For decades I have been directly involved on assisting people on the margins. Through the years I have heard thousands of ideas on how to ameliorate the ongoing challenges. None of them have “solved” the endless crisis.
Right now, with this new punishing policy, I dont have a clue on how to be of measurable help to those who are going to experience even more trauma, isolation, lonliness and abandonment.
Your creative thoughts are welcome
DailyKos.com – 11 April 2018 – Joan McCarter
“In between plotting on Twitter to bomb Syria and fire special counsel Richard Mueller, popular vote loser Donald Trump found the time to sign an executive order instructing all the departments to figure out how to make life as miserable as possible for the already stretched thin poor. He intends to shred what’s left of the social safety net, which he calls “welfare”—which hasn’t existed since 1996—by imposing “work” requirements on assistance programs. Because surviving while poor isn’t enough work.
The executive order calls on federal agencies to enforce current work requirements, propose additional, stronger requirements, and find savings (in other words, make cuts), and to give states more flexibility to run welfare programs.
“Since its inception, the welfare system has grown into a large bureaucracy that might be susceptible to measuring success by how many people are enrolled in a program rather than by how many have moved from poverty into financial independence,” the executive order reads.
The order calls on the Treasury, Agriculture, Commerce, Labor, Health and Human Services, Housing and Urban Development, Transportation, and Education departments to use the next 90 days to submit a report with their recommended policies to the White House. […]
Agencies are ordered to follow nine “Principles of Economic Mobility” to guide their proposed policy changes, including adding work requirements, giving states more flexibility—usually in the form of block grants—consolidating duplicative programs, and encouraging involvement from the private sector.
That would be the private sector that just got a massive tax break, and is plowing that windfall into stock buy-backs, not creating jobs. The private sector is not going to come to the rescue here.
The administration says “reforms to SNAP and Medicaid are front and center.” So it’s a good time to reiterate that most recipients of these programs who have the capacity to work are already working. In the case of SNAP, or food stamps, they move in and out of employment “in low-wage jobs with little stability and lack key work supports, such as affordable child care—conditions that often contribute to job turnover.” Even so, in households using SNAP that have at least one non-disabled adult, 58 percent are working at any given time, and 82 percent worked in the year before or after getting the assistance. As for Medicaid recipients, 60 percent of able-bodied, working-age adults have jobs, and nearly 80 percent live in families with at least one member who is working.
Not having a job is not the problem for people relying on the safety net to live. A minimum wage stuck at $7.25 is the problem.”
We All Deserve Better 