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Some glaring problems with the snippet you posted:
1) If someone qualifies for "disability" they would never have gone into the military. They wouldn't have been accepted.
2) Many who abuse means-testing by not marrying still often pool their resources, and live together. They just don't marry. Which means a child slated as "living in poverty" might actually not be living in poverty. Also, many states have specifically gone after fathers of children whose mothers take assistance, and make them pay.
It's not that hard to qualify for "disability", and the point is were this easy way out not available, they might do something more beneficial for everyone involved.
Well duh but the liberals insist these programs work. Give mom a check for questionable intellectual disabilities or misbehaving in school and guess what she's going to allow Johnny to continue to be a problem at school.
Perhaps the high effective marginal tax rates on earning money and trying to get ahead incrementallly, plus the high marriage penalty in these programs are part of the problem?
good find OP. Definitely surprises me to hear this kind of talking points coming from a Kristoff. I've been saying for years that when I think back to my school classes in the 60's nd 70's, there were only a small handful of kids who were incapable of making their way thru life independently. The number would have been less than 1%. These were the kids who were born with serious maladies and disabilities.
I like this quote from the article "The greatest challenge we face as educators is how to break that dependency on government. In second grade, they have a dream. In seventh grade, they have a plan.” "
This column could have come straight from Rush Limbaugh; it's the kind of thing that he says all the time.
Kentucky trailer parks, huh?
More toothless red staters on the dole. No surprise to us here in the donor states.
Frankly, after a career in public service as an armed first-responder, dealing with some of these people's problems on an hourly basis...I think it's just as well we pool our resources and pay certain individuals $600 a month to stay home
Well duh but the liberals insist these programs work. Give mom a check for questionable intellectual disabilities or misbehaving in school and guess what she's going to allow Johnny to continue to be a problem at school.
Here's an idea- why don't we fully fund education and health care in this country, so we're not 36th in the world in per-pupil spending, and god-knows-where on aid to those with disabilities?
Or, we can continue to "cut spending", pack 50 inbred cases into a tiny classroom, and slap our heads when they wind up Repulicans!
I give credit to Kristof, to admit that an aspect of the ideology he embraces does more harm than good. It's just too bad other liberals can't come to this conclusion.
Sigh...yet another comment on poverty from a man who's well-off. I've been poor, so poor that I had no home address and nothing to eat.
Marriage is the worst possible answer, because it ties poor women into arrangements that are little better than prostitution, and leaves them vulnerable to abuse because they dare not leave. The social safety net exists in part to prevent that, by creating an environment where women don't have to tie themselves to the best of a bad lot in order to survive. These areas do not overflow with good providers. If the women
These women don't need husbands. They need reliable daycare, reliable transportation, jobs that pay a living wage, health care and decent schools for their kids, all things the almighty taxpayer has voted to defund. The bottom line is that America wants to keep these women and their children poor. As vile as their strategies to avoid that may seem to you, under the circumstances they really are doing the best thing they can to support their kids, and to teach them how to survive in that environment. The jobs, transportation infrastructure, childcare and schools they need do not exist.
Well duh but the liberals insist these programs work. Give mom a check for questionable intellectual disabilities or misbehaving in school and guess what she's going to allow Johnny to continue to be a problem at school.
There are many problems with this, but I'll only mention two:
1) The welfare state in the US is by far the stingiest in the industrialized world. Countries like Germany, Denmark, Norway and Sweden have far more generous welfare systems than the US. Yet, they also have lower rates of poverty, crime, teenage pregnancy--basically all the problems we like to blame on our "excessive" welfare state. How would this writer explain that?
2) Marriage is not the ticket out of poverty some people say it is. The reason is simple: in poor communities, the better, more stable men and women pair off together. Almost no one, male or female, is interested in rescuing anyone from poverty by marrying them. On the contrary, they usually want to marry another relatively well-of person in order to enhance their own standard of living.
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