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posted by CoolHand on Wednesday April 15 2015, @06:50AM   Printer-friendly
from the suppresion-of-the-proletariat dept.

Analysis of a study (PDF) carried by UC Berkeley Center for Labor Research and Education shows that isn't the poor people won't work but the work they do can't sustain them. As a blog on WaPo puts it:

We often make assumptions about people on public assistance, about the woman in the checkout line with an EBT card, or the family who lives in public housing. [...] We assume, at our most skeptical, that poor people need help above all because they haven't tried to help themselves — they haven't bothered to find work.

The reality, though, is that a tremendous share of people who rely on government programs designed for the poor in fact work — they just don't make enough at it to cover their basic living expenses. According to the UC Berkeley Center for Labor Research and Education, 73 percent of people who benefit from major public assistance programs in the U.S. live in a working family where at least one adult earns the household some money.

This picture casts the culprit in a different light: Taxpayers are spending a lot of money subsidizing not people who won't work, but industries that don't pay their workers a living wage. Through these four programs alone [food stamps, Medicaid, the Earned Income Tax Credit, income supports through welfare], federal and state governments spend about $150 billion a year aiding working families, according to the analysis (the authors define people who are working here as those who worked at least 10 hours a week, at least half the year).

The workers relying the most on social programs: Fast Food (52%), Home Care (48%), Child Care (46%) and Part-time college students (25%).

 
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  • (Score: 2) by bootsy on Wednesday April 15 2015, @02:48PM

    by bootsy (3440) on Wednesday April 15 2015, @02:48PM (#170979)

    Part of the problem with this approach is that you have to also provide free social housing. Otherwise any boost in income will just be absorbed by landlords and the money shifts to people who already have it. This has been observed many times and you see it in London.

    The other issue is that a minority of people are sensible enough to live well of a low income. I've met people that have including myself as student but then I didn't drink or smoke and I ate cheap food that I prepared myself. I new one guy who has a great lifestyle despite a low income but he eats a lot of foraged food such as nettles, elderflower, dandelion leaves etc. If you don't have the skills to prepare food yourself everything costs more and in the UK at least the cost of transport rises far faster than inflation. If you are poor and looking for a job and have to travel to interviews this just kills you. There is only so much walking you can do.

    Statistically the poor tend to have more children as well which over generations make the problem worse.

    It's a really hard problem to crack and people have been pondering it for centuries.

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