Ebony's Pearls

East View from Mother's Grave
Originally uploaded by nodigio

I was homeless with small children once, after a divorce, and I briefly allowed myself to get sucked into the welfare system. I got out of it as quickly as I could, but it was very hard work. Once you’re mired in welfare, it’s very, very hard to get free of it. Sometimes, it felt as if the only way out was to die. People who have never been on welfare condemn those who are on it, but they do so without understanding just what it means to be on welfare. I’m not talking about the endless petty humiliations to which welfare recipients are subjected, both by the public in general and by the case workers who are paid to help them. I’m talking about the time welfare recipients have to spend to stay on welfare that prevents them from getting and keeping a job.

Welfare definitely needs reform, and I’ve spent years thinking about how it could be reformed in ways that are beneficial to society as a whole without costing taxpayers any more than it currently does (and potentially costing less) and in ways that are empowering and beneficial to the recipients.

Right now, welfare is subsistence aid that oppresses and humiliates the recipients. It's dependency entitlement. Once trapped in the cycle of welfare aid, it’s very hard to break out of it. It’s designed that way. Once you’re on welfare, you, your children your children’s children, and so on will be condemned to living on welfare for the rest of your lives and you’ll pass along a culture of welfare dependency that will guarantee only the luckiest will break out of it. It breeds despair, despondency, and apathy with resentment, a strong feeling of entitlement, and, weirdly, an unquestioning obedience to some authority figures and deep fear and anger towards others. The recipients are unable to imagine any other type of life.

But what if we did reform welfare so it was more effective overall – helped people get and stay off welfare, cost less, was conducted with dignity and respect, and empowered both the recipient and the taxpayer?

We could, if we were willing to make some deep and fundamental changes.

If, instead of looking at welfare as “giving away money to lazy no-goods”, we looked at it as an investment in families and society as a whole, we would set ourselves up to be more favorably predisposed towards the recipients of welfare. The whole “welfare queen” myth has been thoroughly debunked, so I don’t feel a need to cover old ground here. Most people who receive welfare receive it because they felt they had no other option, either because circumstances pushed them into it or because they were born into it and can’t see their way out. Once in welfare, it’s currently designed to keep people there.

The first step was altering how we look at welfare. This can be done through ads, word-of-mouth and a serious attitude adjustment among the case-workers and politicians who constantly bad-mouth the recipients. This will not cost any more than what is already being spent on advertising, just a shift in presentation, which is free.

The next step is to develop a multi-step welfare program: immediate urgent care, short term care, and long term assistance.

Immediate urgent care would be the care needed for someone who is suddenly jobless, suddenly homeless, and existing in that limbo between unemployment or getting re-homed. Their most urgent needs are a place to stay, food, and cash. For some people, this may be all the help they need until their unemployment kicks in or they can make arrangements for another job or home. Often, they only need help for 1 -8 days and six weeks would be the maximum time for urgent care, because that’s usually how long it takes to start collecting unemployment and get a place with the incoming money.

If they need more assistance than immediate care can provide, they progress to short term care.

Short term care happens when they still lack essentials but will take longer than 6 weeks to get them arranged – for example, they are denied unemployment or don’t qualify for it, their unemployment check isn’t enough to cover the expense of moving into a new place (deposits, basic household goods, transportation…), they are disabled or ill. The goal here is to help them advance so they regain independence. Perhaps they need job retraining, vo-tech assistance, or college help. They may need a job counselor who can do more than say “Well, what do you feel you’re qualified to do?” (I hated it when they asked me that – how was I to know if what I felt matched what was real?) Job counseling should consist of reviewing the person’s actual work and education history, hobby activities, volunteer work, and then offering the recipient the ability to improve skills for a better job. No one who goes through welfare should have to “settle” for a minimum wage job, nor be expected to work 9 hours a day at a state “training” job that only pays them $10.00 a day, when they could be spending those 9 hours studying for a better job or actually getting that better job. The time to complete this phase can take from 2 – 4 years, depending on where the recipient needs to start, and how long it takes them to recover from their illness/temporary disability. Excellent medical care to heal them up is essential to move them off welfare faster.

They may also need effective financial advice and assistance, especially if they are deeply in debt. Once a person enters the welfare system, all interest on outstanding debts is terminated. This includes entering for immediate care. They will only owe the principal amount of their debt, not the interest. Once they are in stable employment for at least 12 months, any debt they still owe can be renegotiated for interest rates. Any court-ordered payments, such as child support or a judgment against them, will be suspended while they work their way through the welfare system, and they will not owe back-payments for the months they spend in welfare. Payments will be renegotiated and resume once they’ve been in stable employment for at least 12 months. In the case of child support, they can voluntarily pay up to a maximum of 25% of what they receive in cash or unemployment benefits while on welfare and recovering from it.

