Everyday Politics Blog

Anti-Poverty Laws and Ideology

With the recent downturn in the economy more people are relying on food stamps to feed themselves and their families. Blue collar workers, especially those tied to the auto industry, have been forced to apply for services. (Check out the interactive map in the New York Times to see the numbers of recipients in your county.)

Some facts about Food Stamps:

• 1 in 8 Americans and 1 in 4 children are on Food Stamps
• 36 million Americans receive benefits
• In some counties, half of all children receive benefits.
• Only 2/3rd of those who are eligible have applied for the benefits. 15 to 16 million more could be getting services.
• Now nearly 12 percent of Americans receive aid — 28 percent of blacks, 15 percent of Latinos and 8 percent of whites. Benefits average about $130 a month for each person in the household, but vary with shelter and child care costs.
• Almost 90 percent of beneficiaries nationwide live below the poverty line (about $22,000 a year for a family of four).

Americans are divided about how government should approach anti-poverty programs, such as the Food Stamp program. In general, liberals believe that government should provide services to assist the poor  either by providing direct payments or by providing subsidies for education or job training. Conservatives believe that welfare programs create a class of people dependent on government money and eliminate the incentive to find work. They believe that volunteer organizations and local churches can provide food for the hungriest Americans, and government should not be involved. 

In the 1980s, President Clinton revamped the welfare program in this country. He famously claimed that we were going to end welfare as we know it. Work requirements and time limits were placed upon  welfare beneficiaries. As a result, the number of people on welfare has declined, however little research has been done to examine the full impact on families and children.

The Food Stamp program has been less controversial than other anti-poverty programs, because few people are willing to let people starve in the streets. The actual cash payment per family is relatively small. The debates around the Food Stamp program have largely been about how to eliminate fraud. How do you make sure that a mother is really using the money to buy rice and beans for her children and not trading in the vouchers for money that will spent on drugs or alcohol?

What laws or policies do you believe should be put into place to help the poor in America? Is government or the community responsible for making sure that children aren't starving? Should government be spending more time coming up with laws that get at the root of poverty? Should they be setting up job retraining programs in the neediest areas? Do you believe that fraud is a big problem with Food Stamps? Has your local community been hard hit by the economic downturn? What policies or programs would you like to see in your area?

Madison and Health Care

By Scott Lemieux

One of our fellow political scientists over at The Monkey Cage discusses Thomas Friedman's diagnosis of why the American political system seems unable to address major problems (most notably global warming.)  He identifies five potential reasons:

1. “the wild excess of money in politics”
2. Gerrymandering of congressional districts
3. the 24 news cycle
4. a permanent presidential campaign
5. the emergence of a blogosphere that “at its best enriches our debates, adding new checks on the establishment, and at its worst coarsens our debates to a whole new level, giving a new power to anonymous slanderers to send lies around the world” (I’m going to assume he’s talking about The Monkey Cage in the former part of that quote).

Tucker has a good account of some of the work political scientists have done on these questions.   I, however, was struck by the omission of what strikes me as the most obvious explanatory variable: the structure of American political institutions.   For better or worse, the system was designed so that major legislation was going to be the exception rather than the rule, and this is exactly how it's worked in practice.     

Relatedly, Friedman refers to the saying that the American system was "designed by geniuses so it could be run by idiots."   This is essentially a restatement of Madison's famous argument in Federalist #51 that "[i]f angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary."   As the first version suggests, Madison's statement is sometimes interpreted to mean that he didn't see political leadership as being especially important, but this is a misreading.    More accurately, Madison wanted to structure the government that couldn't do too much damage if bad leaders where at the helm, and his structure was an ingenious means to that end.   But it's the other implication of these structures that creates the dilemma that concerns Friedman: structures that make it hard for bad people to enact policies also make it hard for all political leaders to enact major reform policies, even if there's something like a consensus that the status quo is unacceptable.

Whether this is a good or a bad thing, of course, depends on your political values.   But it's not surprising that the American government has been slower to respond to problems like global warming than other comparable democracies.  

Online Petitions

by Laura McKenna

When I was a kid, the running joke was that dad always stole our black magic markers. We had every other color in our art kits, except for black. Why? Because dad used them to make protest signs. And then he would round up the three of us to march around in a circle with other people protesting something or another.

Before he was a marker-stealing dad, he attended civil rights marches and anti-war rallies in DC. He even had a confrontation with Dan Rather, because Rather chose to interview the long haired hippies at the rallies instead of the clean cut college kids, who were the majority of the protesters. Later, after we arrived, he got involved in local politics. He became involved in environmental policy and ran for office on a third party.