When Poor Folk Get Cash, It Doesn't Make Them Lazy.

[ksen]

http://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2015/11/20/9764324/welfare-cash-transfer-work

For as long as there have been government programs designed to help the poor, there have been critics insisting that helping the poor will keep them from working. But the evidence for this proposition has always been rather weak.

And a recent study from MIT and Harvard economists makes the case even weaker. Abhijit Banerjee, Rema Hanna, Gabriel Kreindler, and Benjamin Olken reanalyzed data from seven randomized experiments evaluating cash programs in poor countries and found "no systematic evidence that cash transfer programs discourage work." Attacking welfare recipients as lazy is easy rhetoric, but when you actually test the proposition scientifically, it doesn't hold up.

I wonder if the same people that believe the poors are only motivated by being kept hungry and worried about losing their homes are the same people that believe the executive class are only motivated by more and more cash being thrown at them?

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eta: I kid, I kid. I don't really wonder that at all.

 

[DBT]

Wasn't there a catch phrase in the 80's that said something along the lines of - 'pay peanuts and get monkeys - in relation to executive salaries and bonuses?

 

[Bar-Jesus]

In my experience, monkeys are more partial to dried fruit.

 

[SimpleDon]

http://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2015/11/20/9764324/welfare-cash-transfer-work

I wonder if the same people that believe the poors are only motivated by being kept hungry and worried about losing their homes are the same people that believe the executive class are only motivated by more and more cash being thrown at them?

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eta: I kid, I kid. I don't really wonder that at all.

It's the innovators, that is, the smartest people in society, who must be tempted out of the gulch with the promise of more money and fewer government regulations because for some reason the innovators are really confused by government regulations and won't innovate if the government takes a large percentage of their income away.

One would see the contradictions in these statements if one would think about them for a few seconds.

 

[SimpleDon]

I read this paper a couple of weeks ago and debated whether to start a thread here about it. I decided not to for reasons that are more than evident now, in this thread. Welfare is a tripwire for the modern conservative. You have to be against any type of welfare for individuals, (and supportive of any type of welfare for businesses,) to be considered a conservative right thinker today.

Evidence Loren's distinction without a difference between receiving cash from the government and welfare. Or the prevailing opinion among those on the right that the relative few people on welfare who cheat the programs are evidence of why the programs must be stopped even though the programs help a lot of the poor. It is like them presenting evidence that the war on poverty had to be stopped because after ten years it was a failure because it had helped only one half of the poor out of poverty.

Once again, this is why we must stop relying on these cash transfer programs to help relieve poverty and to instead purposely raise the incomes of the working poor. It is all too easy to demonize the government programs as give a ways to the few to elevate their incomes above your income. As have been proven over and over again.

 

[Toni]

What's the argument exactly? If it's that people who are already working will continue to work even though they get a government benefit, no surprise. But what of those who are chronically unemployed or follow a generational pattern of welfare dependence? We already know their spending habits from EBT cards; why would we think that their effort to work would change if that were substituted for free cash?

Exactly. Showing that providing money to those who are working doesn't make them stop doesn't say anything about the leeches.

I think you mean leaches

or the 0.1%.