This morning, the Senate President, the Senate Chairs of the Joint Committee on Children, Families and Persons with Disabilities and the Senate Ways and Means Committee announced in a press conference at the State House a “welfare reform” bill that will add more humiliation to being poor, restrict exemptions to the work requirement while spending millions of taxpayer dollars on photo IDs for EBT cards that serves no legitimate public purpose. At the same time, the bill takes only limited steps to help poor families learn skills or build assets that will lead to an improved standard of living, the only fair and proven way to lift people out of poverty and reduce taxpayer expenditure.
Progressive advocacy groups from across the state will undoubtedly be speaking out against several of the bill’s most onerous provisions as well as against the process by which the bill was brought to the Senate.
This appears to be just the latest in a series of assaults on the poor here in Massachusetts.
Laughably called An Act to Foster Economic Independence, the bill requires welfare recipients to:
- Prove they are actively seeking a job before getting any cash assistance
- Secure a Photo ID EBT card that must be checked by store owner
- Not be out of state more than 30 days (currently 60) before losing benefits
In addition, it:
- Limits work exemptions to those individuals meeting SSI standards (very onerous)
- Limits work exemption for pregnant women to one month before birth (currently up to 4 months)
- Reduces benefit extension from 6 months to 3 months
- Raises age of work requirement from 60 to 66
My question – what problem are we solving??
We know that the right typically hypes the amount of fraud – or the number of people who are sitting on their asses enjoying the largess of the government. Whoa – want to have a cushy life – live on welfare and food stamps!!
But why do we have democrats doing this?
In the last few state-wide elections, the most progressive candidate won. What does that tell us about where our policy and our priorities need to be?
More to come in another post on the hideous process used to move this bill so rapidly.
We have a Governor in this state who had to sleep on the floor every third night.
The solution to his family’s childhood poverty wasn’t more humiliation and paper work… it was a good education and opportunity.
I’m proud to have a Governor in this state who actually cares about poor families and recognizes how hard they work, and how important to their future success food in their belly could be.
I’m ashamed that the Senate President would propose legislation to further punish poor people for the sake of being poor, as an answer the a problem these measures will not solve, even as she refused to engage in any of the Governor’s plans just a few months ago that would have helped reduce poverty — by increasing our funding of education.
This is especially perplexing when the Senate President was on a roll with her efforts to increase the minimum wage — but now we’re one step forward, two steps back. We can’t be cutting the very few lifelines our society has left; people can’t strap up their boots to get themselves out of poverty if we take away their shoe laces.
Today’s Globe has, on the front page, a long article about college-educated people who lost jobs in the recession and are barely keeping their heads above water as they drift into unemployability. At the rate we’re going we’ll have more people in need of help, not fewer.
There are days when I feel convinced this country’s best days are behind it. Nothing to do but fight this kind of bad policy.
The situation for those of us who are older (in my case, 60) is even more bleak. Finding a conventional job (you know, W-2/1099, compensation paid regularly, etc) in the technology sector is, well, impossible.
I don’t want to hear about how Ms. Murray is a “good Progressive”. I really don’t.
House Leadership released the supplemental budget on Friday night (!!!) and embraced Republican Rep Shauna O’Connell’s most egregious so-called “welfare reforms”.
I will try to get you a direct link to State House website but you can read the text here.
Some of the worst provisions:
• Creating a program integrity bureau (doesn’t that sound ominous?)
• Creating an integrated eligibility system (not a bad idea until you realize that it will be used to determine if welfare recipients are spending their money wisely)
• Requiring SSN verification within 3 months (sometimes difficult for newborns)
• Limiting spending to MA and contiguous states (may be unconstitutional limit on travel)
• Implementing photo ID for EBT cards (here we go again)
• Creating an online payment system for rent and utilities that all recipients must use within 3 years
We are calling on progressive representatives to vote as a block to strike these provisions
bill numbers to help people making calls?