Most people who need assistance will benefit from either the immediate care or short term care, and this will be enough to get them back on track and out of welfare. Suspending interest and court-ordered payments can ease a really rough stretch without ending the debt altogether.


Long term care is what we need when the person is permanently disabled or is coming from a deep family history of poverty and welfare, or someone who cycles on and off of welfare. These people need a completely different type of assistance, and it may take a lot longer to help them.

It’s actually two different groups of people – the permanently disabled and the deep poverty history. Let’s look at the permanently disabled first.

There are levels of permanent disability. Some people who are permanently disabled are still able to live independently and even to thrive with only minimal assistance, usually in the form of help with medical bills and durable medical equipment, transportation, and altering their home to accommodate their needs. Others will require more help, and may even need a lifetime of financial support and assistance. This is not usually addressed as welfare but as social security issues. I’m still pondering this aspect of welfare/social security because of the diversity of needs here. For now, that’s all I’ll say about permanent disability.

Deep poverty, however, has to be a long term strategy to help people out of it. When people have been born into poverty and grown up in deep poverty, changing that can be difficult and may be a generational effort. Let me take a stab at what I think would be an effective, multi-pronged program.

Several things need to happen society-wide for this to be truly effective. One is shrinking the wage gap between the lowest paid employee and the highest paid employee (including benefits, bonuses, and perks). People need to realize that they aren’t “giving the employees money” but are trading them a symbol for the use of their time, labor, skills, and knowledge and without the lowest level employees, the highest level ones couldn’t function. Narrowing that gap will reduce a lot of the burden on the welfare system.

A second society-wide thing we need to do is shift the focus of media from blame to support. Media plays an unfortunately large role in shaping how society behaves. It has taken the place of work, church, and community in that area. As such, it needs to realize its responsibilities and limit the yellow journalism to the appropriate venues, like The Onion and the opinion pages.

Then, we need to provide opportunities to potential entrepreneurs by removing a lot of the roadblocks that have been placed in their way. Zoning laws are among the worst culprits for restricting opportunities, but so are tax laws, and these need to be reviewed. Businesses that have fewer than 10 employees or earn less than a pre-determined amount of profit (not gross income, net income) should be tax exempt so they can grow to be larger businesses that will then be able to pay taxes. The larger a business is or the more locations it has, the more it should pay in taxes – franchises, chains, mega-corporations, and businesses earning more than a pre-determined amount of profit would pay more in taxes to help restrict their growth and prevent them from crushing fledgling businesses and competitors. This would provide more and better employment opportunities for a wider range of people, thus taking them off the welfare rolls.

Re-establishing neighborhoods, where people worked in the same area they lived and played, where people lived among their co-workers and shopped among their neighbors, would also provide society with a number of benefits ranging from a higher level of prosperity to a lower level of crime.

Once that’s done, for those who have become mired in the current poverty trap, we will need to expend the resources that have been freed up by paying employees a fair and living wage. Persistent poverty is off the radar for many Americans – even those who are themselves living in persistent poverty. Few politicians mention persistent poverty except to blame those who need it or to enact laws criminalizing poverty – and that’s certainly not going to end it.

We need to look at those elements of our culture that promote poverty – and don’t tell e we don’t have anything in our culture that promotes poverty because we certainly do.

The disparity in education alone is enough to keep segments of our society impoverished. The only incentives we offer for staying in school is the remote possibility of getting a better paying job – and that gets blown out of the water by the number of college graduates struggling to pay off crushing college loans by working 2 or 3 minimum wage and near-minimum wage jobs that aren’t even in their degree field because there are no jobs in their fields. Changing our educational system is a thesis in itself, so I’ll gloss over it here – but it is vital that we look closely at education and how we, as a society, use it to keep portions of our people in dire and persistent poverty.

We also marginalize the poor in society, preventing them from being heard – and I mean really heard – by our politicians and law-makers. Those who are rich disdain the poor and blame them for the poverty in which they live. The poor receive less government service for their tax dollars than any other segment of society and are treated the worst by those more fortunate than they. We block them out of organized civic life, prevent them from holding office because they can’t afford the megamillions it now takes to run for political office. We are governed by the rich for the rich, and we need to equalize that.

Many who are persistently poor, who were born into poverty and grew up in poverty marginalized and poorly educated, grow up knowing this is their lot in life and it can never change. Not “will” never change – “can” never change. They have a fatalistic attitude towards their poverty. They can’t imagine themselves living in any other way so they focus on things – iPods and fancy sport shoes and bling of all sorts because the trappings of discarded wealth and imitation wealth is available to them, but the reality of a better life isn’t.

