Welfare is necessary in a nation that intentionally keeps a 5-6 percent unemployment rate. (When unemployment dips below this, inflation starts to grow, and the Federal Reserve contracts the money supply to bring both inflation and unemployment back in line).
To tell welfare recipients therefore to just "get a job" is terrible economics, because it is literally impossible to reduce the unemployment rate to zero.
In March 1987, the General Accounting Office released a report that summarized more than one hundred studies of welfare since 1975.
It found that "research does not support the view that welfare encourages two-parent family breakup" or that welfare significantly reduces the incentive to work.
Conservatives also accuse welfare of giving mothers an economic incentive to have more children.
Ten major studies have been conducted on this issue in the last six years alone, and not one has found any connection between the level of payments offered and a woman's decision to bear children. The size of average welfare families is virtually the same as non-welfare families.
Because the poor cannot afford well-funded lobbyists in Washington, they make easy targets for budget cuts. Between 1970 and 1991, individual AFDC payments have declined 42 percent in real terms.
Today, AFDC takes up less than 1 percent of the combined government budgets. Meanwhile, corporate welfare is running $150 billion a year, three times the federal spending on AFDC and food stamps.
Steve Kangas is dead but his ideas live on. Of course, Newt Gingrich congress got rid of AFDC when he was house speaker and replaced it with Temporary Assistance to needy families (TANF) which provides a lifetime 5 years of welfare payments to single mothers.
Is the US a welfare state? Hardly.
TANF is one of the reasons for the the rise of the "for profit"""" " schools. these schools provide training programs for the poor and working class people coming off of welfare and out of prison. Typically these schools will have a medical assistant program for females and a criminal justice (CJ) program for males. The top students who score high enough to be in an IT program.
Unfortunately these programs cost about twice as much as what a community college charges and students roll up $20,000 or more in student loans that they are unable to pay back.
Why? Because many of the degrees are considered worthless and the credits earned are not transferable to public or private colleges. Most law enforcement agencies will not hire for profit CJ graduates.
To make matters worse a student loan cannot be discharged during bankruptcy. The student gets stuck holding the bag,
It"s pointless to get an associate degree in medical assisting and then take a job at McDonald's for minimum wage.
The Obama administration is trying cut off those schools that are unable to get appropriate employment for these unfortunate students.
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