myths about welfare

THIS IS A TRANSPARENT, OBVIOUS DODGE.I'm so sick of people making wild claims about social programs encourage promiscuity and/or reckless pregnancies....Huge claims with major policy implications...And present no data.Randman made such claims. Supplied no data. Runs, runs away when asked to back it up. Dodges, dodges, dodges when confronted with his running away. Pretends to be on the debate high ground in order to get OTHER people to do the hard work. No, you love to assert your opinion. And you're unwilling to back up the opinion with anything other than random nonsense and hearsay you pull off the top of your head.SHOW US THE EVIDENCE!This message has been edited by Zhimbo, 11-19-2005 05:33 PM

linkHere's a reminder of WHAT RANDMAN CLAIMED."Here in the US, we tried welfare in the Aid to Dependant Children, which is still in effect but with some reforms.
Unfortunately, it had the opposite effect. Instead of being a stepping-stone to help poor kids get ahead in life, it produced more and more fatherless children borne of teen-aged Moms that decided it was better to get pregnant and get their own apartment than to stay at home and in school. Sometimes it was unwanted pregnancies. Other times, it was not."

This is anecadotal at best. When I was living in Phoenix, a friend of mine told me about a conversation that he had just had with his cousin (also living in Phx). She was 15-16ish and had said that "She couldn't wait to be old enough to have a kid so she could go on welfare and help the family".Chalk it up to 16 yr old thinking, but I wouldn't be suprised to find more people thinking this way.Endnote - everyone in the story is White.

Disclaimer - I have NOT read the source thread, I'm only commenting on what I see here. Going to try to talk for Randman here. I don't think that this above quote is all that outrageous, though I do think that he's reaching a bit.One of the things we study in Anthro is cultural economics. Sometimes this refers to what types of food are harvested, etc. Sometimes it's about trade between groups. And still other time it's about cultural systems that lead to unintended economic situations.I don't think that ADC is solely to blame for the situation. And I think the the designers had the best of intentions when they set out.Obvious a child with one parent needs more help than a child with both. Obvious a house with several children needs more help than a house with one child.It's not unreasonable to assume that there are people "gaming the system" by having kids and not getting married. I don't think that this is unique to the black community. There are far more white recipients of welfare than black. I'm sure that this same scenario is occuring on all fronts.Randman's experience was coming from a person with first had knowledge of a particular community. Since economic downturns often effect an area, it's not surprising that such a downturn would plunge many families in a single community into needing state/federal assistance.Over a prolonged period, the forces driving the economic engine are going to have an effect.Are these forces the only effect - NO!For example, (jumping back to African-Americans since that was the original assertion) the disproportionately higher rate of incarceration of AA males means that there is a likewise higher rate of children who's fathers are in jail. But, like the ADC, this is just one of many many factors which cause this scenario.I may have wandered a bit in my post, so I'll try to sum up.I don't think Randman was wrong on this topic. I think he was overreaching and oversimplifying what's going on. I think that his language was blunt.I completely believe the research posted. I doubt that any studies have been done to scientifically confirm what I've been talking about here largely because it would be very difficult to isolate just one factor causing what's happening.This message has been edited by Nuggin, 11-20-2005 03:03 AM

In the last two messages you have made an attempt to, for lack of a better term, meet randman somewhere in the middle. In the first message you supplied the subtitle "Hate to offer Randman a foothold but..." - I like it.But in the second message, you fell back to using the rather brutal "randman, please address the OP" subtitle chain - Not nearly as good. I would strongly suggest changing that subtitle to something along the lines of "Hate to offer Randman a foothold but... #2".Not that there aren't an abundance of other places the same would be true, but I think this is a spot where a good new subtitle would be especially good - Offer randman (and yes, I realized the message is a reply to Zhimbo) a little friendlier position to reply to.Adminnemooseus

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2nd post, I was just replying to the string. I typically don't change the subtitle when replying to an ongoing conversation.I actually wasn't fishing for a response from Randman, I was trying to support his position since the whole string up to the point seemed like it was just baiting him.I see your point, and will try to pay more attention to the subtitles.I remember a couple of strings where the conversations had drifted so much the subtitles had absolutely nothing to do with them.

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Adminemooseous writes: But in the second message, you fell back to using the rather brutal "randman, please address the OP" subtitle chain - Not nearly as good.

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Excuse me, but when did a simple, direct statement like "please address the OP" become "brutal"?Should I start using a lot of pleady, whiny language, or maybe manipulative flattery to try to get someone to do the bare basics of honest debate, or something?Smilies? Do you want me to use smilies?

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Adminemooseous writes:Offer randman (and yes, I realized the message is a reply to Zhimbo) a little friendlier position to reply to.

