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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: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 15 2015, @04:12PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 15 2015, @04:12PM (#171036)

    Ditch the laws that make ... overtime cost more.

    Now there's a genius idea, make it so companies can make their employees work 100+ hours per week without any kind of disincentive! The reason overtime is required to cost is so that companies which need overtime will instead hire more people. If your company needs an employee to work more than 40 hours per week, its clear that you need more employees.

    Ditch the laws that make full-time workers ... cost more.

    Another genius idea! Employees don't need benefits or health insurance or retirement funds! All that shit is just a meaningless drain on profits! Those uppity, entitled welfare queens need to just accept the fact that they're slaves and enjoy their slave labor jobs working 100+ hours per week and still not being able to support themselves.

  • (Score: 1, Disagree) by khallow on Thursday April 16 2015, @07:47AM

    by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Thursday April 16 2015, @07:47AM (#171444) Journal

    Another genius idea! Employees don't need benefits or health insurance or retirement funds! All that shit is just a meaningless drain on profits! Those uppity, entitled welfare queens need to just accept the fact that they're slaves and enjoy their slave labor jobs working 100+ hours per week and still not being able to support themselves.

    First, my society doesn't need employees to have those things. There is a dishonest equating of personal wants with societal wants.

    Second, there is a continuing disconnect between cause and effect. Why is it better to force people to work multiple jobs with all the sacrifice and suffering that entails than one job without overtime? Why is it better to have people who don't work and thus, are unable to provide for their own wants than people who do? We have a half a century of history indicating that there is something deeply wrong with the developed world approach to disincentivizing employment of developed world workers. My view is that you need to give employers a fair playing field even though they are a small portion of the human population because they are the most important part of employment. It is far harder a problem to create a job than to work that job. I favor as a consequence such things as eliminating or severely reducing minimum wage, mandatory benefits for employees, overhead from regulation and social safety net programs, and a lot of the restrictions on when employees can be hired and fired.

    When you throw a bunch of penalties, restrictions, and such on one side of a trade, you discourage the trade. When the trade is as important as employment is, you are harming directly the structure of society, particularly its ability to deliver the things you want. I think it more important that societies allow for the free and productive employment of people than the provision of the fairy dust entitlements you cite above because you can't have the latter without the former. This is the cause and effect that gets consistently ignored.