There should have been a white flag over the State House last week when Democratic leaders in the Legislature rolled out their welfare reform package.
After announcing that the system is broken (something everyone can agree on – especially those who are “in” the system), the Democrats offered their solutions to fix it.
First on the list was a schedule of punishments for people who use cash welfare benefits to buy cigarettes, liquor, lottery tickets, tattoos and other forbidden items.
Yes, that’s right. These are the same reforms that Gov. LePage and Republican allies have been demanding for the past five years, and ones most Democrats and their allies have been pushing back against, saying that they address a tiny part of a huge problem and would do nothing to feed a hungry child or help a struggling mother find a job.
The critics had the facts on their side. The Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program – the only welfare program that provides cash benefits – only serves about 5,000 families in Maine. Most of the benefits are used for housing. Any “extra” cash that would be available for the prohibited uses could only be spent by a small subset of a small subset of the state’s roughly 182,000 people who live beneath the poverty line.
But don’t bring your facts to a knife fight. The governor is convinced that poverty is caused by welfare, misuse of the system is rampant and it is driving high taxes for the rest of us. No amount of evidence is going to change his mind.
And he is not the only one who thinks that way. It seems that everybody says they have seen someone else abuse an Electronic Benefits Transfer card at the grocery store, or they know someone who has seen that, or they have a brother-in-law or cousin who is milking the system for undeserved benefits.
That creates a political trap: If you argue that waste, fraud and abuse are just a small part of a huge problem, you quickly find yourself arguing that a little waste, fraud and abuse is OK.
And that is exactly the spot the governor has maneuvered the Democrats into for the past five years. Demonizing poor people for stealing benefits that they don’t deserve becomes the rationale for dropping thousands of people off programs like MaineCare, food stamps and TANF.
These people did not leave the system because they found better jobs and no longer needed help. The policies just forced them to find help elsewhere, overwhelming emergency rooms, food banks, homeless shelters and municipal General Assistance offices.
We have seen a 50 percent increase in the number of children living in deep poverty – with parental income at half the federal poverty line, or $10,000 a year for a family of three. It’s the biggest such jump in the entire country.
To the Democrats’ credit, their plan doesn’t end with punitive actions against a few cheaters. They also propose targeting assistance to address the specific barriers that keep people out of the workforce. For some people, it’s a lack of education. For others, it might be domestic violence. For others, it’s just a matter of finding a job. They all need help, just not the same help, and if the state was smarter about knowing what kind of help people needed, more of them would become self-sufficient.
The Democrats also propose turning millions of dollars in cash assistance into housing vouchers that would be paid directly to landlords. That not only takes cash and the potential for its abuse out of the system, it could keep some families from having to move all the time – which can be crippling for a child who has to keep changing schools.
The bill also would require the state to measure and evaluate its programs, so we wouldn’t have to rely on anecdotes to decide if the money is going to the right people.
These ideas could make real improvements in real people’s lives without costing taxpayers any more than they are spending already. It’s hard to see why anyone would oppose them.
But the fact that the Democrats had to package those good ideas along with the fantasy that the real problem is lazy poor people taking advantage of the system is a sad commentary on how our politics works.
As Republicans in the #neverTrump movement are finding out, you can’t reason someone out of a position that they didn’t reason their way into.
Gov. LePage shows us that if you are loud enough long enough and tell people what they want to hear, you win.
All you can do is wave the white flag.
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