http://www.deseretnews.com/dn/view/0,1249,660198774,00.html
So, the Associated Press just released a story which has been picked up by the NY Times (and the Deseret News) about the state of American welfare dependency. First of all, this story is not a scoop. I helped edit a piece that appeared in the NY Times and at AEI about the same thing last summer.
http://www.welfareacademy.org/pubs/welfare/twocheersforwelfarereform.pdf
It should be noted that the numbers for TANF in the AP piece are skewed because they've included state maintenance-of-effort money in the TANF total which is money paid by the state. These are not federal funds. If we are talking federal expenditures, then TANF should be around 16 or 17 billion not 27 billion. I'm still at a loss as to what this piece is trying to prove. Using the data from this piece, the huge increase has happened in Medicaid. Everything else has gone up minimally. So, what's to account for the huge increase in Medicaid? It certainly isn't money being spent on the poor/working class. About 30 percent of the Medicaid population are old poeple in nursing homes and this accounts for around 70 percent of all Medicaid expenditures. Often times, older people have not purchased long term care insurance, so when the need arises, middle and upper class elderly people transfer their assets to their children so that they can qualify for Medicaid to support them in the nursing homes. Also, you have an increasing reliance on private facilities instead of on families who used to take care of their aging parents. This is a function of the increase in women in the workforce as this burden traditionally fell on daughters or daughters in law. Now that the vast majority of women are in the workforce, this has been outsourced to nursing homes. I'm not taking a stand on this one way or another (some feminist economists like Barbara Bergmann support state funded nursing homes and daycares), it's just a fact from this demographic shift. I wonder how many uninsured we would have in this country (currently it's 46.6 million) if the increase in Medicaid spending had been on the uninsured and not on the elderly (a dollar goes a lot further on the young then on the old that's for sure). In other words, the phenomenon identified by the story is not supported by the data.
This does not mean that the phenomenon does not exist, it's just isn't proved in the story. Surprisingly, the story didn't point out the Earned Income Tax Credit which has ballooned over the last few years and now pays out around 35 billion a year to lower income families, twice as much as TANF. The story also ignores child care assistance, school lunch programs (where a lot of kids get discounted lunches, more so then you think), housing assistance, low-energy assistance. You could make an argument that more Americans are dependent on the welfare state after seeing a major increase in these programs. But, like Haskins in the article, should we really be worried about dependency when the majority of the supplements I just mentioned end up going to working adults and their families? Isn't this what the safety net's supposed to be about?
1 comment:
Man, you're too smart for me. That seems like a very interesting post but I think I'll have to read it next time you're in town and you can sit down next to me and explain every single word you wrote.
Man, nice string of posts. I love the Dave missing the airport and then flipping out. Dana and I always laugh at how kids can be happy/content/asleep one minute and then slip into mass hysterics the next. It makes me laugh. Problem is my kids hate it when they come to me crying and upset and I just crack up laughing.
Daydreams. Awesome post on daydreams. I think about them all the time; I have them all the time. Mine are similar to yours. I have the sports, only I am the athlete--mostly skateboarding, baseball and golf. I never thought I'd be daydreaming about golf when I was a kid, but there you go. I have the music daydream where I'm the lead singer in a band. I pretty much have that one 24 hours a day. Then there's the writer where I publish anything from novels and short stories to plays, screen plays and poetry. And I totally do the interview thing where I imagine myself answering questions from all kinds of reporters. I don't have the job one, though, probably because I wish I never had to work another day in my life. I guess that IS my work daydream.
Thanks for the FR plug.
what about the Cougars basketball? Too bad they lost to SD but beating AF at AF? Money. We're supposed to have our first home baseball game on Thursday but it's been snowing regularly so I don't see that happening.
And, finally, the pretend football games in the backyard leave me at a loss of words. Awesomely speechless.
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