Free Republic

President Trump signed an executive order Tuesday for a government-wide review of welfare programs, with a goal of putting more people back to work, White House officials said. The order directs all federal agencies involved in providing more than $700 billion in low-income assistance annually to study programs that are “failing Americans,” and to report back in 90 days with recommendations, said White House domestic policy council director Andrew Bremberg. “Our country still struggles from nearly record-high welfare enrollments,” Mr. Bremberg said in a conference call with reporters. “President Trump endorses reforms that ensure those in need receive assistance, while...

Rep. Keith Ellison (D-Minn), deputy chairman of the Democratic National Committee, endorsed the concept of government paying a minimum income to all citizens regardless of whether they work or not. “A lot of things that people do don’t have a market value,” Ellison argued. “For example, as a Muslim, I am obligated to pray five times a day, go on a pilgrimage to Mecca, and wage jihad to spread the faith. As a member of Congress I have a generous salary and a small commitment of time I have to put in to earn this salary. Others aren’t so fortunate.”...

In 1969, two years after the introduction of disability insurance in the Netherlands, 4 percent of the Dutch working age population was receiving benefits. By the late 1980s, that had risen to 12 percent. Prompted by rising costs, the Dutch took a series of steps to reduce benefits, stiffen eligibility requirements, and transfer responsibility to individual employers. In Intergenerational Spillovers in Disability Insurance (NBER Working Paper No. 24296), Gordon Dahl and Anne Gielen exploit the 1993 disability insurance changes to explore how a parent's loss of some or all disability insurance benefits affected their children's future choices and outcomes. They...

Health insurance gets all the headlines, the fierce political battles, the politicians accusing each other of wanting fine, upstanding American citizens to die. But while health insurance may pay your medical bills, it does nothing to protect you from a big risk that all Americans face: that when they get sick, they won’t be able to work, and all the obligations they’ve taken on — the car payments, mortgage, student loans and credit card debt — will send them spiraling into financial catastrophe. What the middle class may need even more than health insurance, in other words, is income insurance:...

The Department of Housing and Urban Development has completely scrapped the bidding process previously underway for contracts to manage the Section 8 program, which provides rental assistance to low-income persons, and will start again from scratch. The Washington Free Beacon previously reported on the Section 8 contracts, including allegations from a long-time contractor who claimed bureaucrats in the agency had been purposefully skewing the process.

(Skip) If a wall stopped just 200,000 of those future crossings, Camarota says, it would pay for itself in fiscal savings from welfare, public education, refundable tax credits and other benefits currently given to low-income, illegal immigrants from Mexico and Central America. If a wall stopped 50 percent of those expected crossings, he says, it would save American taxpayers a whopping $64 billion — almost four times the wall’s cost — to say nothing of the additional billions in federal savings from reduced federal drug interdiction and border-security enforcement. (Skip) Therefore, illegal border-crossers create an average fiscal burden of more...

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CORONA, Calif.—Roberta Gordon never thought she’d still be alive at age 76. She definitely didn’t think she’d still be working. But every Saturday, she goes down to the local grocery store and hands out samples, earning $50 a day, because she needs the money. “I’m a working woman again,” she told me, in the common room of the senior apartment complex where she now lives, here in California’s Inland Empire. Gordon has worked dozens of odd jobs throughout her life—as a house cleaner, a home health aide, a telemarketer, a librarian, a fundraiser—but at many times in her life, she...

In a proposal dubbed “America’s Harvest Box,” President Trump’s new budget calls for replacing half of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) vouchers with actual food for 80% of the program’s recipients. The “box” would contain allotments of shelf-stable milk, ready to eat cereals, pasta, peanut butter, beans and canned fruit and vegetables. Democrats were quick to attack the plan. Michigan Sen Debbie Stabenow, the ranking Democrat on the agriculture committee, labeled it “not a serious proposal.” Rep Jim McGovern (D-Mass) called it “a cruel joke. It unfairly limits the choices of those dependent on the government for their living....

