48 Month Welfare Limit Bill Signed in Michigan

Screw it. Thread hop and responding to the first page:

Let's wait 6 months, and see whether or not Tom is right that cutting off welfare will lower the unemployment rate. This can be SCIENTIFICALLY STUDIED AND ESTIMATED.

And I'm sure that if and when the results demonstrate "OH HAY, UNEMPLOYMENT DIDN'T DROP AT A RATE HIGHER THAN WOULD BE EXPECTED HAD WE DONE NATHING!!!" then Tom will then say "It appears my hypothesis was incorrect. I do say!"

Cutting off welfare benefits strikes me as a terrible idea, mostly because the multiplier from it is higher than most things we can spend money on and, frankly, these people need it. Welfare benefits do NOT let people live like kings. They are constantly surrounded by fear of debt, eviction, catastrophic loss due to medical problems, and so on and so forth. No one who is unemployed is going to desire to remain unemployed because they're on welfare, and cutting welfare won't decrease unemployment.

edited 17th Sep '11 10:05:36 PM by TheyCallMeTomu

Actually, between taxes, health risks plus shaky insurance, and various ways minimum-wage jobs tend to screw their employees at every opportunity, it's not uncommon for unemployment to actually be a better financial option in pretty much every way.

My mother was working a warehouse job a few years ago that was a decent amount higher than minimum wage, but when they started slavedriving the place it took such a toll on her that she had to quit — the short period of unemployment between that and her next job cost less overall while she was recovering.

edited 17th Sep '11 10:07:46 PM by Pykrete

That seems to speak more for the lack of quality of the job than anything. It doesn't seem right to force people to work to death (literally, in come cases) or risk dying.

Which is an argument to raise minimum wage, Pykrete...

I am now known as Flyboy.

If there are far fewer jobs than there are job seekers, than it doesn't matter how desperate job seekers are, they're still gonna be screwed.

Dutch Lesbian

This is worse than a kill the poor bill. It's a kill the working poor bill: if you're job wasn't enough and you needed welfare too, you are completely owned. You can beg your employer for a raise and you can go into debt, and no Michiganite's going to try leaving their employer in this climate. The employers will know it. The small employers won't be able to do much since knocking out welfare just rendered a fair amount of their customer base destitute, leaving small businesses owners better fed but equally locked in and likely to be squeezed out. The big employers get to try their experiment in American feudal lord/serf economics on Michigan soil, at no consequences to them.

I would like to inquire at this point how easy is it to go about a job hunt in Michigan when the weather's getting colder, you can't afford transit to go knocking on doors, and your landlord's about to kick you out. Sounds like a better incentive to go shoplifting; you can get a quick meal, and a warm roof over your head once you get arrested. Hmmm. I don't suppose you can back that up? I don't know how well off auto workers were. You've suggested in other threads on tax rate discussions that people making a million a year (adjusting for inflation, of course) are not all that well off, so we can use that as a baseline. Taking inflation into account, how many auto workers over the history of Michigan were making the equivalent of a million a year?

I would argue that the price of gas has had bigger effects on the auto industry and on Michigan as a whole.

EDIT: While we're at it, Thorn, do you have a citation on that 60 million dollar figure that this is going to save the state budget? And would anyone defending this bill care to explain how they would invest that 60 million in a way to save Michigan's economy?

edited 18th Sep '11 6:37:53 AM by RadicalTaoist

Share it so that people can get into this conversation, 'cause we're not the only ones who think like this.

You exist because we allow it and you will end because we demand it.

What about those who can't get a job, for whatever reason? I'm thinking those who are injured from a car accident or some such thing. DO they under a different plan?

Also: welfare sucks. I've lived on it and it's enough to barely keep you alive.

Is using "Julian Assange is a Hillary butt plug" an acceptable signature quote?

The disabled are exempt.

You exist because we allow it and you will end because we demand it.

Corporations have been extremely lousy at actually getting workforces out to vote one particular way historically. Unions have been quite reliable for the Democratic Party. (And are in fact the only reliable voting segment on their side.) Meaning corporatist politics where the corporation goes out and tries to get votes to support it generally gets few if any returns. Unions on the other hand can and do pull the unethical "Vote this way or we'll see to it your job is gone" card.

It's more effective for them to go into advertising since they have knowledge of that (but still isn't consistent election over election turnout wise) than go out grandstanding and organizing political movements at the street level.

That's the reason why even if there are big corporations in a city, if that city is a union town it will vote in favor of the union's ideology instead of anything else. (Even if said anything else opposes both corporations and unions.)