Very confusing. Now looks like:
House, No. 3514 – An Act making appropriations for the fiscal year 2013 to provide for supplementing certain existing appropriations and for certain other activities and projects.
https://malegislature.gov/Bills/188/House/H3514/History
We can’t have government getting involved in our private lives… but we absolutely must check on every little cent people spend on their EBT cards to make sure it was 100% perfect and healthy, ban people from using anything other than online paying options… even though many of the people who need this program don’t have enough money to afford the internet and a computer (!!!)
And this is to say nothing of the Photo IDs, so some drug addict parent’s hungry kid can’t go get food that night because that kid is expected to take care of themselves… but the cashier now won’t take the card.
Actually, I’m willing to bet the vast majority of the new expenses in the Senate Plan is over the Photo ID requirements, the costs of which would far exceed any ‘waste’ in the program and do nothing to resolve the limited problems our Auditor unearthed.
The people who designed these ‘reforms’ clearly don’t know very many people who use these programs and care about them even less. Poor does not equate to bad and draconian punishments does not equate to more jobs.
This action is ONLY about pandering to prejudice. We are watching a mob of bullies descend on their targeted scapegoats motivated by their own personal prejudices and pandering to the personal prejudices of their supporters. No amount of knowledge or information will change anything about this mentality.
I am truly, deeply, and genuinely eager to get these allegedly “progressive” officials un-elected. I am so very weary of being ashamed and embarrassed by the official actions of the leaders of my own party.
I guess this is for charlie and not the article’s author, but have you ever gotten unemployment in MA? You have to prove you are looking for a job to receive your benefits. You do so by keeping a diary of job-seeking activities. It’s been a while, but I think you have to have 3 per week to qualify for benefits. The diary must be available to the DUA on request, and they do check. (details are here: http://www.mass.gov/lwd/unemployment-insur/resources/questions-and-answers/claimants/eligibility.html#maintainElig)
I was unemployed briefly about 3 years ago, and at that time I was never asked where I was looking for work. I did what I had done in the distant past, kept the name and contact info of the person I had applied to, but nobody was ever interested at unemployment. They were far more concerned that I attend their mandatory classes about how to write a resume and how to dress for a job interview.
Here’s funny story from the classes (two years ago):
Instructor-
“There’s this thing out there on the Internet, I don’t know much about it but people say it’s helpful. It’s called Linked Ed In.”
Last time I was unemployed, maybe 10 years ago, they handed out a three-page list of job-finding sources on the Web. It went way beyond monster.com.
and they checked my diary twice in that time. (Westboro office)
I did get the mandatory courses up front (which counted towards “looking for a job”), but those only lasted a week or two.
The unemployment rate was lower then than 3 years ago – I wonder if they’re just too busy to check now.
… a ‘bang for your buck’ issue. I’ve got to imagine that it is less time and dollar efficient to be reviewing and verifying lists of individuals’ employment efforts than to dedicate man hours to teaching helpful information (even if not everyone needs it) to several people simultaneously.
but when my mother was laid off years and years ago, she most certainly did have to report her 3 resumes/job applications a week. It certainly caused her a lot of stress and seemed pretty unfair to make someone do when she had never lost a job before in her life.
When Congress passed the latest extension of federal UI, they added a lot of job-search strings that did not exist before 2013. You have to attend two job search sessions and you lose your benefits if you don’t. You have to keep a job log (as Steve says), and the state unemployment agency is required to audit the logs and demand UI benefits back from anyone whose search cannot be “verified,” whatever that might mean.
I wasn’t out of work long enough for the extension to kick in, so I may not have been subject to these strings you speak of.
The Democrats hold 8 of 60 House seats and 4 of 30 Senate seats. I’ve learned, from my experience in Massachusetts, that parties with only about 10 or 20 percent of legislative seats can nonetheless drive the agenda. So I’m sure that, once I get out to Wyoming, I’ll find the Democrats ramming their bills through 80% Republican chambers. Right?
We really need an overhaul of this legislature.