A reaction to Social Security

This reaction essay by a student is a bit more didactic than other reactions, but it offers a young adult’s understanding of the old age pensions provided by Social Security. 

Social Security is a social policy that was established by Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the Social Security Act of 1935. Social Security is the common name for, “Old Age, Survivors and Disability Insurance”. Social Security is a social insurance program but is not considered “welfare”, as that is known as public assistance. [interesting way to define welfare.  Public Assistance programs listed by the Illinois Department of Human Services include: SNAP, public housing, unemployment benefits, Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF), Medicaid, and Supplemental Social Security (SSI). However, in Illinois I would think General Assistance (cash grants given by townships to poor residents) would also count.]  Social insurance programs and public assistance programs are the two categories of support programs that make up American social welfare. Old Age, Survivors and Disability Insurance is a universal program, and all Americans can participate as their social right [provided they aren’t excluded because they work abroad or work for an employer that has them in another program that substitutes for Social Security, and provided they are “Americans” by the definition of the American government, which doesn’t consider persons who grew up here to be Americans unless they were born here or their parents were citizens when they were born.] Participation in social security isn’t based on your financial need, but rather eligibility. Funding for this program is provided by a payroll tax that both an employee and employer must pay. Benefits of this social insurance are adjusted when the cost of living goes up. Social Security has been an effective way to raise individuals above the poverty line for several years.

In order for a person to receive benefits from Social Security, they must have paid their payroll taxes while they were working for a minimum of 10 years. In terms of Social Security, that is a total of 40 quarters. If an individual has paid their taxes and meets the age requirement at the time of retirement, they will be covered by this insurance permanently. The amounts of benefits that will be received are based on how much money was paid into the program. That makes up the “Old Age” part of the social insurance program. To be eligible for the “Survivor's” benefits of Social Security, an individual must be a child under 18 years of age, a dependent widow/widower, or a dependent parent. If he/she is one of those individuals and the insured worker dies, they will receive Social Security benefits. Along with that, to receive benefits from the “Disability” part of Social Security, an individual must be 18 to 64 years of age and unable to work. He or she will have to prove that they are disabled and unable to participate in “gainful employment”. When a disabled person turns 65, they will continue to receive benefits under the “Old Age” sector of Social Security. 

I believe that Social Security is a great form of insurance for eligible individuals. There are many different benefits it provides to such eligible individuals. As mentioned earlier, it has consistently lifted many people 65 and over above the poverty line [Yeah, it lifts about 22 million elderly Americans out of poverty]. It is a source of income for individuals who are unable to work, and it provides benefits to deceased individual’s families. However, there are certain problems that go hand in hand with the benefits that exist within the program today. Some employees that have paid into Social Security for many years aren’t getting the benefits they deserve. Part of that has to do with the budget issue that has arisen in Illinois within the last couple of years. As with any social welfare program, there are also ways to abuse the program that cause many problems. For example, a person who is insured under Social Security will receive benefits at the age of retirement which is their American right. But if such an individual has a family and is in the process of getting a divorce when he/she dies, their spouse will continue to get the benefits on behalf of the children. Although this is something that can’t exactly be monitored or fixed, it is a problem that happens more often that people think. The children should have the right to those Social Security benefits, but they should be set aside until they are 18 years of age. At 18 years old, the child will then have the option to do choose what to do with the benefits received from their deceased parent, as they are of an age to make responsible decisions. That is just one of the issues that prevails in the Social Security program. 

Any social welfare program will prove to provide a number of benefits to a range of different people. But as with all the other programs, social welfare policies will also have a number of abusers and issues that are existent within that program. Social welfare programs should continue to serve Americans but could stand to change a little for the better.

This is the first time I ever heard anyone raising this issue of survivor benefits going to a surviving spouse even if the surviving spouse and deceased Social Security Beneficiary were in an uncompleted process of divorce.  I think one reason there are survivor benefits for spouses is that we assume sometimes one adult works in the formal labor market and pays payroll taxes to get Social Security benefits, while the other adult works informally to rear children and keep house for the one who is working.  So, the spouse benefits are a reward for the working spouse who work just wasn't in the formal labor market.  It seems to me that such a spouse would deserve the benefits even if they were about to divorce the person who had paid the payroll taxes into Social Security.  Those payroll taxes were paid by a "household" as much as they were paid by the individual who earned them.  And, the spouse who didn't earn income may have been supporting the partner who did earn income for many years, and all those years of support don't get erased if in the final years the two part from each other. If the surviving spouse is taking care of the children, and paying for their living expenses, then it seems to make sense that the survivor benefits would go to that spouse.  But, yes, a surviving spouse might waste the survivor benefits on an addiction to gambling or substances, instead of using the benefits to care for the children.  That could happen.  Children's individual savings accounts are a good policy idea that could be made part of Social Security.  I think all children ought to get some money at birth, and have money added to it for various achievements in their lives.  The Child Individual Savings Accounts could be used to purchase a home, purchase education, invest in a business, pay for health expenses, and pay for relocation or moving expenses.  As adults people could continue adding money to this account, and then it could be passed on to children or grandchildren.  I'd have such savings accounts run as a supplement to the existing OASDI functions of Social Security.