But that does not quite address or correlate to Michigan's welfare reform.

edited 18th Sep '11 7:18:13 AM by MajorTom

^ Not really true at all Tom. If you look at economic studies that judge the effects of campaign contributions, unions/corporations are usually in dead-heat.

Anyway for this legislation

• It's not going to save any money anyways, welfare costs basically nothing and the article itself indicates it'll save a measly 60 million. I know, I know, every little bit counts, but somehow I'm pretty sure they have better things to cut first. Pinching pennies, spending pounds.

• Getting people employed is actually pretty stupid if the job itself doesn't provide enough for a person to live on. Yeah it sounds real proud to say "Hey he's working for a living". Does slavery sound very proud? It's pretty pointless.

• Why would poor people pay taxes? Bills I understand, but why taxes? Something sounds broken.

edited 18th Sep '11 7:36:49 AM by breadloaf

Like what in Michigan? Social services like welfare is practically their whole schtick.

Their state budget is 60 million in welfare?

EDIT:

So looks like Michigan spends a total of $1.2 billion onto welfare services (food assistance, child welfare etc etc). Their total state spending is $26 billion.

According to the state budget,

• 52% of the money goes to Food Assistance
• 15% to Administration
• 15% to Child Welfare
• 5% to Adult and Family Service (not sure what that is)
• 13% to Other Public Assistance

edited 18th Sep '11 8:21:27 AM by breadloaf

Do you know what else they could cut?

Nothing, so they should basically not cut anything. Killing your own state isn't going to solve problems now and it'll make it worse later. From what I see they spend almost nothing on everything as is. I mean, I'm just looking at their budget...

25 million on primary/secondary education per year? Wtf? How does that even run enough schools?

Higher education has a whopping 1.4 billion spent per year on it.

edited 18th Sep '11 8:24:21 AM by breadloaf

They could cut this shit out, is what they could cut. It will not be an economic positive in the long term. Hell, I'm not sure it'd be one in the short term.

ahahahahahahahahahahaha

Share it so that people can get into this conversation, 'cause we're not the only ones who think like this.

I wish you guys had a statistics agency to make looking at this information a lot easier. It's like everybody thrives in ignorance.

So anyway, from what I can tell the Michigan revenue consists of...

• Whatever "General Fund" means, (which I assume is normal tax revenue) is 7.2 billion
• "Non-tax revenue" (???) is 0.904 billion
• "School aid fund" is 11 billion (of which 2 billion was from Federal aid)

It's really hard to tell what the hell these things are, maybe I'll try wiki/google. Nope that failed miserably.

This attack on welfare is purely ideological and political; it's not intended to help the economy or solve budget issues at all. How do I know this? Because I live in Michigan, and I've been following the Michigan Republican Party's agenda. This is perfectly in line with what they've been doing.

To really understand the situation, it's important to know what else has been going on in Michigan.

Since the last election, they've been systematically attacking workers' rights, dismantling the social safety net, and giving tax breaks to corporations. In their last budget, they included roughly $1.8 billion in tax cuts for corporations, a measure that doesn't create jobs at all, just makes the rich richer. To "balance out" this $1.8 billion hole in the budget that they created, they cut over a billion dollars from public education, and now they're cutting welfare, too.

They've also passed laws targeting the teachers' union: erasing collective bargaining rights, cutting pay, even introducing measures to let school districts hire teachers from private corporations. This is coming after a years-long program of cutting funding for public schools. It's an attempt to privatize or outright destroy public education in the state; some Republic representatives have even said as much, admitting their opposition to the public education system.

The welfare bill is just the latest in a long string of ideological measures. This is class warfare, all right, and the rich and powerful are winning handily as usual.

edited 18th Sep '11 8:56:29 AM by Enthryn

Well there we go, we can fix the budget now! Repeal those cuts, problem solved.

Share it so that people can get into this conversation, 'cause we're not the only ones who think like this.

Tell that to the Republicans who passed those cuts.

I like how Tom totally ignored our assertions that the data does not and will not support his conclusion. That's just classy.

<insert boilerplate "discuss the topic not the other poster" comment here>

I should hope that Michigan Republicans are picking up flack for this nonsense. Then again, Michigan seemed to be a state with weird politics anyways.

Share it so that people can get into this conversation, 'cause we're not the only ones who think like this.

It was a very good point-that the data trends will support or dismantle the theory that was presented. It goes to show that there are theories for why welfare is bad, but that said theories are demonstrably false, and when someone insistently relies on demonstrably false theories, they should be marginalized.

I don't think that's "griping about a poster" it's griping about rhetoric in a relevant fashion.