Kentucky became the first state with a work requirement for Medicaid, and now it has to do something arguably more daring: Build a mobile-friendly website that works. The state will require people who get taxpayer-funded health insurance to work or volunteer. It's the kind of government program that often draws disdain from small-government Republicans, but GOP Gov. Matt Bevin has embraced it as "a more efficient use of resources." Government-run websites are notorious for glitches. Kentucky had problems in 2016 when "Benefind" — meant to consolidate all assistance programs — caused chaos. Kentucky officials say this time will be different....

Imagine if you were poor and you got Medicaid, heavily subsidized by the taxpayer, but you had to pay between $1 and $15 a month in premiums. Wouldn't that be confusing? For many people, it is so confusing that they don't understand how to pay and end up being kicked off Medicaid. [Snip] Critics of the plan point to Indiana, which dropped about 25,000 adults from its Medicaid program from 2015 through 2017 for failing to pay premiums there. Some also find the new work requirements some states have imposed troubling ...

A few moments ago, Tucker Carlson quoted 2009 federal statistics citing that 75% of immigrants from Mexico are on some kind of welfare...STUNNING!!!!!!!!!! And these are only the latest numbers...imagine how much larger that number is now after Obama's Mexican invasion!!!!

Not only did Mitch McConnell just give Schumer everything he wanted on budget and health care, he ensured that for the remainder of the year, Democrats can get everything they want and conservatives will not pass a single priority. Not one. snip McConnell is planning to introduce debate in the Senate on immigration next week by putting forth a blank bill with nothing in it. He will then allow anyone to offer amendments, and, in his words, “whoever gets to 60 wins.” snip The GOP platform has become a free-for-all. The only ones who don’t get blank checks are conservatives....

Michael Tubbs, the 26-year-old mayor of Stockton, California, thinks handing out $6,000 a year to low-income residents (with no strings attached) is the way to lift people out of poverty. “Stockton is absolutely Ground Zero for a lot of the issues we’re facing as a nation,” Tubbs told CBS San Francisco (video below). “Ideally, I would like to serve 100 families for 18 months at $500 a month.” Stockton is experimenting with a welfare program called “universal basic income,” which gives low-income residents $500 a month, no questions asked. The money is coming from a private grant. The California city,...

An online petition to include pet food in SNAP benefits is getting a lot of traction. The petition on Care2 has more than 88,500 supports as of Monday morning. According to the website, the petition was created by Edward B. Johnston Jr., who wrote that he’s been on SNAP benefits for a few months and hasn’t been able to feed his dog due to government regulations.

A California city plans to give several dozen families $500 a month for a year as part of a program to study the economic and social impacts of giving people a basic income. The program in Stockton will track what residents do with the money and how having a universal basic income affects their self-esteem and identity, San Francisco radio station KQED reported .

Guess which state has the highest poverty rate in the country? Not Mississippi, New Mexico, or West Virginia, but California, where nearly one out of five residents is poor. That's according to the Census Bureau's Supplemental Poverty Measure, which factors in the cost of housing, food, utilities and clothing, and which includes noncash government assistance as a form of income.

A new civil rights act has come into force in Switzerland that prevents residents who have been on welfare in the past three years from becoming citizens unless they pay back the money they received to the state.

A trio of recently released economic statistics have boosted Democratic hopes of retaking the majority in the House and Senate later this year. First, in December, private employers increased payrolls by stepping up hiring and reducing layoffs. Second, unemployment among blacks fell to the lowest level since 1972. Third, the number of Americans on food stamps fell by two million. Democratic National Committee Chairman Tom Perez labeled these statistics “the starkest of warnings concerning the sad fate in store for average Americans under Republican government. Millions are being forced out of the social safety net so meticulously constructed for them...

There’s another round of arguments brewing over welfare reform (or “workfare” as we used to say in the 90s), this time caused by hints that the Trump administration would begin granting waivers to states that want to impose work requirements on able-bodied recipients of Medicaid. These waivers were all denied under the Obama administration but, as you might expect, things are different now.These rumors have led Washington Post editorial team member Elizabeth Bruenig to take to her keyboard and make a sweeping argument which goes far beyond the question of workfare. Taking time out to toss an endorsement to her...