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TIM MANNELLO
Williamsport
Are most poor people destitute because they refuse to work? Or, could it be because full-time work or combination of part-time jobs in which they're employed don't lift them out of poverty?
Actually, the Trump Administration's Business of Labor Statistics show that welfare recipients are made up mostly of children, the disabled, the elderly, college students, and part-time workers who have care-giver responsibility but not the means to pay for outside help.
In fact, the report states that, "among the poor, only two out of every 100 are working-age adults who are disconnected from the labor market for unknown reasons."
Studies like those done by the Association of Psychological Science (APS) have found "no systematic evidence that cash transfer programs discourage work. Today, the idle poor adult who is able-bodied remains a rare creature." In a New York Times Magazine article, Vanessa Solivan put it this way, "The non-working poor person getting something for nothing is a lot like the cheat committing voter fraud through impersonation. Such voters are pariahs who loom far larger in the American imagination than in real life."
But don't bother telling that to the "There's-no-free lunch-welfare-queen-they're-just-lazy" crowd who incessantly whine about their tax dollars paying for "stay-at-home freeloaders."
They're sticking to that stereotype despite compelling evidence to the contrary. Ironically, some of the loudest complainers in their ranks turn out to be government workers receiving wages and benefits (including health care and pensions) which they could never get for doing comparable work in the private sector. If it takes a free-loader to identify a free-loader, such government-employed critics are, indeed, among the most qualified.
The APS study cited above reported also that many critics of the poor characterize the average welfare recipient as generally less responsible, less prudent with food stamps and cash assistance, less hardworking … and, oh yes, overwhelmingly more African- American than the average non-welfare recipient.
Welfare reform has been based on the premise that people are poor because they're not working; thus, the purpose of "welfare to work" initiatives has been to put them to work.
While true that more welfare recipients did find employment as a result, they remain impoverished. So, the real problem is not so much that the poor don't work, it's that work doesn't pay enough. And as robots and artificial intelligence replace more jobs previously done by humans, this situation has only gotten worse.
As a rule, people want to work, and to raise themselves out of poverty.
They're not the problem.
What we lack are enough jobs that pay sufficiently for them to achieve that goal. While work should be the solution, today (and increasingly for the foreseeable future), it hasn't been for many.
Furthermore, we don't seem to be striving for effective answers.
The "lazy" factor is not so much the poor themselves, but continuing to blame them instead of providing them with requisite training for and access to the many jobs available now and created in the future which pay a living wage.