Welfare Spending: Are State Restrictions Really the Answer?

USA Today recently carried an article detailing many states’ efforts to curtail how welfare recipients spend their welfare payments. In many states, welfare recipients will no longer be allowed to use their stipends on liquor, gambling, cigarettes, strip clubs, and guns. Apparently it's been decided that these listed indiscretions should only be allowed to those few people who can truly afford to waste their money doing them. (Although it comes as no surprise that those who can afford to do so generally do not). This is the case despite the fact that the same legislators, who are now creating an economic bar to certain specified sins, have long ago declared all these sins to be perfectly legal. Indeed, I presume that many, perhaps most, of the members of the enabling legislatures probably engage in many of these activities themselves. So I guess it’s ok to sin, as long as you do it with money you have earned.

But who gets to choose which uses of welfare benefits are acceptable and which must be outlawed? State legislatures? How about movies, tickets to sporting events or rock concerts, computer games, camping trips with the family? Can welfare recipients shop only at Target, Walmart, and JCPenney but do jail time if they walk through the front door of Sax Fifth Avenue or Niemen Marcus? Must they be limited to driving ten-year-old cars? Can they have DirectTV?

The point here is not to police what people do with the money the government gives them but to limit the money by both time and amount in order to give people a fair chance to get back on their feet. Some people will waste their money, no doubt, but they will do so even if Big Brother hangs out at their front doors. Besides short-term financial assistance, what welfare recipients really need is an education that will get them a job, teach them financial responsibility, and allow them to become entirely self-sufficient.

If you want to know what really needs to be done, I suggest reading Steve Rothschild’s new book The Non Nonproft-For Profit Thinking for Nonprofit Success. Steve and his brainchild, Twin Cities RISE!, understand both the problem and the solution, and it has absolutely nothing to do with Big Brother supervising how welfare recipients spend their money.

Let’s address the problem of poverty, not beat the political drums that appease voters but do not solve problems.