Through a package of proposed reforms to the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program, or TANF, the administration plans to shore up the U.S. social safety net. The regulations are intended to ensure that more federal and state welfare dollars make it to low-income families, rather than being spent on other things or not spent at all.
The proposal, drawn up by the federal Administration for Children and Families, is open for public comment until Dec. 1. Once comments are reviewed, officials plan to issue final regulations that could take effect in the months after that, heading into the 2024 election.
ProPublica found that in Arizona and elsewhere, money meant to help parents struggling to raise their children is instead used to investigate them for alleged child maltreatment — which often stems from the very financial circumstances that they needed help with in the first place.
Under the Biden plan, Arizona would likely have to find other ways of funding its aggressive child protective services investigations of poor parents and use welfare dollars to help families stay together rather than removing their kids into foster care.
As someone who works with low-income folks and sees plenty of CPS cases play out, I think the article is being pretty slanted in its coverage here. It’s depicting CPS investigations as being weaponized against the poor, but this is far from the truth in my experience. Funny how people stop caring about “putting children’s safety first” when it becomes politically convenient to do so. In my experience, it’s actually pretty rare that a family be investigated by CPS due to unavoidable problems related to poverty. I’m not going to say it never happens, but it’s far from the norm in my experience. More often, the issue is a combination of poverty and the parent not doing something they should have or otherwise making bad decisions. One can of course argue that said bad decisions are due to social problems linked to the client’s impoverished background, and that’s true, but it’s not a direct consequence of the parent not having enough money to take care of their children, and the distinction is important. One is an issue of one government system punishing a person for another government system’s failure, not the parent’s; the other is a much more complex societal systemic issue that is not a problem with government systems per se, but rather a sociological problem that requires a much more complex solution. The article’s framing of this issue is simplistic and seems deliberately misleading for political purposes. Bad reporting.
Do you have experience in Arizona, specifically? These allegations about weaponizing CPS to go after poor people for being poor are state-specific.
No, and to be fair, I was assuming they were more general in their accusations.
I don’t think the administration is making this move predicated on “putting children’s safety first”. They’re doing it because using funds that are earmarked for social safety net purposes (providing more support for families in need) to instead punish those who are in need of those funds - even when that punishment is deserved - does not address the thing the money was intended to resolve and this the request for funds is disingenuous.
We can roleplay this…
Person 1: “Hey, can I borrow $50? My impoverished sister can’t afford food for her family this week.”
Person 2: “Sure, here you go. Wait, what are you doing?”
Person 1: “Well, I think my neighbor might be neglecting their kids so I spent that $50 on investigating them, just in case.”
Person 2: “But I gave you the money to help your sister, not to investigate someone who may or may not have done anything wrong”
You see the problem?
I understand the issue being highlighted in the article, and I wasn’t commenting on that specifically. I was merely expressing disjunction with their characterization of the CPS system in the sense that they implied there was a hostile motive behind it in a general sense. In my experience, this isn’t true.
As mentioned elsewhere, the article is talking specifically about Arizona, due to investigative reporting on their handling of the funds. I realize that it may not be true everywhere, but do you have a reason to believe Arizona does NOT have the problem called out in the article?
I’ve already said I wasn’t talking about the funding issue. At this point, you seem to be willfully misunderstanding me, so I’m not going to continue responding.
… But the article is about the funding issue? I’m not willfully misunderstanding anything. I’m asking whether your statement is directly related to the article or just a tangent that is only marginally related.
You seem to have intentionally misrepresented the article’s content so that you could say “Not All CPS” which is just not a good look for you
Interesting, I’m glad I got your perspective in addition to the article, thank you. The article clearly has an opinion and doesn’t treat the issue neutrally.
You said it’s true that the bad decisions these parents make are due to social problems linked to their poverty - sure it’s not “directly” the cause, but wouldn’t making sure this funding helps those families reduce the chances of them making those bad decisions?
I’m sure even if we helped impoverished families as much as we could financially, there would still be a need for CPS to step in and protect children. So it seems like both need funding. But since this money was meant to help families in poverty, using it instead to boost CPS does seem wrong, in that right-wing “punish people instead of improving society” kind of way.
