Welfare / Norplant

Several years ago I came up with a little variation on the
Welfare Mother problem which I thought was a lot more
palatable.

Offer a 'birthday present' program, under which *any*
female over the age of 11 who has not yet had a child or become
pregnant, on her birthday, gets a cash award. The award should
be high enough to encourage participation; $250 seems about
right. A woman who can deliberatly turn down a $250 lump sum 
every year for the rest of her life is almost certainly able
to afford to raise a child.

This scheme:

* Is entirely voluntary; no one has to use contraceptives, 
  stay off welfare, or anything else.

* Targets young women who would be likely to become 'welfare
  mothers'. The parents of such young women would be highly
  motivated to have their dependent daughters participate.

I haven't worked out the costs, but suspect that the net 
savings would be quite substantial.

Peter Trei
trei@Process.com

Disclaimer: The above is my personal opinion. I dont suggest that
any other person or oganization shares it.

At 10:49 AM 8/25/97 -0700, Tim May wrote:
>Possibly more palatable to the majority not already on welfare, but hardly
>an incentive to a single mother contemplating the increase in her
>AFDC/WIC/etc. benefits should she add to her brood.

>At 5:33 AM -0700 8/25/97, Peter Trei wrote:
>>Offer a 'birthday present' program, under which *any*

As with many government programs, and many attempts to fix them,
it's going for the wrong problem, and tieing in to a lot of emotional
hidden agendas.  The real problems are that we'd rather not keep paying 
money to people many of us disapprove of, and that doing so in the 
way that it's been done has failed badly, and created an underclass of
more people that we disapprove of that are getting money, as well as
an overclass of welfare bureaucrats who do a better job of evading 
disapproval, and the whole process tends to create lots of hostility,
in no small part because not only is having to live on the dole demeaning,
but lots of people (including the above-mentioned bureaucrats) want to
make sure it's as demeaning as a modern liberal society will allow.

The obvious approach to the problem of people on welfare getting more
money if they have kids is not to refuse their right to have kids,
it's to not give them more welfare money.  Regardless of the consequences.
(Private charity is a totally different case, none of the government's 
business, though the government has corrupted a lot of the big players
like Catholic Charities and the Salvation Army into running welfare
subcontracting with government money.)  Maybe the way to implement it
is to cap the monthly amount, maybe it's to cap the lifetime amount
(so welfare mothers know that if they want more money this month
based on having more kids, they'll get fewer years of support.)

Milton Friedman's socialistic approach to the problem, the Negative
Income Tax, is also a partial win.  It proposes that the paternalistic
welfare bureaucrats haven't done much good in reducing the
number of people dependent on welfare, so fire them.
Use the well-known evil bureaucracy, the IRS, and have it just give money
back to people with sufficiently low incomes.  Maybe you'll get more
welfare recipients who aren't the "deserving poor", but so what;
probably there will be fewer "welfare queens" multi-dipping,
and maybe even there'll be more welfare mothers with (gasp)
their husbands or boyfriends living with them, but you'll have
also gotten rid of a class of parasitic bloodsuckers who've probably
contributed substantially to the dependency of the poor,
and saved enough money to make up for the extra undeserving poor.

[ObCryptoPolicyContent]  After we get rid of those bloodsucking bureaucrats,
or maybe even before, we can make it harder for the IRS to stay in business
as well, by moving much of the economy out of their reach into cash :-)
And the off-the-books cash economy is not unfamiliar to the poor, either;
maybe we can learn some tips from them....]

#			Thanks;  Bill
# Bill Stewart, +1-415-442-2215 stewarts@ix.netcom.com
# You can get PGP outside the US at ftp.ox.ac.uk/pub/crypto/pgp
#   (If this is a mailing list or news, please Cc: me on replies.  Thanks.)

At 5:33 AM -0700 8/25/97, Peter Trei wrote:
>Several years ago I came up with a little variation on the
>Welfare Mother problem which I thought was a lot more
>palatable.

Possibly more palatable to the majority not already on welfare, but hardly
an incentive to a single mother contemplating the increase in her
AFDC/WIC/etc. benefits should she add to her brood.

And the program would target the wrong people. Unavoidably, unless we have
mind-reading machines.

>Offer a 'birthday present' program, under which *any*
>female over the age of 11 who has not yet had a child or become
>pregnant, on her birthday, gets a cash award. The award should
>be high enough to encourage participation; $250 seems about
>right. A woman who can deliberatly turn down a $250 lump sum
>every year for the rest of her life is almost certainly able
>to afford to raise a child.

Hint: $250 a year is vastly too low to be an incentive to those
contemplating the additional allotment an extra mouth brings.

Second hint: Large numbers of young women who don't plan to have children
until much later anyway will of course participate! My 14-year-old niece,
my neighbor's 18-yo daughter, my 41-yo sister, and so on. Maybe 50 to 60
million, I would estimate, women would be eligible.

Third hint: This program works be rewarding _foresight_, e.g., making plans
to have avoided pregnancy. All indications are that the women presumably
intended as the targets are fairly lackadaisical about birth control, and
the prospect of $250 at the end of a year is unlikely to change this.

>* Targets young women who would be likely to become 'welfare
>  mothers'. The parents of such young women would be highly
>  motivated to have their dependent daughters participate.

Yep, in addition to some fraction (probably low) of those already on
welfare and likely to get $3000 a year extra for each new member of their
brood, there will also be about 40-60 million women of reproductive age who
would collect this "birthday present" each year, just for their ordinary
nonfecundity that year.

Question for the curious: Could we combine abortion clinics with this
payment scheme? I can imagine some crack addict really, really wanting that
fix on the eve of her birthday. If she aborts herself, or has the clinic
yank the foetus out, she can get high that night. Sounds like a plan.

>I haven't worked out the costs, but suspect that the net
>savings would be quite substantial.

See above.

But given the obvious flaws in Peter's plan, he probably has a future as a
bureaucrat in Washington. :-)

(I rarely use smileys, but I wanted to soften the tone of my criticism.
Peter's proposal has deadly flaws, easily uncovered. But so do the
proposals we all make at times.)

--Tim May


There's something wrong when I'm a felon under an increasing number of laws.
Only one response to the key grabbers is warranted: "Death to Tyrants!"
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Timothy C. May              | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money,
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