Last month, I started working at a non-profit group called CET - the Center for Employment Training. This organization provides job training to people who lack the skills or the opportunity to earn at least $10 an hour plus benefits.
Why is a program like this necessary? The minimum wage in this country is $5.15 an hour. Not long ago, Congress voted down an proposition to increase it to $7.25 an hour. What do those numbers mean? Simply this: that it is perfectly possible to be fully employed and still live in deep poverty, and that the lowness of the minimum wage combined with the lack of a comprehensive welfare system encourages people to stay out of the workforce.
Take, for example, somebody who earns $8 an hour - on the high end of the unskilled-jobs scale. Multiply $8 an hour by 40 hours a week by 50 weeks a year, and we get the paltry sum of $16,000 gross income. Clearly, such a person is one unexpected expense away from total insolvency. And this assumes a single person with no chronic costs such as children, a medical problem, or major insurance fees.
A couple of weeks ago, the secretary of HHS showed up at CET and announced new restictions on Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF) - what most people know as 'welfare'. This was part of the completely bogus 'Deficit Reduction Act' which sought reduce ever so slightly the gargantuan defecit Bush has accumulated by cutting the miniscule amount of money spent on social programs. It might've escaped his notice that when people are denied basic assistance they end up costing the government more, due to the icreased need for emergency services.
Reducing welfare benefits is supposed to encourage people to get off the welfare rolls and find work. The effect, however, is usually just the opposite. Receiving public assistance in the U.S. is such an exercise in humiliation that those who receive it find their will being methodically broken.
It is useless to tell them they should 'look for decent work'. There is no such work to be had, and everyone knows it. Even with a high school diploma - and 1/3 of Americans students drop out - the well-paying bluecollar union jobs of yesteryear are long gone.
The result of this is plain: the vast majority of people who are forced off of welfare are worse off once they are in work than when they were out of it.
In most - though not all - European countries with expansive welfare systems, unemployment is much higher. But there, unemployment is rightly taken as the natural outcome of economic factors and not as some kind of wrenching personal shame. I may be young and ignorant, but I am not so ignorant as to the think that American laborers could ever compete against Chinese laborers forced to work for 0.50 an hour twelve hours a day. That is one example among many.
If we are ever going to deal with unemployment in this country, we shold first admit that it is going to happen, and try to do what we can for those afflicted with it.
4 comments:
I commend you for doing something that will actually make a difference in the lives of the working poor. More funds for job training and an expansion of the Earned Income Tax Credit are desperately needed to help the working poor. And while health care reform is also desperately needed, there doesn't seem to be any particularly clear understanding of what sort of reform is needed. Kudos once again on doing something that actually helps people who really need help.
If we are ever going to deal with unemployment in this country, we shold first admit that it is going to happen, and try to do what we can for those afflicted with it.
The first point is dead on. True full employment is disastrous for employers, and thus, it is in their best interests that some percentage of the population remains unemployed.
As to the second, while a libertarian philosophy of course lets the market take its course, the market will do nothing to correct the evils brought about by unemployment, nor is it meant to. Charity can go a ways toward mitigating the effects of poverty, but it is unreasonable to expect the whims of the hearts to correct where the market dare not tread.
So long as we are intent on providing welfare, I would like to see it taking out of the hands of the government and places within the non-profit sector. Taxpayers should be allowed to take the money that would go to welfare type programs and donate them to government approved organizations which do much the same thing.
The benefits are twofold. First, as non-profits are extraordinarily more efficient than the government, more of the money will get to the people the programs were designed to help, instead of lining the pockets of those in the bureaucracy.
Second, non-profits will not have to treat people like animals, as our welfare system all too often does. Instead of simply giving money to stave off a crisis, non-profits will be able to help inculcate good habits, which are imperative if one is to crawl out of poverty. Further, non-profits will not be forced to help anyone. Meet certain standards--sobriety, etc.--and the organizations will help, but no time or money will be wated on people who will not help themselves.
It's not going to happen of course. Oh well.
Obviously in suits many people to have a situation where wages are low, and those who can't deal with it are relegated to welfare, which is always being cut. Those who choose to deal with it keep labor costs low. If you are a big employer, it's a good situation for you, except that you may get rotten productivity from your ill cared for, ill paid employees.
It is somewhat amusing to see liberalkerry grousing about some poor bastards rims when our gov reps spent 548 BILLION dollars on the Sacred Defense Budget.How about 9BILLION in aid to Israel, a wealthy country with the worlds fourth largest military? How about the untold BILLIONS in corporate welfare? It is the classic Reagan Strawman, the Welfare Queen Iconic Hate Symbol all laid out for these ORielly clones to grasp hold of. As for Wisers comment that nonprofits are so much more efficient than government, I would love to see some data.We always prey on "government bureacracy" but hear little about corporate or nonprofit bureacracy.
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