Temporary Assistance has some pros and cons

In this reaction paper, a student considers the pros and cons of TANF. 

Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, also known as TANF is a program that is run by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services; it provides temporary assistance in the form of cash payments to needy families who are income-qualified.  In 1997 TANF started, and since then has helped roughly over two million families per month; most of those families have been headed by single mothers. 

When talking about TANF there are many pros and cons to the program.  One of the positive aspects of family assistance is the requirement to determine a plan for self-reliance within the family.  Instead of just receiving cash assistance for life, you must meet with a caseworker and come up with a plan that helps you to eventually stop needing to rely on TANF.  I believe that TANF is helping the people find their right path and provide them with ways to stand on their own again.  Another advantage of TANF is that it is a time-based program.  Most states only let families get government money for so many years just so that individuals are not signing up for it repeatedly.  TANF helps individuals pay rent, buy food, pay for utilities etc. 

When I think about the program and its negative aspects, I think of welfare fraud and individuals who abuse it.  I think that there are many people out there coming up with fake names and using other people just to receive cash assistance, just like in the book we read for class (Two Dollars A Day).  Another problem with TANF is helping individuals who do not deserve it.  I think that the individuals who can work should do so and that only the truly poor and disabled should receive cash assistance.  This would stop from helping individuals who make poor choices and suffer from drug and alcohol addiction.  There are needy children not receiving the help and care they need because their parents are worried about getting the cash in hand so they can spend it on things that do not matter.  

In considering the pros and cons of a welfare policy or program, it is often helpful to think in terms of how it fits within a moral framework.  There are also questions we can raise about effectiveness and efficiency. 

I think that just about everyone shares a moral value in which we prefer a situation in which an adult person who is not yet venerable in age is self-sufficient and independent to one in which the person is dependent on others or generally oriented to life with an outlook of what they can get from others instead of what they can produce for themselves.  On one hand, this is obviously related to some sort of sense of fairness.  When we are children or after we reach advanced age, we ought to depend on others, but while we are “working-aged” adults, we ought to “carry our own weight” and “contribute our fair share” to the general civilization.  I think the value of liberty and equality also prefer situation in which people are independent and autonomous.  There is something that distorts our spirit and tarnishes our character if we must be too obviously dependent on others, or if we think so much of what we can get or should get from others.  This is some sort of mental enslavement or subordination, and it violates our sense that everyone ought to be free and equal in life. 

That said, most of us would allow people to be “dependent” or at least “interdependent” in some cases while they are “able-bodied working-aged adults”.  For example, a person may need help for a period of months or years during an economic downturn, or after the loss of a job, or after the birth of a child, or after suddenly taking on unpaid caregiving duties with a child or sick person. Someone must take care of children and sick and disabled persons, so in some sense the person who ceases to earn an income so they can take care of others is really doing a valuable to service to us, and in that circumstance, the “aid” they receive from us through TANF might instead by considered as a sort of “payment” in exchange for their performing duties as good parents, dutiful siblings or children or friends who aid a sick or injured person, and so forth.  But of course we worry whether they are actually earning such payments, which is why you remark on your concern about parents who may only care about having money so they can spend it on things that “do not matter” (or even things that are harmful or wicked).  

There is also this problem to consider: the children in poor families are expected to be dependent.  We do not expect them to go to work in the mills and mines, or the strip malls and industrial parks, to earn their housing and bread.  And, even if the parents are undeserving, it is simply more efficient and cost-effective to preserve families and provide money to parents, and let the parents spend that money on their children.  What is the alternative, removing the children and placing them with a more “responsible” parental figure who can accept the financial assistance we give for child-rearing so that we can adequately punish the parents by denying them assistance and allowing them to face the hunger and homelessness and deprivation that seem appropriate to us as the just consequences of their choices?  And so we are stuck.  We must take care of the parents as well as the children, all together as a family, or else we must punish the parents and their innocent children all together as a family because of choices made by the parents.

But even that is too simple.  For, as it turns out, in many cases the parents who are single mothers have not made especially wicked choices.  Many single mothers are reared in unsupportive families.  Many become parents when they are young and relatively inexperienced, and the fathers are often much older.  In many cases the parents or single parent were working, or are working, but the jobs they hold or held paid low wages, and the cost of living is too high.  Or, they have lost their work, and no employer is willing to hire them.  In such cases, it seems wrong to punish the parents, because they are willing to work and simply cannot find employment; and it is even more obviously wrong to punish the children, as they are blameless in any case, as they are not responsible for the actions of their parents.  

