dangerous territory/devil's advocate

[The Good Reverend Roger]

I agree with V3X on one thing:  We shouldn't have fought to preserve the union.

Because the South infected the rest of us, shortly afterward...Which is why the default state of being for the average American is now "dumbass redneck".

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

Maybe. I just think Conservatives have a valid point that Welfare needs to be reformed because when people get on it, they often never get off. But where they see the "Welfare Queen," I se a welfare trap. There ARE people who are on welfare despite being able to work, and there does need to be enforcement to eliminate that.

Where I differ from Liberals is that I dont think society owes a paycheck to anyone who could be working, period. Where I differ from Conservatives is that I dont believe in just dumping people into poverty. To eliminate the welfare expenses we dont just need to cut them off, but train them for real jobs that can earn real money.

Not sure where you live, Vex, but in Texas cash welfare benefits are about $104 a month. That's a month, not a week. And it's a bitch to qualify even for that, a lot of people (who have been denied unemployment benefits which the state is also loathe to pay out, for instance) who need help can't get it.

I know what you're talking about from the old days, I've seen people have babies and stay on welfare until the kids were teenagers, then have another crop of babies so they could continue getting benefits, but I think the people who need help outnumber people like this by far. These were fucked up people, BTW, usually hard alcoholics who supplemented their benefits with prostitution. Cutting welfare didn't make everything all better, obviously.

In my opinion, anyone who HAS A KID to stay on welfare has a mental problem that absolutely qualifies them for welfare.

My sister, a few years ago, went from being a productive adult to a heavy drinker who sued people constantly, and eventually got sick and divorced her high-earning husband so she would go on disability, which she is using along with some of her lawsuit win to pay some quack naturopath for an exorbitantly expensive and dangerous treatment that will probably kill her.

Some people could make the argument that she's a welfare cheat who did it to herself, but she's clearly batfuck insane, or she would have simply finished her Masters degree and gotten a job instead of systematically destroying herself.

100% THIS.

Everybody I've known who did things like that had some kind of pathology going on, or probably several, whether they'd been diagnosed or not.

Easy fix. Make psychiatric evaluation mandatory for welfare recipients.

AND DRUG TESTS! lol. okay just the psych eval.

What would that accomplish?

Basically what it accomplishes, is porn. Here, let me use SCIENCE to explain:

POP = total amount of people applying for welfare
CWP = cost of welfare for one person
CPP = cost of a psychologist/psychiatrist/psychotechnician/psychic to evaluate one person
PF = ratio of people that would get "caught" faking eligibility

so you'd save money if:

POP * CWP > POP * CWP - PF * POP * CWP + POP * CPP

which reduces to

PF * POP * CWP > CPP * POP

meaning, if the amount of people "caught" exceeds the total cost of psych evaluating everybody that applies for welfare.

you can vary CPP by making the test shorter, or hiring less well-trained psychosniffers--which also affects PF. But then you'd also have to account for false positives and false negatives. The cost of a false negative is obvious (just one more CWP), but you can't really put a number on a false positive (when someone eligible is deemed not to be). But you can fudge those. Then you can plot everything onto a nice ROC curve, write a report and leave it in a legislator's office, where it'll be ignored unless you fudged the cost of false positives low enough. So you decide that the legislator's office is a better place to leave porn instead of reports.

"Caught" doing what? Being mentally ill? Welfare isn't dependent on mental illness. There seems to be no point to the proposed screening whatsoever.

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

Maybe. I just think Conservatives have a valid point that Welfare needs to be reformed because when people get on it, they often never get off. But where they see the "Welfare Queen," I se a welfare trap. There ARE people who are on welfare despite being able to work, and there does need to be enforcement to eliminate that.

Where I differ from Liberals is that I dont think society owes a paycheck to anyone who could be working, period. Where I differ from Conservatives is that I dont believe in just dumping people into poverty. To eliminate the welfare expenses we dont just need to cut them off, but train them for real jobs that can earn real money.

Not sure where you live, Vex, but in Texas cash welfare benefits are about $104 a month. That's a month, not a week. And it's a bitch to qualify even for that, a lot of people (who have been denied unemployment benefits which the state is also loathe to pay out, for instance) who need help can't get it.

I know what you're talking about from the old days, I've seen people have babies and stay on welfare until the kids were teenagers, then have another crop of babies so they could continue getting benefits, but I think the people who need help outnumber people like this by far. These were fucked up people, BTW, usually hard alcoholics who supplemented their benefits with prostitution. Cutting welfare didn't make everything all better, obviously.

