Allowing states to control food stamp usage and decide whether to drug test recipients is part of Trump's larger plan to reform welfare benefits.
Unemployment insurance, welfare benefits, and food stamp usage are similar type benefits. As Dick Cheney once said about them:
"[P]ublic policy designed to help workers who lose their jobs can lead to structural unemployment as an unintended side effect. Most economically advanced countries provide benefits to laid-off workers as a way to tide them over until they find a new job. In the United States, these benefits typically replace only a small fraction of a worker’s income and expire after 26 weeks. In other countries, particularly in Europe, benefits are more generous and last longer. The drawback to this generosity is that it reduces a worker’s incentive to quickly find a new job. Generous unemployment benefits in some European countries are widely believed to be one of the main causes of 'Eurosclerosis,' the persistent high unemployment that afflicts a umber of European economies."
Wait! That was Paul Krugman in his Macro Economics textbook....
However, cue the Democrats' whinging about throwing people out of their homes and onto the streets to starve.
Link: https://books.google.com/books?id=BVOn0FX7iPAC&pg=PA210&lpg=PA210&dq=%22Public+policy+designed+to+help+workers+who+lose+their+jobs+can+lead+to+structural+unemployment+as+an+unintended+side+effect.%22&source=bl&ots=CYYpmyXR96&sig=3F73FRt44lndXW2TBzWdgdmsGp
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I am sure work requirements and an improving economy are helping but why are the numbers still so high?
Link: http://www.trivisonno.com/food-stamps-charts
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Economic growth in this country has been experienced disproportionately by the top 1%.
Opinions can differ over how much of a problem inequality is....but there is no doubt that it is staggering, and growing.
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They aren't uppity like the domestic poor who voted for Trump.
To the extent that it does, it votes overwhelmingly Democratic.
inequality dataset that you're looking at to support your argument that it is rising??
If you really want to argue than inequality is not increasing in the United States, then we can have that discussion.
I'll win.
Link: http://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-magazine-monitor-31847943
I am ready to be wrong, unlike you.
CNN coverage of the study below: http://money.cnn.com/2016/12/22/news/economy/us-inequality-worse/index.html
Link: http://review.chicagobooth.edu/economics/2017/article/new-data-inequality-runs-even-deeper-previously-thought
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These reforms include more work requirements and delivering food in boxes a la Blue Apron rather than allow recipients to buy junk.
Link: https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/white-house/trump-moves-stiffen-work-requirements-food-stamps-n850776
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And the idea of drug testing them is a farce. The ones who are using find those sorts of tests the easiest to fake.
SNAP benefits/unemployement benefits delay re-employment. What is the debate?
It is a helluva lot more complicated than you and your ideologues - or than that those ideologues on the far left - want to believe.
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I'm not sure Trump's proposals will do that much. I guess we shall see.
Link: http://thehill.com/homenews/administration/292361-2m-people-off-food-stamp-benefits-in-last-year
On the right, they don't want to believe that it's anything other than a matter of laziness and addiction to welfare. On the left, they don't want to confront the subcultures that reject the values that make you successful and embrace behaviors that make you virtually unemployable.
Nevermind the issue of what you do with millions of people on the low end of the IQ scale in an economy that increasingly requires complex and abstract thinking to perform the jobs that pay anything. Not to mention the vanishing of low-end, low-skill jobs that are replaced by machines or are done by a smaller number more intelligent people who are underemployed.
Would also have the added benefit of curbing illegal immigration...or, likely, immigration of any kind.
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The poverty rate is near historic lows, and is much less than when they first started measuring it.
I do not see a growing underclass. On the contrary, I see growing opportunity.
We are at full employment. If capable people want to work, they can.
My overall concern is AI - has the potential of hurting smart and dumb people alike.
"If capable people want to work, they can." This gets to what I was discussing.
1. What sorts of jobs are available to the group I cited? Make this a matter of rational choice. What will many of them choose?
2. Define "capable."
It's essentially like what happens in our schools. We all accept that cognitively disabled kids with IQs in the 70s aren't going to be able to the work required of other students, but we pretend that the kids with IQs of 85 or 90 can do the same things the kids with 120 IQs can do. They can't. So some accuse the low-end students of being "lazy" and then others pretend that there's no such thing as inherent intelligence or that it has no bearing on how students perform. We're all malleable and if we just teach these kids better and spend more resources, they'll be able to do whatever they want to do in life. It's a fantasy world, just as it's a fantasy world to pretend that as adults, it's all just a matter of hard work.
It's a very frustrating thing as a kid to be demanded to do things you're incapable of doing. It's a very frustrating thing as an adult to be demanded to do things you're incapable of doing, and be labeled "lazy" when you fail at them. And then add into to it that you've been socialized with all sorts of self-destructive, counterproductive values and you have a lot of unemployable people who drift from job-to-job.
You probably have many underemployed people who have now moved up to appropriate employment to their abilities. I don't know what you do with the group I mentioned above as our economy demands more and more technical knowledge, abstract thinking skills and complex skills to perform ordinary jobs. We need to prepare for that and talk honestly about it.
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The type of jobs that are available for the poor and uneducated might be demeaning for you and me but are better than no work at all.
2. "Capable" is exactly what it means; if you can work, there is a job available for you. Better than no job at all.
Your long post is not convincing. It is better to work than not at all.