By keeping TANF benefits low, and by restricting them over time, we succeed in our aims of depriving poor parents of the means to pay their rent, pay their utilities, or buy clothing.  We may still provide SNAP to prevent starvation, but even that can be terminated if a parent cannot find work within a certain time period. But, what do we achieve by this?  If we make poor parents homeless, we make their children homeless.  If we turn off the electricity or water or heat for a family, we subject the children to dangers of unsanitary conditions, dehydration, heat stroke, or exposure. Without electricity and internet, we deprive children of access to the Internet, and that must have consequences in their education. By subjecting children to such costs, do we impose a greater long-term burden and cost on society than we do by “saving” money by spending less on such poor families?  It may satisfy some people’s sense of fairness to stop sustaining poor families when the parents fail to meet our expectations that they conform to the demands of capitalist rigor and the free market and get themselves a satisfactory job.  But, we also have values of compassion and altruism that make us want to provide families with at least a minimum of what they need to participate in society with dignity.  We may also have a sense of freedom and liberty in which we do not think there is any value to forcing people to bow down to the principles of the free market and capitalism.  Some of us think that human freedom and dignity come first, and that should be secured for everyone, and then we can use the free market or capitalism to give extra rewards to those who do the best or the most within the commercial and industrial aspects of life. I’m not opposed to using capitalism and the free market to make some of us wealthy, but I see no reason to “punish” persons who want to exert their freedom to disengage from capitalist production, perhaps doing so for six or seven years while they rear a child.

You say that people who can work ought to work.  I agree.  But, do you mean that such persons ought to work to earn money?  I am not sure I do agree. Some work is unpaid, like the work of rearing children, or caring for elderly and sick or disabled siblings or parents or grandparents. There may also be work of improving one’s skills and knowledge. I’m in favor of everyone who can work being put to work, but I’d like to recognize that there are worthwhile types of work that earn nothing, and I’m glad to provide a decent living stipend to anyone engaged in those activities.  Also, capitalism and the free market just doesn’t provide a sufficient range of job and career opportunities.  I’m also in favor of the government creating jobs (especially jobs that provide public goods and aren’t easy to use in the process of extracting surplus labor to make profits).  If the government offered more worthwhile employment opportunities so that the unemployment rate was down near 2%, then I might be willing to restrict TANF benefits for able-bodied working-aged adults who failed to get paid employment and also weren’t engaged in any sort of parenting or caregiving or volunteering or self-improvement through skills-development or education.  Until then, the moral problem of allowing a few cheaters and frauds to take advantage of the system seems insignificant to me, whereas we face a monstrous moral problem of depriving many children of material abundance sufficient to secure stable housing, electricity, water, abundant nutritious food, clothing, and internet access. Surely we lose more in white collar crime and tax evasion and corruption among the wealthiest and most powerful than we ever lose to all the low-income shiftless and idle folks who scam and cheat the welfare system.  Surely more moral evil is present in the deaths of thousands of innocent civilians blown to bits by our military drones or the bombs dropped by our proxies in Gaza or Yemen than in all the evil of all the poor people cheating our welfare system.   How prevalent is the problem of welfare fraud anyway?  Is it widespread and common and costing a significant percentage of the TANF dollars?  

Some of the shortcomings of the Affordable Care Act

In the following reaction paper, the student identifies some of the successes of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (Obamacare).  Basing her thoughts on some points made by Elizabeth Rosenthal, the student also reviews some of the limitations or shortcomings of the act. 

The United States is one of the wealthiest countries in the whole world. This would lead you to believe that nearly all its citizens would be well taken care of and not forced to suffer a lack of health coverage. This has been far from true. However, on March 23^rd, 2010 the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA) came into effect under President Barack Obama, who believed that healthcare should be a right for the American people, not a luxury. This act was designed to increase health insurance quality and affordability while lowering the number of uninsured people. The law required insurers to accept all applicants, cover specific conditions, and charge the same rates regardless of pre-existing conditions or sex. 

The PPACA did great things statistically for uninsured Americans. The percentage of uninsured Americans went from 16% in 2010 to 8.9% in 2016 and 24 million more Americans were covered with health insurance in the year 2016 than would have been without the PPACA. It’s estimated that this healthcare act has saved nearly 50,000 lives that would have been lost had those people not had health insurance. 

