Conservatives Do Have a Point

Don't ever discount the power of incentives.

    

THIS is what poverty sometimes looks like in America: parents here in Appalachian hill country pulling their children out of literacy classes. Moms and dads fear that if kids learn to read, they are less likely to qualify for a monthly check for having an intellectual disability.  

Many people in hillside mobile homes here are poor and desperate, and a $698 monthly check per child from the Supplemental Security Income program goes a long way — and those checks continue until the child turns 18.       

“The kids get taken out of the program because the parents are going to lose the check,” said Billie Oaks, who runs a literacy program here in Breathitt County, a poor part of Kentucky. “It’s heartbreaking.”       

This is painful for a liberal to admit, but conservatives have a point when they suggest that America’s safety net can sometimes entangle people in a soul-crushing dependency. Our poverty programs do rescue many people, but other times they backfire.       

Most wrenching of all are the parents who think it’s best if a child stays illiterate, because then the family may be able to claim a disability check each month.       

“One of the ways you get on this program is having problems in school,” notes Richard V. Burkhauser, a Cornell University economist who co-wrote a book last year about these disability programs. “If you do better in school, you threaten the income of the parents. It’s a terrible incentive.”

Of course it is fine to help those who are poor.  Yet, we must be exceedingly careful that the help is really that - and not something that actually exacerbates the issues for all of us.

 

Comments

[J. Reed Anderson]

I know of a family in Northern Minnesota, Peg, who did this. The one son was in danger of graduating high school, and this was twenty years ago now, so they made him drop out. All for the disability check.

[Peg]

Pathetic beyond words. Both that the family did this to their child - and that our government is incentivizing it!!