Which Poor People Shouldn't Have to Work for Aid?

[applegrove]

By Emily Badger and Margot Sanger-Katz at the NY Times

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/15/upshot/medicaid-poor-michigan-work-requirements.html

"SNIP..........

Exhorted by President Trump, federal administrators and many Republican state officials are drafting rules requiring people to work in exchange for Medicaid, housing aid and food assistance. But what happens when the poor live where work is hard to find?

In Michigan, the state’s Senate has passed a proposal that would exempt Medicaid recipients from a work requirement partly on the basis of geography — if they live in a county where unemployment exceeds 8.5 percent.

Geography may seem a simple way to identify who faces barriers to work, but it’s also a crude one. The lines that policymakers draw risk embedding regional and racial biases about who counts as “left behind.”

Michigan’s approach, critics point out, would mean that poor, mostly white rural counties are exempted, but not the predominantly black, economically troubled cities of Detroit and Flint. Those cities happen to be located within counties with low suburban unemployment, which brings the overall unemployment of the counties below 8.5 percent. There are similar demographic patterns in other states pursuing work requirements, including Kentucky, Virginia and Ohio, where the rural areas most likely to qualify for exemptions tend to be disproportionately white.

..........SNIP"

[Crutchez_CuiBono]

1. Corporate welfare

should come w strings attached as well.

[applegrove]

4. Would lower wages.

[Crutchez_CuiBono]

5. oh?

cant get much lower. were at 1975 buying power now.

[applegrove]

7. For every cent they lower wages the rich CEO gets to take home a bonus. They

are at war with the people.

[Crutchez_CuiBono]

2. Corps pay no taxes anymore

so why do they even have a say? They want free labor. If folks could work 30 hours a week....uh...don't you think they would? Glad those rich folks got their tax break though.

[Hortensis]

3. The ones who can't reasonably, of course. That includes

physical, mental, emotional, practical as in caring for dependents, and work availability reasons, as well as any other sensible ones that don't come to mind.

It would be expensive, of course, but from-safety-net-(back) to-self-reliance programs, including training for viable jobs, has always been a liberal progressive goal. I once met a social worker whose job included rousting a mother suffering from depression out of bed and seeing that she took her medication on bad days when she couldn't manage it on her own (this was going on 40 years ago now). The idea was to help her transform her life into something that wasn't itself depressing and supported healthful mentation.

Unfortunately, few Republican-run programs of our current corrupt era could be expected to be run well or justly.

An old story. We believe in the virtues and benefits of progressive programs, and most conservatives have much tighter limits than liberals on what and how much they'll support. If we insisted on keeping people off the streets, as a group typically insisted on warehousing them in cheap projects and forgetting about them. Many individuals were different, of course.

This was a big argument when I was a teenager starting to become politically aware, aside from elections the first one I really remember. Then, it was progressive liberals and a few progressive cons arguing for doing what was needed to get people to work, most cons condemning programs, people, and costs.

That said, when Republicans are arguing for getting people to work, and talking jobs training, that's something we should be using our power to make happen as it should.

[Crutchez_CuiBono]

6. job training

like free college ? you can see how they reacted to that.

[Hortensis]

8. :) TN just passed a law making community college free

for adults. They'd passed one a few years ago making it free for high school grads. Some not-unreasonable requirements and limitation. Adults can't already have degrees, for instance.

It's not free university, but in a southern state it's extremely encouraging, right?

[Crutchez_CuiBono]

9. Sure is!