Milwaukee Ranks Fourth Worst in Poverty.
You’ve read the headline. Do you notice what’s missing? What’s going unsaid?
People Starving to Death.
Wouldn’t you expect the two to go hand in hand? What is poverty if not an inability to meet one’s basic needs? What does it say if poverty ranks high, yet true human suffering is minimal? My theory, based on second-hand knowledge of “the system,” is that we have one hell of a social safety net.
While it’s a good thing that few (or none) are actually starving to death, I also see that this safety net functions as a snare. Perhaps one reason the poverty rate is so high is that it is too difficult or enticing to break the cycle once you’re caught up in it.
Imagine a hypothetical (not really) single mother on Welfare or unemployment. She is required to document her efforts to find work, with signatures from prospective employers, in order to recieve payments. In effect, her job for the time being is finding work. That’s good, right? She’s being encouraged to get off the system.
But, there’s a problem. Others in the system don’t want to work. They find it easier to attend a couple of interviews each week in order to continue recieving money from the government. So, when our single mother finishes the interview and hands over her unemployment forms to the employer she’s already being written off. Of course, an educated person might think to withold these forms if they want the job. They might interview elsewhere, to get the necessary signatures. On the other hand, even if you could talk some sense into our hypothetical (not really) single mother, is it really in the spirit of things to ask that she take extra interviews for jobs she doesn’t want? There’s a problem here. All the bad eggs are screwing it up for the people who want to work. I’m not sure how I would address this, because I simply do not understand the motivations of someone who would play this game of faking job searches. It seems like too much work to me. They may as well get a job which pays good money for scamming people: lawyer, salesman, politician, artist, etc.
There’s another problem with the welfare system, which I have considered an approach to. Imagine another (the same) hypothetical (not really) single mother. This time she is weighing her ability to earn against the cost of daycare because she knows that once she crosses a certain threshold the state will cut her off. Cold turkey. She needs a serious boost in wages to overcome the gap. What’s the incentive to achieve or take a better job?
I’ve pondered this one several times, because there seems to be such a simple answer. Why cut the daycare benefit all at once? This amounts to a pay cut for working harder. I wonder what would happen if the penalty for promotion were removed. Let’s say the recipient gets a raise of $50 per month (above the current cutoff point). Rather than stripping away all daycare benefits, only $50 is cut. Eventually, the employee is (admittedly, hopefully) paying all of their own daycare costs out of pocket because they have not been punished for advancing their career. I’d be willing to bet that you could even increase the incentive and still cut costs to the government. What if we used a ratio less than 1:1? Take away $25 when the employee earns $50 over the cutoff point. This should remove any feeling that a raise is for nothing. Of course, there would still be scammers. It’s just that I imagine the result to be a net positive. Perhaps I’m naive.
People respond to incentives. What’s the incentive to get off of welfare and/or out of poverty in Milwaukee? Something tells me it’s not all that great.
