Posts tagged social services

Link 6
Notes
Posted 1 year ago

Walker wants private sector to run assistance programs

Texas started using a private company in 2005 to screen medical and food assistance applications. By 2010, there were 56,000 unresolved food stamp applications, according to a report by the Dallas Morning News.

In addition, 37 percent of all applicants — and more than 50 percent of applicants in the greater Dallas and Houston areas — were not told whether they qualified for benefits within 30 days of filing, as federal law requires, according to the newspaper. And applications from 13 percent of the truly destitute — people defined by the newspaper as virtually out of cash and unable to afford groceries — weren’t processed in the seven days required by federal law, it reported.

I think it’s time we started calling privatization by another, more accurate name: corruption. Sending vital services out to a for-profit company is nothing but a chance for it to skim money off the top.

(Source: ziatroyano)

via ziatroyano
Photo 68
Notes
Posted 1 year ago
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Photo 11
Notes
Posted 1 year ago
The invisible American welfare state Suzanne Mettler’s piece in Perspectives on Politics (free access to PDF) has many fascinating arguments about the political consequences of public ignorance about the benefits that people receive from the state. But this table is jawdropping. It shows the percentage of people who (a) benefit from various programs, and (b) claim in response to a government survey that they ‘have not used a government social program.’ Mettler’s basic argument is that because the US welfare state is ‘submerged’ and sliced up among a variety of different programs, many of which operate indirectly rather than directly, it is mostly invisible to US citizens. This has obvious political consequences - ‘government social programs’ are equated to ‘welfare’ and stigmatized. The fact that nearly half of Social Security recipients do not believe that they have benefited from a government social program, and that the same is true of some 40% of G.I. Bill beneficiaries and Medicare recipients is a rather extraordinary one.

The invisible American welfare state

Suzanne Mettler’s piece in Perspectives on Politics (free access to PDF) has many fascinating arguments about the political consequences of public ignorance about the benefits that people receive from the state. But this table is jawdropping. It shows the percentage of people who (a) benefit from various programs, and (b) claim in response to a government survey that they ‘have not used a government social program.’

Mettler’s basic argument is that because the US welfare state is ‘submerged’ and sliced up among a variety of different programs, many of which operate indirectly rather than directly, it is mostly invisible to US citizens. This has obvious political consequences - ‘government social programs’ are equated to ‘welfare’ and stigmatized. The fact that nearly half of Social Security recipients do not believe that they have benefited from a government social program, and that the same is true of some 40% of G.I. Bill beneficiaries and Medicare recipients is a rather extraordinary one.

Photo 3
Notes
Posted 2 years ago
Looks like both Superman and Captain America have a pretty progressive take on “The American Way.” Zoom

Looks like both Superman and Captain America have a pretty progressive take on “The American Way.”