Having said that, I found a very interesting article called “Sorry, We Don’t Take Obamacare” on the New York Times website, outlining some of the shortcomings of the Affordable Care Act. The author, Elizabeth Rosenthal, discusses how the healthcare plans offered by insurers like Anthem and United Health were very different from those being offered by employers. These plans provided less coverage away from patients’ home states, required higher patient outlays for medicines, and included a very limited number of doctors and hospitals. Rosenthal contributes many of these problems to the broad standards for PPACA plans, which allow insurers considerable leeway in designing their exact offerings. For-profit insurers naturally tend to exclude high-cost, high-end hospitals and physicians. 

All in all, I see both sides of the coin. Unfortunately, no system, especially one as large as one that is trying to provide universal healthcare, is perfect. There are risks when you must collaborate with big business insurance companies who only want to turn a profit. However, I do believe the PPACA is doing more good than harm. Saving lives and increasing healthcare is my number one concern for this issue. Having said that, I would like to see stricter guidelines in place for insurers to further cut costs on premiums and medications while providing access to a wider variety of hospitals and doctors. 

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/15/sunday-review/sorry-we-dont-take-obamacare.html?_r=0

The Affordable Care Act was written partly by the hospitals (including the for-profit hospitals) and the health insurance companies, and other associated profit-making industries involved in providing health care. To gain sufficient support from these powerful interests in the medical industry, the people creating this law had to figure a way to allow these corporations to continue profiting under the new regulations and rules.  Most of the rules were going to reduce the profits of health care, so other rules had to be introduced (or prevented) so that profits could increase or at least be preserved at a level that would be acceptable to the profit-takers.  If you remove life-time limits, so that insurers can be responsible for unlimited lifetime health care costs, you have to give something.  If you take away the insurance company abilities to exclude persons with pre-existing conditions, or kick people off their insurance if they get sick; then again, you must give something.  If you mandate that the minimum standards of insurance include certain things that the insurance companies sometimes exclude, as a consequences you have to find something else you can give to the companies to compensate for that. 

One way for the insurance companies and health care provision companies to keep costs under control is to limit and restrict the choices of health care consumers. If consumers have total freedom of choice, then they can go anywhere, and see anyone, and get any sort of service, and costs become less predictable, and consumers tend to spend more.  In other words, the freedom of the healthcare consumer and the doctors and nurses who see them is opposed by those who want to control costs, whether they are for-profit health care providers and insurers trying to keep down costs so that profits will remain for their investors or whether they are government bureaucrats trying to reduce the spending of public tax revenue in a public medical insurance policy.  

The higher patient co-pays or personal spending on health care will be sought in a “free market” system in which only a handful of fairly non-competitive health care providers compete in markets that are geographically limited (there are limits to how far people will go to get a bargain in the prices they pay for medicines and doctors services).  The same increases in costs will occur in a public system in which the public administration of the health care system seeks to get maximum efficiency, reducing “wasteful” spending on unnecessary or possibly ineffective services and treatments. 

The thing that continues to amaze me is how timid the government has been in applying its coercive regulatory authority over professions and corporations.  Why not simply dictate that as a requirement for licensing and authorization to practice medicine, or nursing, or insurance, or dentistry, or hospital administration, that doctors, dentists, nurses, hospitals, and insurance companies must do… and then dictate terms? If there is a problem that a doctor or hospital “won’t take Medicare” or won’t participate in some part of the PPACA, why not simply make it a law that doctors and hospitals have no right to turn away Medicare patients (perhaps they only will be allowed to turn away Medicare patients when the percentage of their case-load of patients using Medicare to pay exceeds the percentage of all persons in their geographical area who are using Medicare by 10%)?  If medical care costs when traveling are too high, why not have the government dictate that such costs cannot be higher than costs of using local providers by more than some percentage amount? 

Is there something wrong with limiting choice of doctors and hospitals?  There may be a problem if such limits impose harm on people’s health, or cause significant inconvenience.  But, suppose records show that three hospitals meet standards of care, and two don’t, then in such a circumstance, why not encourage patients to use the three hospitals that meet standards by allowing them to pay the least to get care in those hospitals, and discourage patients from seeking care in the two hospitals that fall short in standards of care by imposing larger costs on the patients if they use those inferior hospitals?  

Let’s say there is a procedure that costs between $20,000 and $120,000 to perform, and on average costs $70,000.  Let’s say that the average “success” rate of the procedure is 80%, and the average 5-year relapse or reoccurrence of the problem the procedure addresses is 40%.  I would make a scale for this procedure like this:

Level 5:  Success rate over 80%, 5-year reoccurrence under 40%, cost less than $50,000.
Level 4:  Success rate over 80%, 5-year reoccurrence under 40%, cost between $50,000-$70,000.
Level 3:  Success rate over 80%, 5-year reoccurrence under 40%, cost over $70,000.
Level 2:  Either success rate over 80% or 5-year reoccurrence rate under 40%, but only one, and not both, are better than the average.  Cost is below average ($6,000-70,000).
Level 2:  Either success rate over 80% or 5-year reoccurrence rate under 40%, but only one, and not both, are better than the average.  Cost is above average ($70,001-$120,000).
Level 1:  Success rate under 80% and 5-year reoccurrence rate over 40%, but cost is low ($6,000 to $50,000)
Level 0: Success rate under 80% and 5-year reoccurrence rate over 40%, and cost is average or high ($50,001 to $120,000)

