[speakeasy]

(02-05-2016 01:21 AM)GlobalMan Wrote:  

That wasn't my point, I'm not talking about quantity of children at all. I'm saying that children being born to single mothers, growing up without a father, are far far more likely to end up in the criminal justice system than children born into a family of mother + father. This is known.

True, but there's no political solution to out of wedlock births. Welfare is essentially unavailable if you have no children and are able-bodies. So the purpose of welfare is to protect children. The children never asked to be born to poor and irresponsible parents. And we don't want to have a situation like Brazil where kids are sniffing glue to go out and rob people so they can eat. People are going to have out of wedlock kids no matter what the government does. I don't like single motherhood anymore than you do, but from a pragmatic point of view, getting rid of welfare would likely cause an explosion of crime which would be worse off than the welfare(which is only 1% of the federal budget anyway). It may be a tradeoff we just have to live with for the sake of keeping crime under control.

Quote:

Being able to raise a child without a father, on a level and to the extent that it exists in our society, is only possible with the help of a welfare state. My argument is that if the welfare state didn't exist (or was much smaller), and women knew that they would receive no government help (there's still plenty of private charities) that some and eventually most women would make different choices. Such as not banging that dude down the block outside of marriage. When you know there are severe consequences to your actions most people change their behavior.

But look at the birth rates of the 3rd world. Not having welfare doesn't do anything to stop people from procreating. I doubt getting rid of welfare would change out of wedlock birthrates. You would just have more kids growing up in abject poverty. I think this is more of a cultural issue to tackle.


True, that is the intent, but that is often not what happens. And it's not a really a fault of their own, it's that they are punished for trying to climb out of poverty, there is a negative incentive. What do I mean by that? Here's an example, complied from Mississippi data:



You have a higher total economic benefit making $3,000 per year than you do making $30,000. So not only is there no incentive- even if you really really really wanted to improve your life it is extremely unlikely that a person could go from making $3,000 to the $50,000+ needed to actually increase their total benefit to improve their lives. Typically, IMO, people making $3,000 per year don't exactly have the skills to increase their income by nearly 2000%.
[/quote]

There are limits to how long you can be on welfare. That was reformed back under Clinton. There's no such thing as being on welfare for life. So it is definitely a temporary program for people to fall back on until they get a job.