The Myth of Welfare’s Corrupting Influence on the Poor

All else is largely pencil-pushing. If you want to shape economic policy that is sustainable & impactful, it has to make a large allowance for how people feel about welfare.

Let me elaborate.

You can make well-reasoned arguments and appeal to the sound nature of people and hope that they will understand & internalize your case for welfare. You can back it up with scores of studies that have data stretching multiple decades. You can provide touching anecdotes that tug at the heart strings. You can do all that and yet people will not have a change of heart for more than a fleeting moment.

I will give you an account of how workaday people - sensible people - really think about welfare and handouts in general.

For this, I will stick to America & Americans although this could easily be extrapolated to other parts of the world.

I strongly believe that most non-welfare dependent ( & even most welfare-resenting ) Americans are like me. For this purpose let me also exclude the portion of the population that are impetuously dismissive of the "freeloaders" and "deadbeats". Including them would not be helpful here.

Having said that I think most sensible Americans are fine with some form of "public assistance" ( lump into this whatever forms of unearned perks, benefits, allowances, tax breaks, subsidies etc that the government lavishes on the low income or even some middle income people ) for those people who have fallen on hard times.

Most sensible Americans are also fine with those same forms of "public assistance" being bestowed upon those same sections of the public for even extended durations of their lifetimes. I think sensible Americans get that the ill effects of an impoverished childhood & other social curses can stretch for the better part of a generation, if not more.

What most sensible Americans won't stand for is when those benefits are still lavished on those sections of the society even when those previously disenfranchised people are now, well, no longer beggared.

Take the case of San Francisco.

It is not uncommon to find yourself dining at a restaurant where your fellow diners constitute a good chunk of these previously beggared classes.

You think ,"good for them."

It is not uncommon to find them shopping at upmarket home furnishing stores.

You think,"hmm...okay..they share my taste in rugs."

It is also not uncommon to find them gushingly sharing photos & videos of their fantastic vacations to Iceland or Namibia.

You think, "I wish I could take a month away from work. Well, perhaps next year."

It is not uncommon to find your kids struggle to stuff their applications to the same top tier colleges as these previously beggared classes who are suddenly competing with your flock, to be one among the lucky 6% or 7% that constitute the incoming class at a Yale, Columbia or Harvard.

Now you think, "screw all these welfare programs for deadbeats and moochers."

That's what it all boils down to.

Everyone's fine with handouts until it starts to get too close to home.

Your entitlements end where my feelings of hurt begin.

We can differ on the degree & scale but that's the general sentiment of most sensible workaday Americans.

What is interesting about the results (which include peer reviewed studies - the one in mentioned by the NYT doesn't seem to be peer reviewed) suggesting that cash handouts are more efficient than than more complicated welfare programs is that the cash handouts would eliminate the middle man and maximise the bang for buck of helping people in poverty. I.E. minimising the size of the charity or the government bureaucracy.