Sparks have flown since Sen. Sam Brownback, R-Kan., became chairman of the Senate subcommittee that oversees spending for the local government in Washington, D.C., because his social conservatism doesn’t play well with some local officials. Now he wants to give low-income D.C. couples a marriage bonus — up to $9,000 in federal money to help such marrying couples buy homes, fund children’s educations and more. Everybody can get behind the goal of promoting stable two-parent families. But is it government’s job to underwrite them?
Posted by Rhonda Holman
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21 Comments
It’s time to lobby for backpay.Sixteen years for me.
Rhonda,so, now that the government WANTS to give money away you’re not for it? I don’t get it, I thought Libs like you, Rhonda Holman, thought that government programs and giveaways like this are good?
not sure if its a good idea, brownback’s idea, but I see where he is going with it.
looks like he is trying to combat the welfare system that disincentivises (if I can use that word) getting married. i.e. if you are not married and have children, you are eligible for many many more welfare programs than if you are married.Just a thought.
by the way, since I am new here, do the editorial writers or editors ever actually get involved in conversations or do they simply put their opinion down without having to defend it.I would think an approriate blog or public forum, like this, would have some kind of give and take.
anyone know?
Hey, bread and circuses, right? How ’bout the politicians actually working for our votes, instead of trying to continually buy them from us with our own Visa cards?This is for the children, right? The same ones who’ll be stuck with paying it all off later?Let’s hear it for the Borrow-and-Blow Republicans!
I acutally agree with you Jed, stop spending our money for us to pay back later.
Captain- I’m not aware of the editorial staff ever participating in the discussion.It’s pretty much the Hardhats VS the “Pinko-hippie commie fags” on this blog. If you’re somewhere in the middle you’re lucky,YOU GET TO BE HATED BY EVERBODY!
wow, I understand that is a quote eh?
ouch.
I think its pretty week the editorial staff doesn’t take part.
I should say, weak….
The best part is that no one moniters the blog. You get to read all kinds of colorful language (ie. Ian the racist-cuban a**hole), and if you get mad enough, you too can use it.Ah…but I am a lady.
I wouldn’t put it past the WE staff to post undercover. If you use the basic framework of ‘follow the money’, all WE wants to do is generate traffic, which in turn increases the chance of a reader navigating to the advertising links. It’s all about the money, honey. Wish it was about factual actionable information with perspectives. That would be too much to ask of a communication media, though:)
Sorry to burst anyones bubble:-(
And, you do get a lot of colorful metaphors. A vivid reminder that we do live in a blue-collar city. I just wish the CAVE’s would go away. (Citizens Against Virtually Everything). I can handle the politically and intellectually challenged bloggers. I enjoy the banter.
Gubment fundin mirrage be lik dogs fundin kitens: Gib tha dogs mor ta et.
Whhaaaaat???
Can’t quite put my finger on it, but Brownback has always kind of given me the hebee-jebbes. He’ll probably be president someday.
Captain P,No, the editorial writers never take part in the comments, though I did get a good e-mail from one of them once.
I suspect they use their blogs merely to gauge interest levels on various topics. In any case, real give-and-take rarely occurs between commenters; and I notice that few really good commenters stay around very long. The crazies tend to make too much of a nuisance of themselves, divert attention from real issues, and behave more like attack dogs than rational humans.
These blogs provide plentiful evidence of something similar to Gresham’s Law, that is: “Bad argument drives good argument away.” There are worthless arguments that get repeated ad nauseum by a handful of commenters – probably kids with more time than sense. They have no interest in making progress, only in repeating their simplistic and mean-spirited positions. Of course, anyone who points this out to them is rewarded with heaps of abuse.
The only solution may be a password-only forum with an active moderator. Short of that, the comments will devolve into name calling every time.
If this give away is so good, why limit it to people in D.C.?
Any chance that gay couples in DC with kids will qualify?
The Great Society tried to replace the family with government policies and handouts; but what we got, instead of the promised utopia, was an example of the real “Great Society” embarrasingly packed into the Superdome for the world to see. Indeed, the War Against the Family is showing its failures more and more as state welfare costs skyrocket because they are tied to the government penchant for enabling irresponsible and dysfunctional behaviors, with predictably disastrous long-term results.
