This story from the Daily Caller about colleges helping kids sign up for food stamps, got me completely depressed. It’s not so much that this is indicative of a bloated, out-of-control government, though it is. It’s more that this symbolizes how the social capital of the nation is being eroded by the moocher mentality. Welfare should have social stigma, it should not be overly generous, and it should not be part of the federal government. As you can see from this excerpt, I’m batting 0-3:
About 20,000 people sign up for food stamps every day, and college students across the country are the newest demographic being encouraged to enlist. Portland State University devotes a page on its Web site to explaining the ease with which students can receive benefits, along with instructions on how to apply. The school says food stamps are not charity but rather a benefit all honest taxpaying citizens can afford. …Traditionally food stamps are for the working poor and single parents, but colleges are trying to make it as easy as possible for students to obtain federal assistance, no matter their socio-economic background. Oregon has a state-wide non-profit which includes a special focus on food stamps for students… The Grand Views, a college newspaper from Grand View University in Des Moines, Iowa, featured a story on students who apply for food stamps because they claim they don’t have time to hold down a job between classes and basketball practices. …Adam Sylvain, a sophomore at Virginia’s George Mason University, recounted a recent conversation with friends in his dorm room. “My roommate told me he applied for food stamps, and they told him he qualified for $200 a month in benefits,” Sylvain said. “He’s here on scholarship and he saves over $5,000 each summer in cash.” “A few of our other friends who were in the room also said if there were able to, they would get food stamps … They think that if they’re eligible it’s the government’s fault, so they might as well,” Sylvain said. …President Obama’s latest budget included $72.5 billion for food stamps — nearly double the amount from 2008. Approximately 38 million people, or 13 percent of the U.S. population is on food stamps. It’s a trend that seems on the rise — Salon recently reported on young, broke hipsters using federal assistance to buy high-end organic food. “I’m sort of a foodie, and I’m not going to do the ‘living off ramen’ thing,” one young man said, fondly remembering a recent meal he’d prepared of roasted rabbit with butter, tarragon and sweet potatoes. “I used to think that you could only get processed food and government cheese on food stamps, but it’s great that you can get anything.”
[…] The federal government maintains a Byzantine maze of redistribution programs, so there are lots of opportunities for progress. Medicaid is an obvious example, along with food stamps. Especially since both programs are riddled with fraud. […]
[…] The federal government maintains a Byzantine maze of redistribution programs, so there are lots of opportunities for progress. Medicaid is an obvious example, along with food stamps. Especially since both programs are riddled with fraud. […]
On this post and https://danieljmitchell.wordpress.com/2020/07/30/tax-increases-will-generate-more-spending-more-debt-and-less-prosperity/ : First on moochers:
Yes, there’s excess and legal violation. I challenged (by one letter) a New York State requirement that anyone applying for an ACA (Obamacare) subsidy ca. 2014 must also apply for any financial or benefit program for which they qualify, even if they don’t need it. NYS wrote back in affirmation of the requirement. I guess an argument for it is alleviation of the worst poverty resulting from excess stigma. But I think the person’s own assessment of need should be permitted along with meeting legal qualifications; if you qualify but you decide you don’t need it, don’t apply. And some are more disadvantageous than the monetary benefit would imply.
And there are legal violations, like fraud. There are also business frauds and illegal acts by people in all classes, albeit not by all people. The answer is the same across the board: enforce laws. I didn’t hear any criticism of the FBI’s arrest of Bernie Madoff, even though it was fraud by voluntary signature, not fraud at gunpoint. If enforcement is a bad idea, maybe that means the laws should be reformed.
The Daily Caller story didn’t have numbers showing how bad fraud is. Organic food is often close to cheap; I don’t choose to buy it unless nonorganic is not offered, and I don’t pay much for food. Food stamps aren’t enough to pay much for many high-end steaks and hot food is not allowed. Many college students are poor and we’re probably better off as a society letting some poor people get degrees before they become middle-class, because waiting for middle-class status may mean never getting the degree and never learning the knowledge, research techniques, and analytical skills needed to contribute intellectually to society, and that’s the direction society needs to pursue. Perhaps someone can study whether financial supports help these people. Scholarships help; probably SNAP does, too. We can measure whether government benefits from poor people getting degrees.