I would then restrict the freedom of my patients or the persons I was insuring by letting them pay the least out-of-pocket if they would go to a provider that was rated as a level-5 provider of that procedure.  They would pay a bit more to go to a level-4 provider of the same procedure, and a bit more than that to go to a level-3 provider of that service, and so on and so forth to the highest out-of-pocket fees for choosing to get the services from a level-0 provider.  

The PPACA goes in this direction to some degree by having health care providers keep records in a certain way and report things related to costs and outcomes to the government, so that care providers get feedback on how they are doing in terms of delivering services that are meeting quality standards and doing so at prices that are relatively lower or higher than average. There are consequences and incentives to push providers to try to be both more effective and more efficient in service provision.  It makes no sense for the information about “effectiveness” and “efficiency” to be collected by a host of competing private organizations; it all ought to be collected and shared by one central disinterested professional organization (a public entity). The information ought to be used to reward the most effective and efficient providers of services (by allowing private insurers and public health provision programs to guide patients toward the best services).  The same information can be used to intervene with the least effective or least efficient service providers, determining why their ratings are low, and helping them improve. For example, local customs may be causing a decline for regional ratings on effectiveness, and a public health intervention is needed to change local customs.  

Student examines welfare reform from the 1990s

In my social welfare and policy class we study the history of social welfare policy and services. The policies and services are introduced through lecture and text.  We also study the client(s) in relations to policy and services, sometimes as their advocates. One of the text required for the class is “$2.00 a Day: Living on Almost Nothing in America” written by Kathryn J. Edin and H. Luke Shaefer. This informative book spoke on the history of welfare and its reform, formally known as Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC), now known as Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) and Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). The book explained the purpose of reform was to keep people from taking advantage of the system and to help those on the program become independent. Edin and Shaefer also gave insight, actual people, dealing with the system and the current effects of the reform. The requirements when you apply consist of an address proving where you reside (lease and rent receipt), your recent pay stubs (if working) or proof of any income (SSI, Disability, retirement child support,..etc), proof of income for everyone living in the household, your checking and savings account statements (cannot exceed $2,000), birth certificate, and social security card. I was a bit curious and decided to search the internet for more information on the welfare reform and came across a research report conducted in 1998 by Michigan State University. “Social Welfare Reforms in the Midwest: Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Ohio Wisconsin”, written by Dr. Fayyaz Hussain. Dr. Hussain received his Ph.D. from Michigan state University in 1991, his expertise includes: poverty, hunger, social demographics and rural sociology.

Per Dr. Hussain the new policy for food stamps in the state of Illinois states:

1. Food stamps will be given out for only 12 months (can be extended for 12 months if a person in the household is elderly or disabled)
2. People would be found ineligible for any of the following reasons.

 A) refuse to register for employment 

B) refuse to participate in job training programs

C) refuse to accept an offer for a job

 D) quit a job.

I feel the problem with the reform is it has narrowed the requirements so much that people who qualify and benefit from the program the most are denied or do not qualify at all, because of a technicality. I feel the system is not equipped to deal with individual cases that need special circumstances granted to ensure the health and wellbeing of the individual and/or children, mainly because it does not address the needs of the clients as individuals upon initial contact.

 This book read to me like a novel put together of some of my friends and family life experiences. I was born and raised in Chicago and knew stories like the ones in the book all too well. In the book, it shows how the system reformed to help people has put them in more chaos (poverty, hunger, and homelessness). 

The system was set up to serve and provide for the public the basic needs for survival but people’s circumstances and needs vary. The policy requirements can be unrealistic for someone homeless with children. What if a woman finds a job that requires her to be outside past the homeless shelters curfew time. It leaves her with the decision of being homeless with snap benefits and a job but will she be able to keep the job while fighting homelessness. If she quits she in most definitely going to be kicked from the program. An example in the book illustrated a woman and her daughter that was forced to live with distant relatives in which her daughter was sexually assaulted by the family member. The people in the book want what most of middle and upper class people take for granted, a stable home, stable work, and food. I think the system needs to be revised again to better serve the people in need. We all deserve to be fed and safe at night in a home with our loved ones. The US is a rich, powerful, and influential country yet our people are homeless and starving everyday. 

