Help with Welfare Stats/Info

[kimmylavin]

Hi there!

Does anyone have any stats on the amount of money given to the average welfare recipient? With google searches, I've come up with something like 75% of recipients are off welfare in two years, with 50% being off in one, and the average amount being something like $373/month. I just wondered if someone out there had some hard data?

Also, what percent of the federal budget goes to welfare?

And lastly, is welfare given in the form of government issued credit cards? I thought those were given to government employees, not people on welfare?

(Working on a LTTE against my local 75-year-old "free markets rule" and "I pulled myself up by my bootstraps, so these lazy criminals should be able to" conservative grump.)

Thanks so much for any help!

[Maureen54]

1. 2 years?

I think they have to off welfare in two years...
Wasn't that the Clinton welfare to work policy?

[Hannah Bell]

2. 2006 tanf = 17.5 million, .65% of fed spending

http://www.nationalaglawcenter.org/assets/crs/RS22385.pdf

bottom of page

[Hannah Bell]

4. You might want to compare that with the 406 billion spent in 2006

on interest payments on the federal debt.

http://calculatedrisk.blogspot.com/2006/11/interest-on-national-debt.html


Or you could compare it to the cost of Iraq, 2 billion/week in 2006 (more now).

http://www.boston.com/news/world/middleeast/articles/2006/09/28/cost_of_iraq_war_nearly_2b_a_week/

That's 17.5 million: 17,500,000
v. 104 billion: 104,000,000,000 (5942 x higher)
v. 406 billion: 406,000,000,000 (23200 x higher)

[Hannah Bell]

5. Then you could compare that to the 2007 $3 billion paycheck for J. Paulson,

hedge fund manager.

He worked hard for it - shorting subprime mortgages.


BOSTON (Reuters) - Millions of Americans may be facing the prospect of losing their homes, but a handful of fund managers have become the best paid in their industry -- taking home 10-figure paychecks last year -- by betting against mortgages.

John Paulson, who ran a medium-sized fund until last year, zoomed to the top of the industry's earnings table when he took home an estimated $3 billion in 2007, double what the top earner made in 2006, according to data released by magazine Trader Monthly on Monday.

By standing conventional wisdom on its head and deciding that housing prices could decline on a national level, and that investment-grade mortgage bonds would be subject to default in record numbers, Paulson, 52, set a new record for payouts on Wall Street, industry analysts said.

Paulson's $3 billion payout is equivalent to $26 for every U.S. household (114.4 million in 2006).

[Viva_La_Revolution]

3. Every state is different..

These are all state programs that receive funding from the feds.
Each state figures their own $$ according to local costs.

They did away with paper food stamps several years ago, and now most states use debit cards for cash payment.. same with my unemployment, I get it put on a debit card (I had the option of direct deposit or the card).

[bobbolink]

6. I appreciate you doing this! Little by little, we need to assemble the actual facts

to use against the propaganda machine.

Thanks!

:toast:

[kdmorris]

7. I can tell you what I got back when I was on welfare

(this was pre-welfare reform). I had 3 children, ex-husband refused to pay child support. I was lucky enough to get a Section-8 housing certificate that allowed my rent to be based on my income(which was good because being homeless with 3 children was no fun). I got $276 in cash and $405 in food stamps every month (I really don't know what it is now). This was from 1992-1996. I fought hard to get off of welfare, but, at every turn, it seemed like something went wrong. I did finally manage to get off of welfare, but that was part wanting to and a huge helping of luck. Without the support of other people, I never would have made it off.

When I first went on welfare, the food stamps came in paper and the cash came in the form of a check. About 6 months into it, they did start giving me it all on a credit card sort of thing (the "Independence" card... gag). I did actually like it better, even though I knew they did that to stop all us "criminals" from "getting rich". At least I could kind of hide it and pretend it was an ATM card. After a while of being on welfare, due to "I pulled myself up by my bootstraps, so these lazy criminals should be able to" conservative grumps, I was ashamed of being poor and generally only stayed alive because I didn't want my ex-husband to get my daughters. Most days, I wished I was dead and any time I was confronted with bigots like those people, I felt more and more powerless.

