From: bh@anarres.CS.Berkeley.EDU (Brian Harvey)
Newsgroups: misc.kids,alt.kids-talk,alt.parents-teens,misc.education
Subject: welfare (was: Minors right of access to contraceptives?)
Date: 15 Apr 92 17:54:36 GMT
Article-I.D.: agate.shqksINNq3t
Organization: University of California at Berkeley
NNTP-Posting-Host: anarres.cs.berkeley.edu

jh4o+@andrew.cmu.edu (Jeffrey T. Hutzelman) writes:
>user Carl Reimann@auvm.americ writes:
>>Wisconsin has decided that in the case of
>>childbirth to a welfare mother, marriage shall be economically rewarded, and
>>the birth of a second child shall see a smaller increase in welfare payments
>>than the birth of the first child saw. Most controversially, the birth of
>>a third child shall be met by no extra payments.
>
>I think the theory behind this is that there are families on welfare who
>deliberately have more children in order to get the money.  This isn't
>an attempt to control teen pregnancy or anything else; it's an attempt
>to reduce the number of people who misuse the system.
>
> [... more arguments pro and con ...]

In my opinion the important dispute here is not about details of what policy
will have what effect on people's behavior.  The important point is a deep
disagreement about who is to blame for poverty.

Some people think that each poor person is individually to blame for his or
her own poverty.  If you think this, then you start arguing about how to
tune up social policy to make those poor people behave better.  You also
then start splitting hairs about things like whether it's fair to blame the
child for the parent's behevior, etc.

Other people think that poverty is primarily the result of overall social
forces.  People's individual behavior certainly has an effect at the margin,
and may determine exactly which people are poor or not poor, but it's just
not possible for every poor person to pull himself/herself up by the bootstraps.
We (I am one of these people) argue that the number of poor people varies in
predictable ways according to government policies and business policies, such
as shutting down factories, switching from progressive (income/property) to
regressive (sales) taxes, and so on.

Ultimately the solution to "welfare depencency" is to build a society in which
economic decisions are made with human dignity (and therefore full employment)
as a top priority.  Meanwhile, it is society's obligation to provide for the
material needs of the victims of economic policy that reproduces poverty.

It's absolutely true that the people on welfare tend to have kids on welfare.
One reason for that is that school budgets are allocated by the wealth of the
individual school district.  The children of the rich are trained for the
high-paying jobs.  The children of the poor are trained for poverty.  Tinkering
with the welfare payment formula doesn't address that!  Meanwhile, the formula
should make sure that nobody starves.  That's why people are "paid to have
children"--so that the children don't starve.

Only to people who want to blame the victims is this complicated.

P.S.  I know this is way off the original topic but I just couldn't let those
other posts stand without comment.  Sorry.
Newsgroups: misc.kids,alt.kids-talk,alt.parents-teens,misc.education