We need to research – quickly – the cultural elements that keep them poor and use that knowledge to craft ways for the poor to imagine better lives and give them the tools and the way and the means to exit the culture of poverty.

First among the things we need to do is offer them incentives to change. Not just give them utility assistance, housing assistance, and food stamps to live a subsistence life, but real, tangible methods to get out of poverty, if not for themselves, then for their children. We need to find ways to keep the persistently poor from transmitting their culture of poverty to future generations.

Because we are a money-oriented society, I propose that we use money to do double work – to make them less poor now and condition it on behaviors that will empower them to live in society and not on the disdained fringes. I’ll get back to this point in a minute.

We need to abandon entitlement welfare completely. The hybrid welfare we’ve developed that’s a weird blend of humiliation, restrictions, and entitlement only makes matters worse. The whole convoluted mess of case workers only complicates welfare and plays favorites. The rules don’t apply equally to everyone, and it’s possible to “game the system” so some people get more entitlements as long as they’re willing to experience greater humiliations and accept the appearance of greater restrictions.

In our nanny state of entitlements, we want guarantees that the poor will only spend what money we grudgingly give on only the things we approve of. Scrap that. That attitude of distrust towards the poor is part of our culture that keeps the poor in poverty.

Yes, give them money based on conditions, but not negative conditions or onerous ones that prevent them from engaging in more constructive behaviors. We can do this low tech or high tech. I recommend high tech because I feel in the long run it will be less expensive and more effective, but we can start low tech and move up.

For example, students could receive a grant for attending school and participating in events at school and their parents would also receive a grant for each of their children who attended school and participated, plus they’d receive an additional grant for participating in a Parent School Association and for participating themselves in school activities. The more participation, the larger the grant. They would have to submit proof to receive their grant monies – report cards, ticket stubs, receipts, certificates of participation, stamped booklets, a swiped card, something that could be tallied. Yes, I’m, aware that this can still be gamed, but the penalties for being caught gaming the system would be severe. The parents would be motivated to send their children to school and to participate in school activities, and the students would earn something for themselves by attending school and participating. It would be like an earned allowance. In upper grades, students would also be able to earn extra grants for good grades, for participating in and earning awards in educational competitions, and for doing volunteer work in their communities.

This would have the immediate goals of providing them with cash to ease their poverty and the longer term goals of participating in organized society and giving them wider career opportunities than collecting the next welfare check. They’d devote time, effort, and gain skills to earn those grants (dispersed monthly or quarterly – low tech would be quarterly, high tech would be able to do so monthly). It would give them a tangible reason to go to school and to participate in school and society.

Adults could also earn grant cash for taking care of the health of themselves and their children by taking preventive health classes, participating in health and nutrition hands-on workshops (and not the penny ante ones they now offer that consist of a few stapled pages of notes and an attendance check, but real ones with instructors who actually show up for the class and actually teach it), and by taking their children to the clinic for preventive health exams, vaccinations, and need. They could present forms signed by the doctors and teachers to receive their grants (low tech) – or the teachers and doctors could send affirmations to the program to disperse the funds (high tech).

The payments would go to the women in married households, to the head of the household in single households, and the children would receive their benefits directly in addition to what the adults earned. They would earn extra grant money for having paying jobs – and employers would need to allow the people in these programs to have time off to participate in it without penalties. Right now, our current welfare system penalizes people who get jobs and employers penalize employees who still need to fulfill welfare requirements and we need to quit penalizing people who are working to get out of poverty.

The system needs to be consistent all across the country. There can be no local discretion or interference. Politicians cannot interfere with the program by making promises to change it or improve it. This welfare system needs to be out of the reach of political tampering. It should be run as simply and minimally as possible – high tech is the best way to go – the recipients swipe a card they have to attend the events and classes and clinics they need to attend, the school send in attendance and report cards, the doctors send in appointment compliance, the money gets tallied by a program and then deposited in the recipients’ bank accounts.

We don’t regulate how they spend the money, but the behaviors we require of them to earn that money will predispose them towards greater responsibility with it.

Those who are mired in poverty because of mental health issues, addictions, and health issues will need a different approach, tailored to their issues. These are the ones who will need caseworkers to supervise their progress and actions. One of the problems we face with our persistently poor is dependence.

They will have to be encouraged to go that extra step, to do that extra bit. For them, it will be slow, and we may not get the current generation off, but their children, and the children of their children will have it much easier.

We need to make it easy to get off of welfare and out of poverty. This is just one abbreviated example of how it could be done. The grave should not be the way out.