Your Assumptions About Welfare Recipients Are Wrong

[xchrom]

http://thinkprogress.org/economy/2013/12/18/3081791/welfare-recipient-spending/

The stereotype of the low-income people enrolled in government programs is that they spend the money on frivolities and are unwise with their budgets. But the data proves otherwise. Families who receive public benefits such as housing assistance, welfare cash assistance, food stamps, Medicaid, and Social Security Income (SSI) for the disabled or low-income elderly have much smaller spending budgets than those who don’t receive benefits and spend a bigger portion on the basics such as food, housing, and transportation, according to an analysis by the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

On average, families who are enrolled in these public programs spend less than half of what families who aren’t enrolled spend. They also put a bigger percentage of that money toward food, housing, and transportation, devoting 77 percent of their budgets to these necessities compared to about 65 percent for other families. Meanwhile, they spend less, on average, on some things thought to be luxuries like eating out and entertainment. A family that doesn’t get public benefits spends 4.5 percent of its budget on “food away from home,” while a two-parent family who gets benefits spends 4 percent of its budget on eating out and a single parent spends 3.6 percent. “Food away from home spending was higher in both dollar amount and percent of total spending among families not receiving assistance,” the report notes. Families who don’t need assistance also spend more on entertainment in both dollar and percentage terms and devote more of their budgets to “other” expenses.

Families who receive benefits are also more likely to go without higher priced items like houses and cars. Just 3 percent of families who don’t get benefits went without a car, compared to nearly a quarter of those on the rolls. On average, a family that isn’t enrolled in public programs has about two cars, while a family that is enrolled has about one. Meanwhile, more than three-quarters of families not receiving assistance are homeowners, while the opposite is true for families who do need the support: just about three-quarters are renters instead of homeowners.

And while the stereotype of the “welfare queen” is a woman who has more children to increase the benefits she gets from government programs, families who are enrolled look similar to those who aren’t. “Average family size was the same (3.7 persons), whether or not a family received assistance,” the report notes.

[TreasonousBastard]

1. A large part of the problem has been taking...

isolated, often at least partially invented, incidents and conflating them to the overall situation. There's been a huge conservative effort to do this and we've been suckers.

The message is easy to get across-- you work hard for your money so why give it to some lazy baby machine and her boyfriend... That does suck as a message, but it appeals to the mean side of just enough people who don't like poor people anyway to affect policy.

We need more Dickensian messages out there.

[Egalitarian Thug]

3. That's become the American way. We over-react to the most extreme examples as if they were the norm.

By this we make those extreme rarities much more common through the inevitable escalation that comes from the over-reaction.

[XemaSab]

11. I'm reminded of the series in the NYTimes a couple weeks ago about the girl named Dasani

It was a good series, but mah gawd the parents were flakes. The parents are unemployed drug addicts with 10 kids who spend their money on booze and gold teeth.

It was easy to read the series and conclude that no changes in public policy could overcome the terrible parenting that girl has, which undermines one of the main points in the series: homeless children need more resources than they are getting.

[alc]

2. my assumption is they are just like "the rest of us"

In that there is a broad spectrum of people from real scumbags who do everything they can to scam the system to some of the best, most honest people you will ever meet who are doing all they can to stop getting public assistance. My wife was on/off these programs growing. And we help out at shelters and meet some people who are "working" harder than anyone I know. They don't have jobs but are working every day to improve themselves (e.g. education, battling addictions) and find work.

The scumbags are a small part but give the entire group a bad name. It's even worse when the scumbags prey on the honest recipients (e.g. screw them out of their EBT card for pennies on the dollar) The best thing for these programs is probably to crack down on the scumbags. It will both reduce the image problem (and make cuts less likely to succeed) and make the dollars go further for everyone else.

[daleanime]

4. K&R....

[ctsnowman]

5. And this article

helps further another stereotype: that they are mostly black people when there are more whites on it than blacks.

[jwirr]

6. Years ago before they started enforcing the laws regarding non-payment of child support I was one of

those women in 1958. My question was simple: I am on welfare because of my three daughters (one severely disabled). Why wasn't anyone considering their father to also be on welfare since he had as much obligation to stay and support them as I did? He was the one who walked out due to the costs for our disabled daughter I stayed. He never paid the support for two of the children but years later when social services finally started collecting it he had to pay part of the money for our disabled daughter because she was still on welfare. It has never been just women and never will be until we can figure out a way to eliminate the male from the entire reproduction process.

If you decide to have children understand that it is your responsibility to provide for them - your gender has nothing to do with it.

[OnlinePoker]

8. My ex was on support when I started paying maintenance

They deducted the entire amount of my payments from her assistance cheques. This meant my son never received any benefit at all for the $90,000 I paid over the years. The only beneficiary was the Province of British Columbia.

[jwirr]

10. Yes, that is true and one of the problems with the newer collection systems. My husband never paid

more than $20 a month that I got to keep for the kids. Anything else the state took. One of the results of that type of system is that I quit cooperating with the collection people any more than I was forced to do.

My point in what I wrote was that having children is a two person event and both have the same responsibility for those children.

[niyad]

7. most of that information is of the "no shit, sherlock" variety. of course they don't spend as much

on. . whatever, because they don't have it!!

[Spitfire of ATJ]

13. Sometimes ya get the idea these articles are for the upper middle class asshole.

[xchrom]

15. or for jerks who think they know better to clap each other on the back. nt

[Burma Jones]

9. Not MY assumptions

What I know about people on Public Assistance makes me even angrier about the miserable minimum wage and my goddamned tax dollars in effect subsidizing the filthy and despicable recipients of "welfare for the well dressed" that constitute the mega rich in the USA.....

[Spitfire of ATJ]

12. Also the poor spends more on auto insurance than the rich.

[Bigmack]

14. You know....

Just because somebody is fucked up... that doesn't mean they - or more importantly their kids - should starve.

Not in a country like this.

If somebody is mentally ill, addicted, or simply not very bright, they need help, too. In fact, they need more help.

If we can throw $750 Billion at the F-35, we can afford a few paltry $Billion to help people who were born into the shit... or made a bad choice or two.

We count pennies helping people, but the $Trillions flushed down the bowl for tax breaks for the rich, the MIC, the wars, and the big corporations... well, that's just the way it is.

[Tigress DEM]

16. EXACTLY!

Ya' find crazy rich people too.

Duck Dynasty with his webbed feet in his yapper.

Donald Trump. Went bankrupt how many times and people keep throwing money at him? Sorry even if you are swimming in gold, stupid is NOT sexy.

Howard Hughes, clipping his fingernails like a hoarder.

When you are rich they call it eccentric.

When you are poor, the names are fouler than fowl.