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Why? Why does he deserve this? Why are we treating him like a deficient child who just needs a little understanding and love instead of what he is; an intelligent adult who agreed to follow the forum rules when he registered here and refuses to?As an admin, shouldn't you be encouraging him to support his claims or withdraw them?

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nuggin writes:I actually wasn't fishing for a response from Randman, I was trying to support his position since the whole string up to the point seemed like it was just baiting him.

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Look, he refused to support his claim in the thread where it was, frankly, off-topic, so I created a new one.He still refuses to support his claim, and is pulling every sneaky, slippery, weasly, dishonest debate dodge out of the book to continue to avoid supporting his claim.A normal request for him to back up his claims or withdraw them, like the opening post of this thread clearly didn't work, as I knew it wouldn't.Baiting him, which only began when he ignored the thread for a week or so, was the only thing that got him to respond at all in case you hadn't noticed.

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This is anecadotal at best. When I was living in Phoenix, a friend of mine told me about a conversation that he had just had with his cousin (also living in Phx). She was 15-16ish and had said that "She couldn't wait to be old enough to have a kid so she could go on welfare and help the family".
Chalk it up to 16 yr old thinking, but I wouldn't be suprised to find more people thinking this way.

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That is a single anecdotal story, and therefore meaningless to this debate. Anecdotes are not data.If you really want to help randman, you will address the questions in the OP.

This is just more loosely argued appeals to intuition. In fact, I "intuit" that a close examination of the cultural economics of the situation would show the *opposite* conclusion - that ADC does not have a measurable effect above and beyond its socio-economic covariates.However, that's my intuition, not my claim. Randman, on the other hand, has made a claim. And isolated anecdotes, some anonymous person's unchecked statistical claim, and vaguely argued appeals to intuition are not enough to back up a claim.No one is looking for "PROOF". Just some decent evidence.

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However, that's my intuition, not my claim. Randman, on the other hand, has made a claim. And isolated anecdotes, some anonymous person's unchecked statistical claim, and vaguely argued appeals to intuition are not enough to back up a claim.

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No one is looking for "PROOF". Just some decent evidence.

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...or a withdrawal of the claim would be fine as well.

Here's the link to the whole articlehttp://www.preservenet.com/studies/WelfareReform.html

Hmm. I suppose that if they had written, "We apparently did a good job of removing the stigma of having children without the means to support them...." then maybe one might be able to take this "study" seriously. But it seems possible that these peoples' concerns aren't about the practical problems of poverty or of having children before one is ready for them; it seems to me that it is about the completely subjective moral "problem" of unmarried women having children regardless of "poverty". In fact, I would bet that the real "problem" for these people is unmarried women having sex. I wonder if their concern over the "morals" of their fellow citizens are biasing their interpretations of the scientific literature (if, in fact, they are reading the scientific literature).

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"Intellectually, scientifically, even artistically, fundamentalism -- biblical literalism -- is a road to nowhere, because it insists on fidelity to revealed truths that are not true." -- Katha Pollitt

It's been 11 days since I have asked randman to provide evidence for his unsupported claim.

Here in Australia we have a breed of talk-back radio "personalities" sometimes called "shock jocks".
They generally espouse lowest common denominator rave and rant type discussions attacking a variety of issues. Race, foreigners, welfare "cheats", "dole bludgers" [lazy people on unemployment benefits] and so on.
Very very powerful men with the ability to detirmine government policy.
A few years ago there was an episode where several of them complained about a specific woman [unnamed] who was rorting the welfare system by having children to 5 different fathers. Lots of call-back discussion about the amount of money she received, the benefits and righteous indignation expressed by nearly all callers.
[Do you have this sort of thing in UK/USA?]
It went on for a couple of days and then they moved on.Just one teensy weensy problem.It was clearly established that no such woman existed.A couple of the "jocks" were forced to admit, very briefly, that their source was lying.And then they moved on and it was all forgotten but imprinted in the mind of the listening community.

oh, sure, we have shock jocks here. They were invented here.Howard Stern is the original and most famous.But the phenomena you are talking about is the conservative "infotainment" pseudo news/political commentary pundit radio talkshow host a la Rush Limbaugh. He was absolutely HUGE (literally and figuratively) a few years back when the republicans took over the senate and the congress. He's lost his TV show since then, and is popular only with his diehard "dittoheads" ever since he was revealed to be addicted to Oxycontin and was buying it illegally to maintain his drug habit.These people are liars, yet they claim to tell the truth. They are political activists, yet when called on that fact that they often urge their audiences to contact their senators about certain issues and whatnot, they simply hide behind their "entertainment" status.