I suspect job openings are, over the long haul, becoming fewer relative to population size. Jobs subject to automation are more likely to go, and that’s an expanding range. Better education would make more people employable for good pay, and we have great higher education and many good K-12 schools, but not enough, and many schools are awful. Entrepreneurship is good but requires greater skill and skill range than does employment; the small-business CEO has to know enough about customers’ demands, product selection, pricing, inventory management, marketing, finance, law, and human resources to survive but relatively few employees need that range of knowledge or how to get it. So someone who retired or is forced out because they’re getting old often doesn’t have the means to become an entrepreneur and last.
A clue that the larger business community is not looking to employ the whole national population is in what the business community is not asking for from government. Businesses have joint institutions that try to influence government and they often announce what they want, including high priorities and medium priorities (they rarely pursue low-priority pie-in-the-sky dreams because they would lose credibility if they tried). They want tax cuts and bureaucratic simplifications, but two potential objectives are unmentioned (doubtless a few contrarians do ask but most businesses don’t):
— Eliminating Social Security retirement. That would gain 15% of the payroll, half each from employers and employees, granting a pay raise with a stroke of a pen. Surely attractive.
— Eliminating higher standards for pensions. Vendors advertise that they’ll take that off business owners’ hands, so I assume many business owners wish they didn’t have to deal with this. There has been shifting from defined-benefit plans to defined-contribution plans, but I don’t think 401(k) and 403(b) plans are under serious attack.
Why? Here’s my speculation: While there’s invidious discrimination against large groups of people (less than decades ago and less than in some other nations) and that includes older people, ageism has a difference: We admire people for having the quality that is the ground for discrimination and we want that quality for ourselves. We admire that they can retire and look forward to it ourselves. Spending more time with family and taking up the banjo are appealing. We usually like our older coworkers as individuals. So, if an older person works with a few younger people and, say, goes to the bathroom more often while fulfilling the same work quota as anyone but doesn’t seem to be faster with a keyboard or a phone, the employer may guess that the younger people are crediting the nice older person with a little of their work so that everyone still looks good. But firing people simply for being older, even if done so as to avoid legal repercussions, may be demoralizing, as word gets around that “everyone gets heartlessly fired at around 65”. One way a company can reduce this is by encouraging early departure, even departure during someone’s late-in-life performance peak. A way to do that is to let people have pensions in which they have confidence and Social Security retirement, which already enjoys wide public confidence. So, when someone thinks about opening a twelve-cuisine restaurant or paddling a canoe across the Pacific or becoming a recreation director for hyperactive kids at one-third less pay, their own financial cushion can make these alternatives more realistic, they leave the employer, and the employer can afford to hire a replacement who’s also a high performer. Thus, potentially everyone in the company is a high performer. Zappo’s and then its new parent Amazon offered bonuses to people who quit (no returning allowed), and one memo offering it began by asking people to please not take up the offer.
So what do we do with the people employers don’t want? Some are supported by families; that requires employers to compensate the people they engage at pay sufficient to support families. Some others are supported by government; that requires businesses to pay taxes sufficient for the government support. While the British colony Hong Kong had no minimum wage, according to the Hoover institution’s anthology on the 1970s colony when the population was considered as low-, middle- and upper-income 44% had low incomes and therefore qualified for housing subsidies (only low-income people qualified for housing subsidies, whereas N.Y.C. subsidizes some middle-class housing (the “affordable housing” program)). I understand the colony was not subsidized by the U.K., so that must have been paid for by taxes from somewhere, and I doubt China paid.
If those solutions are not satisfactory to those who’d be invoiced for them, there’s another solution. From what I’ve heard about suicide (that’s not the solution I’m getting to), people kill themselves because of lack of financial resources plus feeling there’s no future, lack of financial resources plus shame for having failed one’s family, or lack of financial resources plus intractable pain, but not lack of financial resources alone. People whose only major concern is lack of financial resources tend to do something else: They commit economic crimes. Maybe knifepoint crimes; maybe pen-and-paper crimes; maybe some other crimes. People with dependents may be more likely to try it. Probably most people do so on an almost-one-time basis. (I once wondered why Italy is sort of a global headquarters for the Mafia but Australia, founded by criminals with long prison sentences voluntarily released on condition of never returning to England, is now not a significant crime center. A short book on Australia by an academic and published by Oxford University Press gave, in a sentence or two, an answer: most of them were not career criminals. Probably, careerists are skillful enough to usually evade getting caught but amateurs get caught early and their motivation was to get through an economic rough spot, not to make a permanent living through crime.) Whether they commit economic crime briefly or as a career, the society pays through higher security: stores closing earlier, hiring more guards, police, and judges, building more prisons, and suffering lower incomes among ex-convicts who then pay less in taxes, do less investing, and effectively teach their children that sometimes you have to do what you have to do, code for some crime being okay. Compared to that, welfare can be more orderly and cheaper for society. I maintain that education would be a good replacement for needing welfare, but that’s difficult and slow to implement.
