Interesting - but in order for one to work more, with children, they hav eot have someone care for the children - requiring childcare/school (and childcare).
This is a bit of a fallacy. You're makin this conclusion by assuming that a married couple would net a more solid income together and provide a more stable environment (which is far from the truth).
statistically that is precisely the truth. you get your outliers, (yours, for example), but statistically speaking single-parenthood is the leading cause of child-poverty and an exceedingly poor environment to be raised in. as for the numbers - it looks like they are assuming that the mother and father would marry, move in together (thus reducing their costs), and keep whatever income they had previously. hardly a fallacy.
I agree with some of this - but those reforms that made a significant change ARE still in effect - generally speaking - someone's support is capped off at 5 years over a lifetime - 2 years at a time. . . no more generational families who rely on welfare as if it's income. So - WITH that taken into account - what else could be done?
well, given that the two best ways to increase child poverty would be to have their parents marry, and then have at least one of them work full time. Currently two-thirds of our poor children live in a single-parent household, and are supported by only 16 hours of work a week. an easy thing to say in an economy with 9.1% unemployment, I know - but that is a situation that will not remain forever. Government regulations which punish rather than reward marriage should be altered. Government regulations which present a higher barrier to hiring should be streamlined and revoked, and I would say the child-tax-credit should be expanded, even as the rest of the code is flattened in accordance with the Bowles-Simpson recommendations. A depressingly high percentage of our poor children will receive "education" only in the sense that they will spend a few hours a day in a school building; instituting school choice programs for our lower and lower middle classes would provide a powerful means for them to break the cycle of poverty by ensuring that their children receive knowledge, skills, and work ethics that will make them more competitive in the job market. Medicaid can be reformed to an HSA model, which allows the poor to maintain their access to healthcare
while building wealth (and, incidentally, helping to provide downward pressure on costs). Indiana did this and the CATO (libertarian think tank) guys went nuts because they were worried it made Medicaid
too good, and poor people wouldn't want to leave it for a "regular" plan.
Poverty in the elderly is a tougher nut to crack, largely because we have already tried to solve this with massive pyramid schemes, and those schemes have failed us. No matter whose "plan" you choose, the reality is that Medicare and Social Security expenditures will be reduced sharply off the baseline in future years. Social Security should instead be altered to a system that allows low-income workers to own their own accounts, which grow tax-free, and will let them retire financially independent. When I ran the numbers for a thread a few months ago, I found that simply by diverting 2/3rds of his FICA tax into a personalized account (the rest would go to continue to fund benefits for current retirees), a man who never earned more than $32,000 a year in his entire working life could nonetheless retire a millionaire. So, while for our current crop, the best we can do is reform Medicare to allow market pressure to push down cost while means-testing the benefits so that they aid the poor more while helping the wealthy less - for future elderly, we can do quit a bit.
I think that *everyone* should be required to attend college and earn some sort of degree NOT just be required to 'get a job' - because many do have jobs, and it's not enough pay . . .many do have moer than one job - and that' seither not enough income or *too much* income . . . only a portion of people who are classified as being impoverished receive aid.
"everyone get's college degrees" is not a formula for success - for the simple reason that not all of our jobs require college-level training. And government jobs-training programs have an abysmal history. we would be better served if we reduced the power of the specialty cartels - such as those who restrict the number of people who can become plumbers, electricians, and welders. Those kinds of jobs are the kind that America needs, that can't be exported, that are currently fairly well paid, and don't require a collegiate education.