The welfare system in the USA has an assumption that people should be in the labor force.  They must take jobs if jobs are available.  The suitability of the job or the job conditions are not of much significance. This shows that the welfare system serves the needs of the employers, who need a group of desperate potential workers who will take jobs that are low-paying and dehumanizing.  If we allowed people to receive welfare support until they found satisfactory jobs that were suitable for them, our workers would be more selective about the sort of work they accepted.  But this gets at a fundamental problem of how work is organized: to get things made, it seems there are always going to be some jobs that are dirty, difficult, or dangerous.  If this was a society that valued the humanity of workers, we would let workers take those jobs only if they were well-paid, or we would use a system that allowed them to avoid such jobs.  But, as it is, our welfare system and our political ideologies are not oriented toward the well-being of humanity: we are instead most interested in the interests of owners and businesses and employers, and so we have a fairly miserly welfare system.

Student reacts to housing instability as depicted in Two Dollars A Day and the Poverty Myth podcasts.

In session four of our social welfare policy classes we were asked to listen to different podcasts relating to immigration policy, political perspectives, and poverty myths. The Radio Lab is known to explore different issues that are going on in the world and sometimes use personal testimonies so that we as an audience get a real understanding. The poverty myths podcast stood out to me most because of the touching stories that were being told. Margaret Smith was interviewed to prove the myth of the safety net. After listening to her interview I had many different opinions on how her situation could have been different. Here are a few of them:

1. How could her landlord have handled the situation differently?
2. A policy implemented for temporary housing
3. Her job understanding the situation in which she was placed

After Margaret’s son was shot on the property of their home, the landlord issued an eviction notice for three days. I do understand that there was some sort of agreement in the beginning on the lease that any kind of crime committed on the property will result in an eviction. However, in the situation here someone was a victim, and it was unexpected. The tenants didn’t commit the crime, they were the victims. You would think that there could have been some sort of extension so that she would not have to split her family up. How was it possible for her to be able to move out of her home comfortably when she was dealing with her son being in the hospital? This places more stress on someone who already has to deal with almost losing a loved one, and to now have to find somewhere for her entire family to stay is an outrage against human decency.

Margaret had to send some of her children to live with family members while the two youngest stayed with her at the shelter. What strikes me is that welfare policies are supposed to be concerned for someone’s safety. However, having two young children in a shelter is unsafe, and the children are suffering from the essential need of having a safe home to live in. The issue could have been brought to court and maybe been appealed because of her position. I do understand that she was responsible for having the children, however she was in no fault for the shooting that occurred.

Her job was unable to hold her position and she was fired. Margaret should have never been let go in the first place. It seemed as if all social forces were working together to steadily knock her down further and further. This placed her in the situation of not being able to provide for her family. So this supports the earlier myth on this episode that all poor people are lazy. Margaret is willing and wanting to work, however she is not able to do so. 

The story of Margaret reminds me of the book we are currently reading by Edin & Shaefer, “Two Dollars a Day”. The character Madonna is currently being oppressed into poverty and not being able to be above the poverty line. Madonna is constantly trying to work towards something good and others place her in the situation where she cannot provide for herself or  her daughter Brianna. “She fell behind, and her landlord, usually willing to work with a tenant in a tough situation, used the opportunity to get rid of a troublemaker” (Edin & Shaefer, 2016). She was evicted from her apartment and had to bounce from one family members’ home to the next with her daughter Brianna. Madonna was not able to have any assistance to help her with her daughter and received unemployment, but it did not compare to how much she made when she was employed.

Both of these women have social forces working together that target how their success will be. This helps to disprove the myth that people in poverty simply are lazy. Not all people who are poor will look for a handout, but on the contrary, many would rather try to get out and work. How are they able to make their situations better when they are simply being turned away from every program that they apply for? I believe that we have discussed in class many provisions that could be implemented so that there should be equal distribution for those who are in need. This class has opened me up to be able to see the errors in many of our social welfare programs.

References

Edin, K., & Shaefer, H. L. (2016). $2.00 a day: living on almost nothing in America. Boston: Mariner Books.

One of the persistent problems we face in working to end poverty is the myth that the poor deserve to be poor.  Like most people, my concern with fairness is balanced with my concern for compassion, so that I think it’s right that some people “deserve more” and some people “deserve less”, but in order to give everyone a fair chance to show what they are capable of doing, some floor of material consumption ought to be provided to everyone, whether they are deserving or undeserving.  In other words, I don't object to relative deprivation so long as the poverty/deprivation does not interfere with people's rights to housing and a home, access to culture and work (they must have access to adequate transportation), freedom from desperate want (they must have access to medical care and nutritious food), and participation in public life (their relative deprivation must not prevent them from attending some public events, engage in socialization with friends and neighbors, participate in politics, and use public services such as libraries). As we learned from Edin and Shaefer, and as you argue in your reaction paper, Americans generally seem comfortable with allowing a severe level of absolute deprivation in which people are insecure in their housing, and transportation access is unstable so that some may be prevented from gaining or keeping a job, and food access isn't really so dependable either.  This creates a situation of desperation and injustice.  Just as we ought to be morally outraged and inspired to act in the public realm to change matters if we learn that our justice system punishes many innocent persons and some of  our public safety professionals harass many law-abiding citizens, so too we should be engaged in transformational action when we are aware of many innocent persons who are pushed into lives of such instability and absolute deprivation. Our current system is short-sighted and unjust.  Edin and Shaefer put emphasis on this point of housing insecurity in their $2 A Day, and that seems right.  We have no mandatory program providing housing to people, even when we recognize that everyone has a right to a home. Thus, we allow landlords to evict crime victims from their residences because they were victimized on the landlord’s property.  Incredible.