The Welfare Reform Act of 1996 limits most assistance to people. The ONLY good thing in that bill was that married people could jointly get assistance, if needed. That, at least, stopped poor fathers from moving out of the house so that the mother could raise the children, thereby keeping families together. The rest of it was crap and designed to stop assistance altogether or farm people out to the nearest KFC, where they could "earn their welfare check". (I kid you not. The law in Maryland was that you had to work or be looking for work for 20 hours a week. So, they started up a service to hook welfare moms up with fast food joints so that they could keep their checks and food stamps) I was in school then, and I was sanctioned because I was in school for 9 hours a day at a school an hour away from my house. The entire last two months of school, I only received 75% of my original money (they removed my part, but kept the amount for my daughters. If I had had only one child, I would have lost 50% of my money). They didn't sanction my food stamps, luckily, but $405 a month wasn't much in the first place.

You know, I did finally get off of welfare, but I was young and lucky and I also didn't have any disabilities. It haunts me to know that for every person like me who managed to make it out, there were probably 100 more who continue to suffer. It's disgusting how little of a safety net there is in "the richest country in the world".

[happyslug]

8. The Courts killed the man in the house rule in the 1960s.

All Congress did was recognize what the courts had done 30 years before.

Prior to the mid-1960s most states had what was called the "Man in the house Rule" i.e. if the mother and father lived together, they could NOT get Welfare, but the mother and children could get Welfare if the father was absent The rationale behind this was if the father was in the house, he could work and earn income for the family. Since welfare was only for widows and orphans NOT for intact families such intact families were denied welfare.

In the 1960s the US Supreme Court found this division unconstitutional on the grounds the Children on welfare were NOT being treated Equally, as required by the 14th amendment. If a child only had the child's mother at home, such child could get welfare, but if the child had BOTH parents at home, the child would be DENIED welfare under the Man in the House Rule. The court found this was a denial of Equal Protection of the law as to the CHILD. Technically it was still constitutional to discriminate against a man in the house if no children were involved, but since the Federal Government provided no Welfare in such situations rarely a problem.

The Man in the House rule, kept coming back in State Legislatures even after ti had been ruled unconstitutional. The man in the House rule remain on the books in many states in regard to NON-federal assisted Welfare (Which did not really exist). All Congress did in 1995 was finally recognize that the Man in the House rule had NOT been constitutional since the mid 1960s and finally changed the law to reflect what the Court had the Constitution demanded. Congress (Then controlled by the Republicans) made it sound like Congress was improving things, when all it was doing was keeping THAT item the same (And reduce other rights).

[kdmorris]

9. Thanks for the write up

It figures that Gingrich and his ilk would put something like that in there and call it a success for them. The rest of the bill was crap. All it does is punishes people and removes their safety net.

At the time, I didn't have a computer/internet. Most of my news came from the radio, as my TV broke and I couldn't replace it. When I could buy a newspaper, but there was no way for me to search and find out what those people were up to.

[bobbolink]

10. And yet the same people will decry the result.. many fatherless families,

and now young men who don't know HOW to stay in a family they create, and be an actual father.

What we have done is criminal!

:mad:

[bobbolink]

11. Here's an interesting one: 38 percent of women on AFDC receive housing assistance.

This is from a book published in 1997, so it's before the Deform.

How in the hell is anyone supposed to take care of children on what they get from TANF, with no housing assistance????

[TexasBushwhacker]

12. It depends on what you count

There's a lot of info here:

http://www.acf.hhs.gov/

There's housing assistance, food stamps, child care assistance, as well as Earned Income Credit (up to $4716 for a single parent or couple with 2 children or more). Some states have additional assistance available.

[bobbolink]

13. I came across this information, from studies BEFORE Clinton "ended

welfare as we know it", so they KNEW going into this what would happen:

p. 137 A variety of studies were initiated in the early 1980s to track women who were kicked off the AFDC rolls. All of this research came to the same conclusion: women who lost AFDC income worked more and increased their earnings. But on average, their total family income was lower several years after these changes than it had been before. They were unable to earn enough to fully replace the AFDC income that they had lost. In a major review of the effect of these changes, the U.S. General Accounting Office concluded that those terminated from the AFDC program typically had 12 to 26 percent lower monthly income eighteen months to two years after the program change than they had before these changes, "even though many worked full-time and increased their earnings during this period." Thus, these women were unambiguously worse off in two ways after these cutbacks. First, they had less family income than before, and second, they were working more, providing them with less time for their children.
It Takes A Nation, Rebecca M. Blank 1997