Dear Congressman _________________________,
I would like to encourage you to support meaningful welfare reform. I support change which would address all programs as a single welfare system.
I believe the following programs should be addressed: Negative Income Tax from EITC and the Child Tax Credit, SNAP, SSI, Housing Assistance, TANF, Head Start, Job Training, LIHEAP, Child Care, Pell Grants, Child Nutrition, WIC and Lifeline.
The programs represent a difficult matrix for the poor to navigate and for taxpayers to understand. All the programs are designed to help low-income Americans but each has its own unique qualification standards and therefore treat the poor inconsistently. The programs do not have conditions attached to them such as timeframes, work requirements, job training, etc., and therefore don’t encourage personal advancement (TANF is the one exception; it has a work requirement but is too diluted to be impactful). The combined programs also discourage work because as participants raise their income from jobs they lose a greater amount in benefits. On the whole our collective programs represent a “hand out” and not a “hand up” and have not been effective at lowering the poverty level in the U.S. over the last 45 years.
The cost of the programs is high because we don’t calibrate the overall expenditures from all programs to a measure of poverty or any other meaningful parameter. For example, to move all American’s out of a poverty status would have cost $178 billion in 2012 (Census Bureau Numbers) and yet we spent $357 billion on the collective programs in that same year. Program benefits received from one program are rarely considered in the qualification parameters of another program. There are no maximum program participation rules or maximum benefits or caps. In the end we distribute benefits to participants that many Americans would consider undeserving; particularly given our federal budget and deficit concerns. It is also terribly costly to run 13 separate programs in 8 different federal agencies.
Support for the information included in this letter can be found at FederalSafetyNet.com.
I hope you can find the fortitude to tackle this complex problem facing America. I believe that modifications to single programs without a view to address meaningful change to the entire system, will have a minimal impact in the long run.
Sincerely,
Signature: __________________________________
Name: _____________________________________
Address: _____________________________________