Brownback’s idea smacks too much of throwing money at a symptom, but at least it supports the notion of family. It will do no good, however, if it just ends up being another government handout that enables destructive behaviors.
Tricia T.,
Your comments are the predictable result of hidebound ideology + TV pictures. Total silliness.
Unlike you, what I saw packed into the Superdome and the Convention Center was the direct result of abadnoning the policies of the Great Society (education, social services), rather than implementing them.
Brownback and I agree on virtually nothing. But I would be interested to see what stipulations he’s attaching to this money. Seed money can do some good in the effort to get folks into the middle class. God knows enough hard-working folks are falling out of it all the time because wages are stagnant and health care costs are rising as much as 40% per year. I don’t like reactionary social engineering, but I’m willing to see what he has in mind.
As far as governmental enabling of “irresponsible and dysfunctional behaviors, with predictably disastrous long-term results,” please stop with the code words and just say it, Tricia: you think black people are lazy, irresponsible, violent, filthy, and have sex too much.
Please ease up on the code word worries. Poor people often don’t have life skills, period. In this regard, there is no difference between races.
Some of what you say makes sense, CF. I doubt that the people along the Gulf Coast – black or white – ever really got what the War on Poverty was supposed to provide for them. Those people have just been forgotten, not a lot different from the nursing home victims in NO. So, yes, I probably overstated my case, but you and I aren’t all that different in this regard.
I have friends in social services agencies who feel enormous frustration at the bureaucracy on one hand and the endless supply of people, on the other hand, who have problems caused as much by their inability to manage their own lives as anything else.
We have a crisis of parenting, and I doubt that there’s enough money in the world for the public to pay others to properly raise all the kids whose parents aren’t getting it done for whatever reason.
I don’t mind spending money and paying taxes if it cures problems. But I’d like to see more of the “tough love” approach that refuses to reward destructive behaviors with handouts. AA and the various 12-step programs have proved the necessity and effectiveness of avoiding enabling and co-dependent behaviors. Isn’t it odd that we haven’t learned how to do this in the public, social fields?
I think the hopefulness reported among the poor evacuated from NO is very positive. This might very well be a turning point for many of them. Too soon to be celebrating, but I’m hopeful, too.
Tricia,
I hestitate to sign on to ‘poor people often don’t have life skills,’ since I’ve been poor and have quite a bit of admiration for what it takes to scrape by.
But you’re surely correct that a legacy of poverty can leave people at a great disadvantage when it comes to basic coping. It’s as much a matter of showing folks what’s possible as it is a matter of equipping them with specific skills and resources.
And just as nothing succeeds like success, nothing fails like failure. The cycles of poverty are very , very difficult to escape. The comparison with AA and recovery models is instructive, because the relapse rate for all addictions is astronomically high.
Along those lines, I was also thinking of the other sites of entrenched poverty in America, particularly Appalachia. God knows what the right approach is to the socio-cultural problems accompanying that kind of poverty.
I’m pretty unabashed in thinking that the Fed has the reach to do things other institutions can’t. But I also grant that a lot of the existing institutional approaches leave a great deal to be desired.
So, I’ll meet you not quite halfway.
CF,Thanks for that. Solutions are important. There are just too many poor people in the world to be making partisan politics out of them. It’s too easy to blame the poor, and calls for responsibility too often sound like blaming. Surely only those who have been truly poor have a proper sense of the dificulty of climbing out of it.
I don’t mind erring on the side of giving too much, but it is so hard to know when a person’s needs are helped or hindered by giving. Human nature quickly adapts to coddling. I’d probably be more succesful, myself, if I weren’t so damned comfortable in my lower, middle class life.
It’s late, I need to get to sleep.
Trish,Poor people don’t have life skills? I’d like to see you survive on what they do! What poor people don’t have is MONEY. Period! They can’t buy the services, goodies and geegaws that you rely on every day without even thinking about it. They have to improvise, scrounge, find ways around, do without or do it themselves. Those are real life skills, and if they didn’t have them, they wouldn’t survive!Most of what you parrot about poor people is a myth, based on supposition and a few exceptional cases, and propagated as an excuse by people who designed the systems that keep them poor.Get out of your designer life and get to know some of these people, and if you keep your eyes open, you’ll be in for some real surprises!