A student objects to rules blocking refugees and visitors from certain countries, preventing them from coming to the USA

Early in his presidency, President Trump twice tried to temporarily halt entrance into the United States by all refugees and all persons from a handful of selected nations. In both cases, courts put restraining orders to present the executive orders from being enforced. The policy was controversial, and the student who wrote this reaction paper was very displeased by the policy, mainly because it seemed immoral, inhumane, and unjust.

In light of recent political events, everyone has an opinion on the new president’s love of signing executive orders, a process that he criticized the last president for doing. One recent order that has gotten international attention would be the now popular “Muslim Ban”. He named this executive order “Protecting the Nation from Foreign Terrorist Entry into the United States”. In this order, he banned the travel and migration of citizens from the countries of Iraq, Iran, Somalia, Libya, Sudan, Yemen, and Syria. The order also stopped the re-entry of legal residents (with green cards) from coming back into the country. After this order was signed, millions revolted in opposition to this decision. While there were some in favor, it seemed as if the opposition was much louder and more vocal. People protested in airports, in the streets, and in front of the White House to show their dislike of the ban. 

My reaction to this is that this is a good way for us to have our tails in between our legs and run away scared. President Trump’s whole campaign played on the fear of Americans and he made promises that he intends to keep. I find it also hilarious that this is happening because this country’s history has been filled by people fleeing their home countries to find sanctuary here. The English Puritans, the Irish during the Irish Potato Famine, the radicals of Europe after the Revolutions of 1848, the Jews of Russia and Eastern Europe after pogroms, and the Vietnamese after the Vietnam War have all fled their homes and families to live in a peaceful world. This country has a monument that commemorates the tired, the poor, and the “yearning to breathe free”. One country in this ban is in almost total ruin due to a civil war and they would not like to live there anymore. Why should we deny millions access to come here based on actions of what a very few people did to us?

Going off of that, yes, there were attacks done on to the American people and these attacks had radical Islam roots. But also take into consideration, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and Egypt are not on this list and all of these countries had people tied to them and they carried out the attacks. The 9/11 hijackers were from Saudi Arabia. Osama bin Laden was from Saudi Arabia. The man who was the United States most wanted was not from any of the banned countries. So why aren’t these countries banned? A point may be that there is more travel or refugee traffic coming from the seven countries and not so much the three I gave in the beginning in this paragraph. Well maybe the citizens from those three countries are not in a civil war or in any hurry to better their lives unlike the other seven countries. 

There have been arguments made from the supporting side. They say that this is not a Muslim ban, this is just a travel ban. They also say that these countries have been on the Obama administration’s watch list too. Others say that this is just for four months so that we can work out the vetting process, which is already time consuming enough. To me and to others, this is just a way to brush off the blame to something else or justify closing our borders. For some refugees, the vetting can take up to a year when they wanted to leave the country yesterday. This is just not fair that now we can stop and pick and choose who we want to come into our country for the next four months. 

In final thoughts, I think that this action is immoral, inhumane, and unjust to those who need our help the most. 

Some of the other arguments in favor of the travel ban, which you didn’t list, include: 

1. if we bring in too many people from regions where the culture is different from ours, those immigrants or refugees may not assimilate, and may not respect our values, so they will threaten our culture.
2. we ought to reduce immigration anyway, for various reasons (for example, we ought to maintain a stable population and not experience population growth because a growing population is not environmentally sustainable, or immigrants will bring values and views that will undermine American values and subvert our culture, or immigrants will drive down wages of American workers because they will compete in the labor market).  
3. Although there is a very slight risk that a terrorist will sneak into our country from one of the countries listed in the travel ban, the government’s responsibility is to reduce the risk as low as possible, and having no immigration from those countries except for exceptional cases will reduce risk of terrorism more than generally allowing immigration from those countries with normal vetting.

