Anyone see this latest bullshit?
Study: Welfare pays more than minimum wage in most states
Read more: http://www.foxnews.com/...
Yeah well it's a total and complete LIE!!!!
More below the squiggle
This will be a quick diary as it's so easy to debunk it would only take me 15 seconds. I'll add a bit more though.
So the CATO Institute and uber hacks du jour Michael Taylor and Charles Hughes came up with a study, if that's what you would call it, in which they determined that people make more living on 'welfare' than working minimum wages in 35 states. THIRTY FIVE STATES!!!!
Fox even breathlessly exclaimed
'Welfare' pays more than a minimum-wage job in 35 states, creating little incentive for Americans to take entry-level work and likely increasing their long-term dependency on government help, according to a new study by the libertarian think tank Cato Institute.
They go on to point how generous these benefits may be
Among the other findings is that 'welfare' in 13 states pays more than $15 an hour, compared with the federal hourly minimum wage of $7.25.
The disparity was even higher in nine states in which welfare pays more than the average first-year teacher’s salary and in the six most-generous states, which pay more than the entry-level salary for a computer programmer.
The 52-page study, titled “The Work Versus Welfare Trade Off,” points out a full package of 'welfare' benefits often exceeds take-home pay in part because benefits are tax-free.
Here's the problem with their bullshit study (aside from the fact that they now lump EVERY program out there for assisting the poor into 'Welfare')...
They compare wages earned by an INDIVIDUAL worker to all the benefits that worker's FAMILY would be entitled to as someone who is poor.
Read that again.
Wages earned by ONE worker compared to benefits earned by WHOLE FAMILY.
Basically these idiots at CATO added up all 126 separate programs out there to help poor and tried to figure out what a typical poor family would get in 'benefits'
Methodology
There are currently 126 separate federal anti-poverty programs, defined as either means tested assistance or programs that are explicitly identified as intended to fight poverty. Most welfare programs are means-tested programs that provide aid directly to low-income persons in the form of cash, food, housing, medical care, and so forth, with eligibility based on the recipients’ income. The remaining programs are either community-targeted programs, which provide aid to communities that have large
numbers of poor people or are economically distressed, or categorical programs, which base eligibility for benefits on belonging to a needy or disadvantaged group such as migrant workers or the homeless. Some welfare programs are well known; others are barely heard of even in Washington. Overall, these programs cost roughly $668.2 billion annually. In addition, state and local programs spend an additional $284 billion fighting poverty. Clearly no one receives benefits from all of these programs. Indeed, many federal welfare programs are so small or so narrowly targeted that few receive benefits. Yet many recipients do receive benefits from multiple programs. For purposes of this study, we assumed that our profile family receives the following benefits:
They then go on to list many of the programs they use in their methodology
-Temporary Assistance for Needy Families
-Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program
-Medicaid
-Housing Assistance
-Utilities Assistance
-Women, Infants, and Children Program
-The Emergency Food Assistance Program
They then discuss the 'tax advantages' this family will get such as the EITC and the Child Tax Credit (because only poor people have children you know).
The add in a bunch of meaningless stats and charts and then conclude
It is, of course, possible to over-generalize from the above statistics. Not every welfare recipient fits the profile used in this study, and many who do fit it do not receive every benefit listed. Many welfare recipients, even those receiving the highest level of benefits, are doing everything they can to find employment and leave the welfare system. Still, it is undeniable that for many recipients—especially long-term dependents—welfare pays more than the type of entrylevel job that a typical welfare recipient can expect to find. As long as this is true, many recipients are likely to choose welfare over work. This was true when Cato conducted its 1995 study, and it remains substantially true today. This is unfortunate for taxpayers who must foot the bill for such programs, but even more so for the recipients themselves. By making a rational short-term choice, recipients who forgo work for welfare may trap themselves and their families in long-term dependence. The rapid expansion of refundable tax credits since Cato’s 1995 study has reduced the tax penalty for leaving welfare for work in some states. While this is a step forward, such benefits are small, especially if one considers the value of leisure. Moreover, it is important to realize that to the degree that such credits exceed the value of taxes paid, they constitute a form of welfare themselves. There should clearly be a public policy preference for work over welfare. The current welfare system provides such a high level of benefits that it acts as a disincentive for work. As a result, if Congress and state legislatures are serious about reducing welfare dependence and rewarding work, they should consider strengthening welfare work requirements, removing exemptions, and narrowing the list of activities that qualify as “work.” Moreover, states should consider ways to shrink the gap between the value of welfare and work by reducing current benefit levels and tightening eligibility requirements.
