When Welfare Replaces Daddy
If we are truly concerned about the future of our children, then we would focus on the benefits, not the costs of amending the Welfare system, because as study after study has shown, our children are doing worse with fewer fathers in the home.
An early study from the Journal of Genetic Psychology found that the differences in development between children were connected more to the amount of interaction with the father as opposed to the socio-economic status of either parent or even the number of adults in the household.
Current studies prove that children without fathers in the home are more prone to an assortment of difficulties.
Yet, society focuses on jailing fathers who do not pay, which has not proven to make them pay or make them show up.
The problem is not that fathers just want to have children and walk away, as we have been told. The problem is that Welfare, in many ways, supplants the father, and in other ways, the courts simply ignore or impede fathers who desire to be present.
Earlier in this series, I highlighted that nearly 40 percent of unwed mothers are living with a man and are already mothers to one or more additional children., but the “income-tested†Welfare System creates blockages to marriage.
Governmental assistance programs often root out males who may be dating single mothers prior to deciding to marry and attempt to assign financial responsibility to them, often resulting in a breakup.
For example, if a mother who is living with her boyfriend applies for benefits as a single head of household, she will have support from the system, while her mate ostensibly will have his own income, even if it’s minimum wage.
But if the two do decide to marry, the system will immediately count the man’s income against the woman’s Welfare eligibility, reducing or ending her benefits.
What this means, as dramatized in the ‘seventies movie Claudine, is that benefits are maximized when a single mother remains single, and slashed if she marries. The two incomes represented by the man’s income and Welfare benefits, are reduced to solely the man’s income—a huge burden delivered with no preparation.
In this manner, the Welfare System forces impoverished couples to choose to remain unmarried over combining incomes in a marriage. While the popular concept of single Black mothers is of Welfare Queens, that concept is neither based on truth or intelligence. Welfare benefits are scarcely enough for a family to survive on and most of the Welfare fraud is actually committed by white women.
Welfare case workers will even deduct gifts from a man from the amount of monthly assistance provided to the single mother.
What must be stated and underscored is that these solutions are designed to create financial responsibility, not to place fathers in the lives of children.
And, in reality, there is no huge single parent Welfare drain on the economy. Total Welfare program costs in the United States are just over $400 billion per year, which is only FIVE PER CENT of the Gross Domestic Product. And only half of this goes to households with children.
But, even as our retarded president seeks more billions for a failing war effort overseas, many stupid ass Americans fly into a rage over the possibility of Welfare’s five percent of the GDP growing to a whopping six percent.
The total arrearages in child support is just under $100 billion dollars, while the cost of the Iraq War will be over $1 trillion by the time things are all said and done.
If we acknowledge the fact that 70 percent of men in arrears earn less than $10,000 annually, then forcing a single woman off of Welfare benefits if she marries, tacitly creates fewer marriages and more single parent households. It also makes for less fathers in the lives of children, when the man is pursued for repayment of Welfare benefits.
Can the Welfare and Child Support System be revamped to make more fathers present in the lives of more children?
The easy answer is yes.
First, since the focus on making him pay has failed (arrears have actually risen despite arrests), more efforts to make him present should be pursued, which will benefit everyone.
Instead of continuing to penalize parents, society would fare better to actually reward couples who marry and combine incomes while improving their standing.
For example, instead of slashing Welfare benefits when a man is in the home, the system would be pragmatic to provide assistance for education or the acquisition of trades, in addition to time-limited extension of daycare support and transportation costs for both parents.
The net result will be fewer families languishing in poverty and on Welfare.
Additionally, a single father who is present in the home and taking full advantage of those incentives should also have his debt to the Welfare system reduced substantially. Largely, impoverished men are being jailed and their licenses are being revoked for being unable to reimburse the Welfare system, not for refusing to pay into a single mother headed household.
A great many fathers hit the road when facing a loss of license and/or jail.
If we wish to have more fathers in the lives of children, then we must stop viewing them as responsible for repaying the government. If a single mother’s benefits were to be unaffected by marriage, particularly to an already impoverished father, no one would have to make choices between marriage and Welfare benefits.
The net benefit here would be mostly for single Welfare mothers and the low-wage earning, fathers with low or no skills, who are the overwhelming majority of so-called “Deadbeat Dads.†Both groups are also among those for whom marriage is most elusive.
Funny, but with all the current hoopla over same sex marriages, there are no huge outreach programs by either church or state to urge single parents to set marriage as a goal to better the lives of their children.
Political and social leaders would do their communities justice by providing the positive message that marriage will improve the lives of all involved, as opposed to the negative message that fathers desire to be absent, which has generally been proven to be a lie.
And, both church and state must stop delivering confusing messages about sex, while allowing the media and entertainment to deliver sex and sexuality. The battle is against sex education in the schools, with little other education suggested. We know that people will learn from somewhere, so the decision is whether they will learn in the schools or in the streets. Some adults have yet to learn.