In my opinion, anyone who HAS A KID to stay on welfare has a mental problem that absolutely qualifies them for welfare.

My sister, a few years ago, went from being a productive adult to a heavy drinker who sued people constantly, and eventually got sick and divorced her high-earning husband so she would go on disability, which she is using along with some of her lawsuit win to pay some quack naturopath for an exorbitantly expensive and dangerous treatment that will probably kill her.

Some people could make the argument that she's a welfare cheat who did it to herself, but she's clearly batfuck insane, or she would have simply finished her Masters degree and gotten a job instead of systematically destroying herself.

100% THIS.

Everybody I've known who did things like that had some kind of pathology going on, or probably several, whether they'd been diagnosed or not.

Easy fix. Make psychiatric evaluation mandatory for welfare recipients.

AND DRUG TESTS! lol. okay just the psych eval.

What would that accomplish?

Punishment.

But for what?

My point was that people who sabotage their own lives in order to qualify for welfare are clearly mentally ill. But unless they are applying for disability, the DHS does not care whether they are or not, only whether they qualify for welfare. It is not the domain of the DHS to screen for mental illness unless it is being asked to provide services for treating mental illness.

The proposal of psych evaluations for welfare recipients is a non-sequitur, unless the budget and mission of the DHS was expanded in an effort to provide a wider net of services for people on welfare. Which I would be in favor of. Otherwise (addressing Vex here) it's a load of shut up shut up shut up.

[tyrannosaurus vex]

Maybe. I just think Conservatives have a valid point that Welfare needs to be reformed because when people get on it, they often never get off. But where they see the "Welfare Queen," I se a welfare trap. There ARE people who are on welfare despite being able to work, and there does need to be enforcement to eliminate that.

Where I differ from Liberals is that I dont think society owes a paycheck to anyone who could be working, period. Where I differ from Conservatives is that I dont believe in just dumping people into poverty. To eliminate the welfare expenses we dont just need to cut them off, but train them for real jobs that can earn real money.

Not sure where you live, Vex, but in Texas cash welfare benefits are about $104 a month. That's a month, not a week. And it's a bitch to qualify even for that, a lot of people (who have been denied unemployment benefits which the state is also loathe to pay out, for instance) who need help can't get it.

I know what you're talking about from the old days, I've seen people have babies and stay on welfare until the kids were teenagers, then have another crop of babies so they could continue getting benefits, but I think the people who need help outnumber people like this by far. These were fucked up people, BTW, usually hard alcoholics who supplemented their benefits with prostitution. Cutting welfare didn't make everything all better, obviously.

In my opinion, anyone who HAS A KID to stay on welfare has a mental problem that absolutely qualifies them for welfare.

My sister, a few years ago, went from being a productive adult to a heavy drinker who sued people constantly, and eventually got sick and divorced her high-earning husband so she would go on disability, which she is using along with some of her lawsuit win to pay some quack naturopath for an exorbitantly expensive and dangerous treatment that will probably kill her.

Some people could make the argument that she's a welfare cheat who did it to herself, but she's clearly batfuck insane, or she would have simply finished her Masters degree and gotten a job instead of systematically destroying herself.

100% THIS.

Everybody I've known who did things like that had some kind of pathology going on, or probably several, whether they'd been diagnosed or not.

Easy fix. Make psychiatric evaluation mandatory for welfare recipients.

AND DRUG TESTS! lol. okay just the psych eval.

What would that accomplish?

Punishment.

But for what?

My point was that people who sabotage their own lives in order to qualify for welfare are clearly mentally ill. But unless they are applying for disability, the DHS does not care whether they are or not, only whether they qualify for welfare. It is not the domain of the DHS to screen for mental illness unless it is being asked to provide services for treating mental illness.

The proposal of psych evaluations for welfare recipients is a non-sequitur, unless the budget and mission of the DHS was expanded in an effort to provide a wider net of services for people on welfare. Which I would be in favor of. Otherwise (addressing Vex here) it's a load of shut up shut up shut up.

To be fair my suggestion of psych evals for people stuck on welfare was a poorly executed joke. My argument was that some people have in fact been known to procreate in order to stay on welfare -- which I think was probably an ignorant argument to make, now. The counter-argument was that anyone who does that would have to be clinically insane so I suggested psych evals since I don't have a serious retort.

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

OK then.