I heard that a colony centuries ago in our land had a rule: work or don’t eat. Let’s say someone was lazy; or was disliked and un- or undercompensated for their work and thus couldn’t get enough to eat. Either way, that person could leave and go into the surrounding woods, pluck an apple and a rabbit, make a lean-to, and make a go of it. Today, that would likely be trespass, conversion of property, hunting without a license, construction without a permit, and violation of zoning, and maybe could get three-strikes-and-you’re-out sentencing. And that criminalization is hard to criticize in light of today’s global population size alone.
This could entail the anti-abortion anti-right-to-die conservatives partnering with pro-safety-net liberals to support the larger population. It is too late to go back to the economic system that I think is and has been used by every species of life except humans and that was used by humans for the first 99.8% or so of humanity’s existence: gathering-hunting. It may not take many hours a week to support yourself that way, by one scholarly estimate 15 hours a week, not 40, but it takes a lot of land. My rough estimate is that if we all went back to that system and stuck with it for about a month, out of every 35 people, 34 would have to die. That’s just by starvation, and without murders.
Many arguments would be stronger (or weaker) if numbers were supplied. I heard that only 5% of the population is numerate. What I see is that people hate numbers. (An adult who can’t read hides it; an adult who can’t balance a checkbook jokes about it and gets sympathy.) So to find the stronger (or weaker) arguments, we have to do our own digging. Your post on fiscal debt reduction through either tax increases or spending cuts is a contribution in that direction. It appears to me that a difference in success between expenditure-based vs. tax-based reduction cases of “more than half” vs. “less than 4 in 10” is not very big, given other differences likely to be present, such that what strategy to prefer for one nation is not easily decided. I do get concerned that the ratio of debt to GDP or GNP may be too high. It seems here that Democrats overspend government money (or have it when they shouldn’t) and that Republicans underspend government money (or don’t have it when they should), and that both cost society. A balancing act is needed.
On the quotation attributed to Friedrich August von Hayek, “[i]f socialists understood economics, they wouldn’t be socialist.” Maybe. A Citigroup international banker, in his memoirs, told a story (saying some swear by it and others deny it) about Fidel Castro setting up the new government when he was with about 20 top followers. He asked, “Who here is an economist?” One person mis-heard that. He thought Castro had asked, “Who here is a Communist?” (Each of the two words is the same in both languages, according to Google Translate.) The person who mis-heard was Che Guevara, he raised his hand, Castro appointed him to run the central bank, and it was a disaster for a year or two. Guevara was a political organizer and went back to that, full-time.
But I suspect that many modern socialist revolutions that included civil wars followed capitalisms that none of us would care to live under. So, if you had shown up at their door after they won their civil war and announced that capitalism can work well to everyone’s satisfaction, you’d be lucky to be permitted to keep vital organs inside your rib cage while you’re shoved out of the country. Even a well-run socialism is economically less efficient than a well-run capitalism, but replacing a badly-run socialism with a well-run capitalism with that history requires education and credibility. Babies are raised on socialist principles, even by billionaires: from each according to ability (they’re cute); to each according to need (nearly everything at birth and maybe half of everything at age 18-22); both decided by a third party (the parents). We offer lemonade stand praxis (with a business model that includes adult C-level talent for free and features 100% of revenue being reported as pure profit) but not before the child is around 6 years old, because a 6-month-old thinks what you do with a nickel is swallow it; for the public, capitalism requires more education than does socialism, under which the smart people all work for the state and get more closely coordinated. Disaster recovery probably does not pay its own way, even allowing that people getting back to work sooner pay more taxes; but no one suggests we shut FEMA down. And trying to convert a society from socialism to capitalism overnight probably leads to a lot of befuddlement and failure. Granted I’m using simplified versions of each economic theory, but most people do that, and that partly shapes the economic system they wind up getting.