Finally, the Welfare System must stop competing with fathers as the breadwinner in the lives of single mothers and children.
The bottom line to all of this is that single fathers, especially single Black fathers, have gotten a bad rap. Most of the negative views are based on mythology and personal biases, not fact.
The sad reality is that even though I have presented research and statistics in this series, many ignorant people have still responded with their same old, tired stereotypes, ignoring everything except their silly misconceptions, which they have allowed to pose as truth. Damn them all to hell.
If we truly desire to improve the lot of those at the bottom, then those above had better be about the business of creating pragmatic solutions.
We can continue to chase after men who have little money, and we can continue to crow about how fathers “just need to pay,†but at the end of the day, that campaign has failed.
Perhaps it’s time for something new.
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(Original title:Â Who’s Your Daddy, Pt. 5)
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Stumble It!
February 7th, 2007 at 10:14 am
Nice try.
I smell another taxpayer subsidy in there somewhere. Conservatives in todays parlance means that one is responsible for himself and his family. A liberal is one that thinks he should be subsidized because he cant afford or maintain his own desires. There is a never ending labyrinth of what the gov’t should and should not do to allow “fairness”. The real goal is to allow people to make their own fairness within their own family framework and initiative. These pathetic infantile calls for more external financial intervention to prop up a pathologic society paradigm of personal irresponsibility that the poor, defective or lazy are entitled to the same social entitlements out of some presumed universal imperitive for fairness is a crock. Everything is earned, and if not earned the remaining proceeds are stolen.
Any viable social system or culture is ultimately validated by its capacity to sustain itself…
February 7th, 2007 at 10:21 am
All government subsidies should be ended.
Welfare and the alphabet soup of programs FDR put in place were never intended to be permanent social programs.
They have, hovewever, become a way of life for many and generations have made it a way of life.
All social programs should be ended. They exacerbate the problem of poverty and keep it cycling from generation to generation. When a person is forced to pull themselves up by their own boot straps, then one will see change.
What in God’s name did people do before these programs?
February 7th, 2007 at 11:10 am
Is it possible for a black person to be racist? I bet Mr. James would say NO!
In his article, he says that most of the welfare fraud is actually committed by white women.
How could he possibly know that, with all the special treatment blacks get these days. Maybe black women are better at not getting caught. White women may be the ones who are predominantly prosecuted. And what about the ones who aren’t caught or caught and not prosecuted based on their sex and race.
Blacks own far and away more single mothers than whites based on the statistics I recently saw, beat only by Hispanics.
I did some Googling and found the statistics that 38.8% of welfare recipients are white and 37.2% are black. Does this prove that whites are more prone to welfare than blacks? To Mr. James I’m sure it does. But not if you consider that according to the 2000 census, 75% of the U.S. population is white and only 12% black.
Why was I not surprised that the article writer is black?
I agree with the previous poster who said that the government should get out of the single mother support business completely. I bet a whole lot fewer women would choose not to get pregnant or if they did, not have the child, or would give the child up for adoption if she knew that free money would not be forthcoming from the government for every child she has without a father. I further bet they would be a whole lot more careful with whom they dated and became pregnant with if they knew that the government wasn’t going to force men who don’t want to be fathers (choice for men, too) to pay up or go to jail based solely on a woman’s whim one way or the other.
Do you think that “bad” boys would lose a lot of their luster in the eyes of women if they knew they would be totally responsible for their choice of a mate and father? Gee, what a concept!
51% of the population is women, so why would we expect something like women being held responsible for their choices? It’s women who are in charge, so they get whatever they want.
February 7th, 2007 at 11:10 am
Daryl, to say you are double minded would be a huge mathematical understatement. You made a few good points. Having off and on as a child of a single Mother benefited from some welfare and food stamps etc, and realizing the disincintives built into the system, great improvements could be made. But I also see the HUGE errors and horrible judgements my Mother made that served to keep us skimming along. More welfare budget is not the answer, though it “feels” good to say it, and especially to contrast it with the war.
Correct that fraud is rampant in the white underclass. My home town and county are the largest recipients of welfare and fraudulent disability in the state where I lived, and most of those people have no clue that the government does not have its own money…I venture most recipients have no idea about that since it is largely generational (ignorance). Perspective changes when you become a producer and not a consumer of entitlement dollars, and as one who has been both, BIG TIME, as a child I have license to be as blundt and mean spirited as I like.
There are welfare queens
There are those who have babies to increase the check
There are irresponsible pathologies that exist independent of the flaws in the system.
it will take MORE tough love reform, not less, indeed even dramatic tough love to clean up the mess those always wanting more budget have created.
February 7th, 2007 at 11:18 am
It has always been true that if you want more of something, subsidize it.
