What? How? Your whole family? I live on more than that per month by myself. I can't even imagine supporting a whole family on that amount per year.[/quote]
Yeah, that was a family of one adult woman and three children. In current dollars it would be something like $10,000 a year now. Or 833 a month in cash, then I think we got something like $150-160 a month in food stamps in 1988, which would be about 300-350 now. You still might be able to make that work if you lived in the slums, but my mom insisted on buying a house, so we had a mortgage. That was $365 a month, or $760 in today's dollars of the cash. We rarely had a phone, often ran out of things like toilet paper and soap. Never had things like socks that one could do without. It was pretty miserable.
RetroGamer87 wrote:
In my country we're solving the problem of drug addicted welfare recipients by paying their welfare into a debit card that can only be used for groceries, bills, clothing and other necessities.
Misslizard wrote:
Food stamps are on an EBT card now,no way for the parents to buy drugs with it.Food only.
It used to be that way as well. Food stamps used to come in something that looked a lot like Monopoly money. Colorful, not mistakable for real cash. But then and now one could sell food stamps for a reduced amount on the dollar. 60 cents on the dollar, say. My mom didn't do that. What she did was use the cash money she got every month for drugs and the food stamps for food. When we ran out of food she'd beg people. Relatives, churches, or food banks.
There is also a scam that women can run on men where if you have multiple children by different men you can get benefits directly off the men either by child support, or from getting a portion of their state benefits. That's what happened with us- my dad died young and my mom got a check for us because we were his kids. These days a woman can have three or four different kids by different men, get three or four different child support payments for the different kids, and not work herself. This then takes such a chunk out of the men's income that they need welfare themselves to pay for the kids in their households or just to support themselves. Or they give up on working to get out of the payments, or they start doing illegal things to get more money.
See, the thing is, there really are systems in place for people who have problems and are have open hearts, ready to let people help them. Education, therapy, church fellowship, jobs, lots of stuff. But what do you do with the people who do not want to accept help? The Trump administration is now cutting off those able-bodied adults. That's hard for a lot of us to look at, and I'm sure it will create it's own problems, but maybe it's what has to be done. I hate saying this publicly because it seems unkind, but I'm pretty much okay with it.
My personal opinion is that we need to recreate homes for people who are seriously mentally unwell but put heavy regulations in place to make sure the people are abused by the workers or each other. And clean up the foster care system and child protection systems so that kids are better taken care of if they have to be removed from a home.