While people can be surprisingly insensitive, even mean, there's always some reasonable voices. In this type of article, there's the predictable complaints about people "receiving handouts" and "being lazy" but this commenter, JCF-1362859, pushes back:
I worked in a social services agency for 17 years helping people apply for government programs. The vast majority of these people were working (upwards of 85%), and most of the rest were either disabled or elderly. The problem was that these people (who were supposedly living off of your dime) were underemployed and underpaid. My question to you is this? Who is actually receiving the government assistance? The person who is working but still needs to apply for government programs to feed his family, or the employer who pays his employees so low that they qualify for government assistance to begin with. Seems to me that there's a little bit (or a lot) of government assistance in that employer's profit margin that he wouldn't have seen had he paid his workers an adequate amount of wages. In these cases, the government is subsidizing the employer, not person who is receiving government assistance.
I think this is a point many people simply don't consider or appreciate; the fact that many people (especially those with disabilities) are underemployed and that so many companies are paying wages that are so little that people quite literally cannot survive on it (especially if a single-parent household).
Are there people who take advantage of subsidies and other benefits? Of course. Show me a system where that never happens, even among the wealthy (except it's called lobbying). But too often accountabilty & auditing are cut to reduce costs.
If you want to know more about the relationship between wages & housing, the National Low-Income Housing Coalition has a good report on this.
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