In my little suburb, we built a new train station some years ago. The bums, ’scuse me homeless, started coming there in droves. Then the cops weren’t allowed to tell them to move on. Then we had even more dollars going to food pantries, PADS programs, and the like. Now we have more of this problem and the stink of piss all around our downtown area.
Yep, we got what we asked for.
February 7th, 2007 at 11:28 am
D-man:
Yo dog, chill on the dis to the ‘power’ in the photo. The whole hand on the head thing, barely keepin the righteous rage contained doesnt make it. Keep the wolf tickets at home…
February 7th, 2007 at 11:49 am
Black, white, pink or purple,, as a vocational school teacher I’ve seen way too many folks milking the system for years on end when I could have put them to work. Not at miniumum wage either but at a decent starting wage with rapid advancement for someone willing to WORK..
Limit welfare time for those who can work or maybe give them a job picking up trash for the state.
You want the state to support you??? You have to work for it.
February 7th, 2007 at 12:57 pm
Whoops!
In my previous post, I typed, “I bet a whole lot fewer women would choose not to get pregnant…”
What I meant to say, of course, is, “I bet a whole lot more women would choose not to get pregnant…”
Sorry ’bout that!
February 7th, 2007 at 1:00 pm
Why is it that in America our impoverished children are overweight and carry ipods cell phones and have nintendo’s ?
February 7th, 2007 at 1:29 pm
Was Daryl paid to submit this article? Because I can write and reason this poorly, too, and I could use the extra cash.
February 7th, 2007 at 1:57 pm
Seems a perfect scenario for affirmative retraction…
February 7th, 2007 at 2:19 pm
Might I humbly suggest that we restore the Constitution to family law practice? Imagine actually having to prove wrongdoing in order to strip a father of custody of his children. To a jury!
We just had an astronaut go PMS on us! How many men are unjustly hit with restraining orders, stripped of their right to keep and bear arms, slammed into child support peonage, further punished because they are unable to comply with unreasonable support orders, all because the legal system sides with the PMS monsters and blame all doemsitc violence on the men?
Answer: millions. Some of them black.
Red Pill, you are right, however, too many conservatives act like they think the problem is fathers abandoning their families, and not the far more prevalent problem of fathers being kicked out of their families.
And then treated like Jews in Nazi Germany.
February 7th, 2007 at 2:31 pm
Roger:
I know what real is because it happened to me. My niggling desire to be fiscally and socially appropriate got me canned for a shot at my stuff without the commentary and without any real male perspective to get in the way of fem freedom on someone elses tab.
Never expect an improvement because it is men with means who need to be found at fault to pay for the whole she-bang. Successful men need to have their success called into question, to have success in general demonized and exchanged for a kinder gentler dependant fantasy which even in self-serving victory is too stupid and too manipulated to do what’s best for the family they claim they have as their highest interest. The pendulum has gone too far and now any semblance of objective western male success is anathma to our wives and daughters. Lookat the current crop of presidential hopefulls, not a single one a success in and of himself providing anything constructive….
February 8th, 2007 at 4:42 am
Welcome to MND Daryl. You have a black man’s perspective and maybe some different appreciation that does not fit well with others’ appreciation. But hey, we all start from different points and we all have different paths. Just so long as a significant change to the current situation is achieved without making even worse errors, the more contribution to the debate the better.
You make films, you write books. You see problems and try to bring people to pay attention. Solutions may be varied but one end result HAS to be less Governmental fiat condemning Fathers and Men, and more focus on the good that men do in the Family.
The problem lies not just in Government, but in Feminsm. This Princess of Lies is your main enemy. It is she who has affected black families more than any other factor.
Turn your attention to destroying the curse of Femonazism and seeking equality for Men and Fathers. The Government and its welfare programs won’t help. Giving women money taken from men by the Government, in any form, is a system failure and a system virus. Inventing new ways of depriving men to provide for women is just more of the same.
February 8th, 2007 at 6:18 am
amfortas, I also have a “black man’s perspective” and this guy is just a libnut rehash and won’t ever change. But I guess it’s cool if you have fun trying. RPR is so easy. Maybe this guy will be a challenge.
February 8th, 2007 at 10:23 am
Black mans perspective: Now THATS a recommendation! Since we are apparently going to accept group rights and group responsibility now, could someone please apply THIS recipe for success to the major city centers where this perspective is apparently not getting heard enough to make any changes for the better. Lewts see, theres the small childs perspectives, a feminist perspective, the feeble minded and brain injury perspective, there’s the just wanna play videogames perspective, the fill-in-the-blank-hyphenated American perspectives. the otherly oriented perspectives ad nauseum. Funny these diverse perspectives all have a common nexus, which is they need employed honkey male money donations so as to be free of the chains of persecution and prosecution. When oh when will it just be the adult responsible self sufficiency perspective that takes priority?…
March 4th, 2007 at 8:09 pm
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