refund in the event of paternity fraud. Why not? Because the government wants to have as many pockets to pick as possible.

 

The picture may be more complicated than this suggests. Civil damages aren't strictly speaking a "refund," but it seems that U.S. courts regularly recognize paternity fraud as a cause of action and award damages. This seems to be an emerging area of law, with variance state by state and perhaps court by court. Law professor Eugene Volokh points to Dier vs. Peters (Iowa June 1, 2012; pdf) for "a good discussion of the debate about paternity fraud lawsuits, including citations to cases that reject such a cause of action and to cases that accept it." In Dier the Supreme Court of Iowa ruled that "such a cause of action [for paternity fraud] is consistent with traditional concepts of common law fraud, there is no prevailing public policy reason against recognizing such a cause of action, and Iowa's statutes do not speak to the issue," and with this they accepted a cause of action for paternity fraud. The decision was unanimous with a separate concurrence by the Chief Justice.

 

The answer is YES (based on DNA testing). Also, I agree that the Moms should pay their fair share. I think we know though that the vast majority of absent parents are male but women should be equally responsible.

 

The father, in this case, might have to file a separate court action in order to recover money paid out. He might have to demonstrate that he was defrauded. If the woman says that he was "the only one" then I'd advise him to get in writing (or email or text or whatever). Otherwise it seems that he is just accepting responsibility and may not be able to recover money down the road.

Graduate of the Judge Judy School of Law

 

Can't a guy request a DNA test when he's in the process of being made to pay child support? I know of a couple of men who did.

 

A lot but not most. Plus, they don't stay in jail forever.

 

I believe he can make that request.