Some other arguments against the ban, which you didn’t list, include:

1. We are working with people in these countries, especially in Iraq and Afghanistan, and some of those local people who are our allies may lose trust in us if we ban them from visiting the USA.  For example, will local people ever want to cooperate with the American military (working on bases, acting as translators) if they know that America may ban them from ever entering the USA or coming as refugees if the American’s leave and the political situation in their homeland becomes dangerous for them?
2. The current vetting process works perfectly well, and there is already zero chance that refugees from the banned countries will come here as terrorists. Most American terrorists were radicalized after arriving in the USA and becoming American citizens, but native-born Americans are just as likely to be radicalized into terrorism as immigrants who come as refugees, and if refugees come from families that are fleeing radical so-called “Islamist” groups or governments, their family background will be far more likely to make them loyal Americans who might help us monitor and understand the situation in their land of origin. 
3. The argument against allowing refugees from certain countries into the USA only examines the potential harms, and has not taken into account the potential benefits. Maybe 1-in-100,000 refugees will be murderers or terrorists, but 100-in-100,000 will be life-saving doctors or life-saving police officers or life-saving military heroes in our armed forces.  Excluding these refugees would make us lose the benefits as well as avoid the harms. 

A student considers the problem of homelessness

In this reaction essay, the student stresses the inability (or unwillingness) of persons to empathize with others who are homeless. 

The first thing that pops up in my mind when the word homeless is spoken, just like anyone else, is that they are lazy, not trying to find a job, a beggar, an alcoholic, an uneducated, filthy, hoarder of junk.  “Normal” people try to avoid them at all cost and do not want anything to do with them. A normal person would not even try to help a homeless person get back on their feet because they did it to themselves.  If they tried harder to maintain and keep their job or if they were not lazy they would not be in this mess and still have a job and a home to go to at the end of the day.  If they had stayed in school, worked hard for their grades, and actually cared about school, then they would be smart enough to keep a job to pay the bills on the house. This isn’t the attitude or impression I want to have, or choose to have, but I think this is an impression that is widespread in the culture, and so it comes to my mind. 

  People don't think of the homeless as individuals, nor do people realize how these people became homeless.  If you are not in that situation, then how can you fully understand the root cause of homelessness and how these people became homeless?  The politicians that make the laws that prevent homeless people from begging or making camps in public places do not understand what these people are dealing with because of the fact that the politicians themselves are not homeless.  They do not provide an alternative solution to these laws because they have a nice warm comfy bed to sleep in at night inside of a safe home.  They eliminate the ability for homeless people to make camps for themselves but do not provide an alternate place for them to retreat to, so in the end, the homeless are still living outside without a camp to sleep inside. 

 Yes, there are homeless shelters for “these people” to live in, but there are only a curtain number of beds and these shelters can only support a fraction of the homeless population.  So where are they supposed to go, back to the camps that they have made in public places like parks and on the streets? No, that is not an option because there is a law preventing them from making something that they can sleep in at night! Yes, we have created alternative housing projects to help the homeless population to get off the streets and to try and provide a safe place for these people to live.  Unfortunately, there is still homelessness in this country, people going without a house to sleep in, food to eat at night, and a job to go to in the morning. 

 If we as a country really care about eliminating homelessness by creating soup kitchens, homeless shelters, and alternative housing, then why is it that there are still people who are homeless?  Maybe there is an underlining issue that we have not figured out yet, like transportation/communication issues.  Why cant Sally get to work (because she does not have a car) and why cant I get a hold of her to ask why she has not shown up on time (because she does not have a cell phone, or any phone)?  Her poverty will cause her to lose her job because she showed up late to work too many times and there is no way to get a hold of her. 

I know that I cannot fix homelessness by myself and I understand that I do not have all of the answers to create the best possible solution to this problem, but we can still try to work to eliminate as much homelessness as possible.

The one-night census of shelters in the USA conducted in January of 2015 counted 564,708 homeless persons. A survey in 2014 estimated there were 7 million Americans living doubled up with family or friends to avoid becoming homeless.  The End Homelessness Grand Challenges paper (2015) estimates over the course a year, 1.5 million Americans experience at least a day of being homeless. This is a high degree of homelessness.  The initial thoughts that “pop into your mind” about homelessness must be what many people think, because how else can we explain the fact that there is widespread demand to provide stable permanent housing for everyone and end homelessness? In 1948 our delegation at the United Nations endorsed the United Declaration of Human Rights (which Americans had a large hand in writing), and that document says that one of the fundamental rights of being a human is having a place to call home.

Providing permanent housing costs about $13,000 to $25,000 per person, but providing services and processing homeless persons who are not in permanent housing tends to cost $35,000-$40,000, up to $150,000 for some homeless persons who get lots of contact in emergency rooms and with police. It costs less to just provide housing for people and help them remain in a permanent housing solution, but Americans are not demanding this.  Certainly, there is something wrong with “normal” people as you describe them.