[…] close by augmenting our list of con artists (the Octo-mom, college kids, etc) who mooch off the food stamp program. As reported by the Daily Caller, one of Mayor de […]
[…] College kids scamming the program for handouts. […]
[…] College kids scamming the program for handouts. […]
[…] College kids scamming the program for handouts. […]
[…] College kids scamming the program for handouts. […]
[…] College kids scamming the program for handouts. […]
[…] College kids scamming the program for handouts. […]
[…] College kids scamming the program for handouts. […]
[…] College kids scamming the program for handouts. […]
[…] College kids scamming the program for handouts. […]
[…] College kids scamming the program for handouts. […]
[…] College kids scamming the program for handouts. […]
[…] has morphed from a handout for the genuinely poor to a widespread entitlement for everyone from college students to the Octo-mom, and for products ranging from luxury coffee to […]
As a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, we are taught to be as self-reliant as possible. After we have done all we can do, and we are still not able to make ends meet, we are counseled to turn to our families for support. If receiving help form your family is not possible, we should then turn to our church’s welfare system. It is designed to help people in time of need, but more importantly to get them on the road to self-reliance as quickly as possible. Often times it requires that you give in return You may be asked to volunteer at one of the food assembling facilities, to clean a church meetinghouse, etc. Basically you don’t get something for nothing!
I am married, and both my husband and I are attending a church affiliated University. We have a toddler and one on the way. It seems we are a “minority” in our community because we choose to be self-reliant and leave government assistance for those who are truly in need. It is amazing to me how many of my peers have the exact mentality that you just described. It’s as if there is no other logical answer to living as a poor college student and supporting a family, than to sign up for medicaid, WIC, food stamps, and any other form of government assistance. I have felt that people think I’m silly for even trying to follow the counsel our church teaches of being self-reliant, when there is a much easier way! Thanks for the post and feel free to visit my recent blog post on the topic, leave a comment, and follow if you wish! http://notsosloth.blogspot.com/2012/01/tough-commitment-to-keep.html
[…] College kids scamming the program for handouts. […]
[…] But what got me most upset was the story about college kids mooching off the program. […]
[…] this is downright reprehensible, perhaps even worse than the story about college students mooching off the program. Shame on Yum! Brands. This is another distasteful example of how big business is willing to rape […]
@Joe G.
The main aim of the AmeriCorp program is to assist low income poverty level households, kind of like a domestic Peace Corp. Part of the program is immersion – you live among the population you are helping. Your standard of living is really low as your stipend is only $10K year.
[…] this is downright reprehensible, perhaps even worse than the story about college students mooching off the program. Shame on Yum! Brands. This is another distasteful example of how big business is willing to rape […]
[…] that make it easier or harder for people to become dependent. There also are some states (and even colleges) that actually try to lure people into signing up for welfare, which also might affect the results. […]
[…] that make it easier or harder for people to become dependent. There also are some states (and even colleges) that actually try to lure people into signing up for welfare, which also might affect the results. […]
[…] that make it easier or harder for people to become dependent. There also are some states (and even colleges) that actually try to lure people into signing up for welfare, which also might affect the results. […]
What ever happened to American pride? The American who believed that no one owed him/her a living? Can our nation ever find its work ethic again? Ever relearn the joy that comes from overcoming a challenge, from being self-sufficient?
this has been going on for years and will go on for years more until one day we wake up and the nation is so bankrupt and the economy is in a depression and Congress crying out for even higher taxes since more and more people are saying “gimmie gimmie”, and then it all crashes down.
Just tell me how to one day be able to move out of the US with my mony , wife and daughter and live somewhere else where i don,t get sick from all the heat like over in Malaysia where my wife is from.
You may have seen Mary Katherine Ham’s recent blog post about this: http://www.weeklystandard.com/blogs/sad-tale-juan-diego-castro
AmeriCorps participants are also encouraged to apply since the stipends are not counted as income for food stamps eligibility.
A main aim of the program, of course, was to increase “self-reliance.” Heh.
Beer? Wine? Spices? all being bought and paid for with federal food stamps? College students? Oh MY God what is next now?