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Brave New Welfare

Michael considered fate at 14:19   |   Permalink   |   Post a Comment

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Comment posted by  Alex @ 3/20/2009 5:01 AM:

My favorite (he quipped ironically) is so-called "enrollment specialists" at high schools who do everything in their power to disrupt a student from enrolling in high school. This has been very much the flavor of my year so far.

It's a mixed up, muddled up, shook up world, man. 

Brave New Welfare, another great piece by Mother Jones:

Desperate, with her due date fast approaching, Clark decided to apply for Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (tanf), better known as welfare. But when she went to the local Division of Family and Children Services office, a caseworker told her—wrongly—that she couldn't apply until after the baby was born. "They basically said, 'Go get a job,'" says Clark. "I was eight months pregnant."

You know I'm not a bleeding heart liberal (though still a liberal nonetheless), but shit like this still gets my goat (bahhhh). There is absolutely no point in having a government bureaucracy made up of employees getting paid with taxpayer money (jobs which you can never reduce, because it is just too politically unpopular) if the bureaucracy's charter - to dispense taxpayer money to those that actually need it - is actively avoided by said employees.

Clark patched things together with food stamps and $256 a month in child support. But after nine months, Gabby's father stopped paying just long enough for Clark to get evicted. She went back to the welfare office, where caseworkers turned her away, saying—falsely again—that because she'd been getting child support she was ineligible for tanf.

Welfare, many will point out, is best used as a stop-gap solution. A way to support those people who are temporarily down on their luck so that they can go out and find some good luck. If this is in fact true, then that makes it even more imperative that welfare be easily and quickly accessed.