At the New York Post, Michael Tanner, of the Cato Institute, has written an opinion piece breaking down welfare numbers in the Cato Institute’s newly released study tracking the state-by-state value of welfare for a single mother with two children. In New York, according to the study, “a family receiving Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, Medicaid, food stamps, WIC, public housing, utility assistance and free commodities (like milk and cheese) would have a package of benefits worth $38,004, the seventh-highest in the nation.”
Considering the high cost of living in New York, that $38,000 benefit might not seem that big. That’s an incorrect conclusion. While it won’t buy high-end cars and lavish, Obama-style vacations, it’s also not offset by any of the costs of having a working single mother: child-care, transportation, clothing, etc. In addition, that sum isn’t taxed, so that hypothetical New York welfare mom bankrolls $38,500 per year. According to Tanner, “someone in New York would have to earn more than $21 per hour to be better off than they would be on welfare. That’s more than the average statewide entry-level salary for a teacher.” The result of these perverse incentives for unemployment means that only 27.6% of the adult welfare recipients in New York are working in jobs that aren’t federally subsidized training programs.
The best place to be an unemployed single mother of two is Hawaii, where you can pull in $60,590 in non-taxable money. In twelve other states, as well as the District of Columbia, a wage earner would have to hold a full-time job earning more than $15-an-hour in order to have an after-tax income comparable to what a welfare recipient gets.
People who go on welfare aren’t necessarily lazy or opposed to work. They may go on it because of a prolonged drought in the job market (something increasingly common in Obama’s America), because of a divorce, or because of a death or illness in the family.
Going on welfare isn’t the problem; getting off is. If someone knows how to work the welfare system, that might be the only work that person has to do. If their dreams don’t include a fancy house in the suburb or designer clothes, it’s economically rational to stay on stable, well-paying welfare, rather than taking ones chances in an unstable job market, with all the attendant expenses that come with being employed.
True story: Back in the early 1980s, before Margaret Thatcher yanked Britain out of its socialist doldrums, I had a friend who took a summer job at the local zoo before he went off to college. He spent his entire summer getting up early, shoveling out animal cages, and driving screaming children all over the zoo in a little choo-choo train. His sister spent the entire summer sleeping, watching the “telly,” and partying at the pub in the evenings. At the end of the summer, her dole payments were larger than his after-tax income. He told me later, in all seriousness, that until he had a professional job with an income that exceeded welfare benefits, he was never going to work again.
It’s clear that America needs a Margaret Thatcher, and it needs her fast before the federal government not only destroys our economy, but destroys our moral fiber as well.
http://www.mrconservative.com/2013/08/23077-why-work-when-welfare-pays-better/
http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2013/08/21/welfare-pays-more-than-entry-level-work-in-a-shocking-number-of-states-study/
http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2013/08/21/welfare-pays-more-than-entry-level-work-in-a-shocking-number-of-states-study/
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