Welfare System Designed to Keep the Poor Poorer

[Jefferson23]

Sanford Schram, professor of political science at Hunter College, says new state laws that place restrictions on welfare recipients mark the poor as deviant and are designed to keep them from receiving welfare - April 17, 2015

Bio

Sanford Schram is Professor of Political Science and Faculty Associate at the Roosevelt House Institute of Public Policy at Hunter College, CUNY. His published books include Words of Welfare: The Poverty of Social Science and the Social Science of Poverty (1995) and Disciplining the Poor: Neoliberal Paternalism and the Persistent Power of Race (2011)--co-authored with Joe Soss and Richard Fording. Both books won the Michael Harrington Award from the American Political Science Association. (Schram is the only person to author more than one book that has won Harrington Award.) More recently he published Becoming a Footnote: An Activist-Scholar Finds His Voice, Learns to Write, and Survives Academia (2013). Soon to be published is The Return to Ordinary Capitalism: Neoliberalism, Precarity, Occupy (Oxford University Press). Schram is the 2012 recipient of the Charles McCoy Career Achievement Award from the Caucus for a New Political Science.

Transcript

Governor of Kansas Sam Brownback has signed a new bill into state law that places restrictions on what welfare recipients can purchase with cash assistance, including movie tickets, liquor, and tattoos. Advocates of the bill say it will provide more accountability for taxpayer money, but will it actually improve the conditions of the poor? Now joining us to discuss this from New York is Sanford Schram. Sanford is professor of political science at Hunter College, CUNY. He is an award-winning author of many books, including Disciplining the Poor: Neoliberal Paternalism.

Thank you so much for joining us.

SANFORD SCHRAM, PROFESSOR OF POLITICAL SCIENCE, HUNTER COLLEGE: My pleasure.

PERIES: Let's begin with what this bill will do, and how bills like this throughout the country is affecting the employment and well-being of welfare recipients.

SCHRAM: Yeah, the Kansas law is just one of another spate of laws that have been passed lately. The country seems to have a habit whenever things start to go bad or the economy's not doing well to fall into a pit of invoking stereotypes, often racist and sexist stereotypes about the poor as deviants who aren't adhering to white, middle-class rules of work and family. And amazingly, we've seen this happen again in the last few years post the great recession, and state after state has passed these kinds of restrictions which really don't make a lot of sense. A popular one is drug testing of recipients, though people on welfare are on average less likely to use illegal drugs than the population in general. And states lose money, they spend more on testing than they get back from dropping people from the rolls for that.

But we see these other kinds of restrictions coming in like the ones in Kansas, limiting how much money you can withdraw from your Electronic Benefit Transfer card each day, $25 in Kansas, and limiting what you can spend the money on. In many cases, about things that low-income people would never even contemplate buying or can afford to buy.

So it's really more about marking the poor as deviant, and sort of creating a kind of policy feedback that feeds back into the society. The policy sort of calls out the poor as deviant and manufacturers their otherness in order to reinforce or buttress anti-welfare antipathy.

in full: http://therealnews.com/t2/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=31&Itemid=74&jumival=13673

[daleanime]

1. K&R.....

and bookmarked.

[Thinkingabout]

2. Was welfare ever designed to get someone rich?

[Dragonfli]

3. Just the other day when I suggested you go to poor neighborhoods

to learn something, you told me you didn't have to, because you live it.

Now unless you read nothing more than the title (and even then, your response is repulsive) you agree that the poor should be made to appear deviant and agree with recent Kansas laws to paint the poor in a ridiculous light.

Are you a self-loathing poor person or are you as I suspected a middle class person living in comfort with a penchant for pretending to be things you are not?

You really don't much care for sub middle class and up people do you? Perhaps you should become a Republican, you sound like one on issues such as these.

[Thinkingabout]

4. You dont know what you are talking. You are personally attacking me and it is time for you to

Accept others are entitled to their opinions. I will continue to have my opinion. I work hard for the little money I get, I hold my head high and refuse to allow you to kick me around.

[Dragonfli]

5. Oh please, I am not attacking you, if anything you agree with attacks on those beneath you

You also told me an untruth last we discussed anything, so excuse my lack of respect for your elitist attitudes while you consistently deride my class (you know, the one beneath you).

[Thinkingabout]

6. I do not take your post as praise but rather you try to degrade:

Your post:


Now unless you read nothing more than the title (and even then, your response is repulsive) you agree that the poor should be made to appear deviant and agree with recent Kansas laws to paint the poor in a ridiculous light.

Are you a self-loathing poor person or are you as I suspected a middle class person living in comfort with a penchant for pretending to be things you are not?

You really don't much care for sub middle class and up people do you? Perhaps you should become a Republican, you sound like one on issues such as these.

Now it is over

[Dragonfli]

7. Yes that was my post, maybe you should think about it or better yet, think about your response

to the OP which sounds just like standard far for a FOX viewer.

[blkmusclmachine]

8. ,

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