Here's where their bullshit quickly falls apart
Table 14
Total Value of Welfare Benefits
Rank Jurisdiction TANF($) SNAP($) Housing($) Medicaid($) WIC($) LIHEAP($) TEFAP($) Total($)
1 Hawaii 7,632 8,827 23,798 6,776 1,289 553 300 49,175
2 District of Columbia 5,136 6,081 21,775 8,136 1,071 600 300 43,099
3 Massachusetts 7,416 6,247 17,203 9,920 979 450 300 42,515
4 Connecticut 6,804 6,312 14,243 9,175 1,253 675 300 38,761
I highlighted Connecticut because that's where I live and I wanted to focus on that as an example of how much fucking stupid is in this report. The first most glaring mistake by their 'study' is that the minimum wage in Connecticut is NOT $7.25 but $8.25. Not that makes a whole hell of alot of difference but that's a very glaring mistake and if applied to all 50 states will skew the results.
But the mother of ALL mistakes is that these idiots take ALL benefits that hypothetical family gets and compares it to the wages your typical minimum wage earner makes. Well last I checked a typical family now consists of TWO wage earners (maybe more) and a kid or two.
So in Connecticut for example while that poor family of four may get $44,370 in pretax benefits on 'welfare', if those two parents work a 40 full time job at $8.25 they're making $34,320 pretax. If they work overtime that pay goes up. That pay also does not include any benefits they may get from their job such as health care benefits or paid sick leave (which employers in Connecticut DO pay. First state in US to require that BTW). When you factor all that in, all of a sudden their findings that in Connecticut people on 'welfare' do quite well, doesn't look so good. And this is in Connecticut where we take care of our poor because well we aren't heartless bastards.
A more appropriate way of looking at their 'study' would be to figure out how much an individual family member gets in 'benefits' and contrast that with how much money that individual family member would make working minimum wage (setting aside the fact that last I checked children couldn't earn any wages to begin with). But the CATO nimrods didn't do that. Instead they compared apples to oranges and called it a day then went to FOX to spread their bullshit.
These idiots even have a nifty chart that shows the median wage in Connecticut compared to the 'benefits' a family would get and states that the family received 107.4% of the median wage.
Table 4
Pretax Wage Equivalents Compared to Median Salaries
Rank Jurisdiction Pretax Wage Equivalent($) Median Salary($) % of Median Salary(%)
8 Connecticut 44,370 41,330 107.4
If one looks at this as an hourly wage (as shown in Table 3), it is easy to see that welfare pays more than a minimum-wage job in 33 states—in many cases, significantly more. In fact, in a dozen states and the District of Columbia, welfare pays more than $15 per hour. If one compares the wage-equivalent value of welfare to median work-related income (as shown in Table 4), welfare actually pays better in eight states, and nearly as well in numerous other states. Indeed, in 11 states, welfare pays more than the average pre-tax first-year wage for a teacher. In 39 states it pays more than the starting wage for a secretary. And, in the three most generous states, a person on welfare can take home more money than an entry-level computer programmer.6
Of course once again though the problem is they're comparing total 'benefits' that individual's family would receive and contrasting it to what the median income of an individual would be in Connecticut. The more appropriate comparison would be to take the median household income for a family in Connecticut and compare it to the 'benefits'.
The median household income in Connecticut is....
$69,243
So basically the median household in Connecticut makes about $25,000 MORE than that typical family would get in 'welfare benefits'. That's NOT including any additional benefits that household gets from working such as company paid healthcare and so on. When you add in healthcare benefits, that alone can add an additional $10,000-$20,000 to the median household income of that family in Connecticut.
I'm not going into too much more detail. I think we all get the point. Frankly there is so much stupid in this report that I can spend all day nitpicking it. This study is something a freshman in High School student could put together and it would be less fundamentally flawed than this piece of shit put out by these hacks at the CATO Institute. The fact that FOX picked up on it and ran with it doesn't surprise me either. But now when confronted by some tea bagging nut sack friend or relative who throws this bullshit study in your face, hopefully we'll all be better armed to debunk the crap before it becomes 'fact' in their minds.
9:22 AM PT: Just to add a correction to the diary. The 'study' reflects what the typical welfare family would be. In the case of the study that is a household with a single mother and two children. Obviously a single mother would not be able to earn two wages but can work two jobs provided she has childcare.
Problem is, as I indicated in my comments, according to gov't data single family households with a single mother consist of 24% of all households in the US. Less of those consist of single mother households with two or more kids. Even less of those would qualify for ANY benefits let alone ALL of them. Some of those single mothers with two kids for example get child support. So when you narrow it down to the single mother with two kids who actually would qualify for all the benefits cited the numbers are small and in some states like Connecticut those households as a percentage amount to less than 10% of the whole.
So I stand corrected on the one point but the larger issue and the credibility of the study still remains in question. The study is really just looking at a small subset of our society and the benefits that small subset MAY get and superimposing those benefits upon the whole. The study also does not factor in additional benefits an individual may be entitled to from their job. They just look at income. Healthcare benefits in Connecticut alone can add several thousand dollars per individual to the median income of the individual worker. It doesn't account for minimum wages in individual states, caps on benefits, complexity/difficulty in getting benefits and so on.