Funding is insufficient to address the problems I pointed to in my comment. It’s not about money; it’s about parenting and the related psychological skills. The only thing that can address that is complex social support; not just teaching of specific skills but relational improvements. I’m a therapist in a community mental health clinic. In addition to definable psychiatric disorders, I can tell you that at least half of what we treat is effectively the psychosocial consequences of generational poverty. In other words, we deal with “ghetto”, “ratchet,” “x-trash” people. These are people who don’t necessarily qualify for any psychiatric diagnosis, but are nonetheless folks who no one wants to deal with in life. They’re the products of bad parenting, who haven’t been taught how to manage their emotions, and thus react in extreme ways to minor stressors, which makes them an annoyance and a threat to people we consider “normal.” These folks need re-parenting. They’re broken in a real sense, and I don’t put it that way to diminish them. They weren’t given the things we take for granted, and as such they can’t function in ways we expect them to. And it’s not fair to expect “normal” people to tolerate them either, because those “normal” people weren’t prepared to deal with them. This is a hugely complex problem and it requires a solution that likely requires decades to fix, because it is generational in nature.
Do you think money allotted to the state for welfare should be used to fund CPS investigations?
Do you think the foster care system is well run?
Do you think money allotted to the state for welfare should be used to fund CPS investigations?
No.
Do you think the foster care system is well run?
No.
What can you divine from these two closed-ended questions?
Best to keep government funds as they are allocated. Especially in desert states so poorly run they are selling their aquafers to deserts on the other side of the planet for pennies.
I can’t help you with your apparently willful stupidity.
Wasn’t asking. Was attempting to correct yours.
One can of course argue that said bad decisions are due to social problems linked to the client’s impoverished background, and that’s true, but it’s not a direct consequence of the parent not having enough money to take care of their children, and the distinction is important. One is an issue of one government system punishing a person for another government system’s failure, not the parent’s; the other is a much more complex societal systemic issue that is not a problem with government systems per se, but rather a sociological problem that requires a much more complex solution.
I don’t get this reasoning. Whether some problem is the “direct” or “indirect” consequence of poverty does not matter for whether poverty reduction programs like TANF are effective. It’s a non sequitur.
You imply that improving the delivery of social supports like TANF will not be effective at helping the poor (who are, after all, the direct cause of their own problems in your experience!). But other rich countries with better social safety nets enjoy much better outcomes for the poor than the US. It’s strange that you criticize a systemic change to the delivery of welfare to the poor for not being “complex” or “systemic”. I’m not sure how blaming the poor for their problems is more “complex” or “systemic”. On the contrary, that’s highly individualistic and moralizing.
Whether some problem is the “direct” or “indirect” consequence of poverty does not matter for whether poverty reduction programs like TANF are effective.
Oh, yes it does. TANF is a band-aid on poverty; it does not address the systemic issues that poverty creates at all.
t’s a non sequitur.
With respect, I don’t think you’re using that phrase correctly.
You imply that improving the delivery of social supports like TANF will not be effective at helping the poor (who are, after all, the direct cause of their own problems in your experience!). But other rich countries with better social safety nets enjoy much better outcomes for the poor than the US. It’s strange that you criticize a systemic change to the delivery of welfare to the poor for not being “complex” or “systemic”. I’m not sure how blaming the poor for their problems is more “complex” or “systemic”. On the contrary, that’s highly individualistic and moralizing.
I’m not blaming the poor, and if you think I am, you haven’t understood my comment at all. Other countries that have done better in terms of outcomes for the poor achieve those outcomes for a variety of reasons, many of which have nothing to do with government programs but rather culture or societal homogeneity. A lot of countries in Europe enjoy relative ethnic homogeneity compared to the United States and other countries, and champion their success falsely upon the neglect of the fact that they haven’t had to deal with the issues that stem from having a multi-ethnic population. Just look at the Netherlands and what happened to their celebratorily tolerant society when they started admitting Islamic immigrants into their population: they experienced culture clash and began isolating immigrant groups into effective camps to “educate” them in order to ease social conflict. In other words, mixing cultures always results in social conflict, and governments tend to abuse the newcomers to those conflicts out of a legitimate desire to preserve their own culture above that of the newcomers’. Egalitarians like to think acclimation is a neat process, but it’s anything but. It’s hard and difficult and messy, and there really isn’t any good solution to it. It requires continued empathy and tolerance, and willful assimilation by the newcomers; if there is resistance from assimilating populations, such as ghettoization, cultural conflict and violence are an inevitability. So, immigrants are sometimes part of the problem. That’s just the way it is.
Ah the mask comes off!
You’re actually claiming that the better outcomes of other countries has “nothing to do with government programs”?? Literally nothing? Even a hyper conservative rightwing ideologue, if they are intellectually honest, would admit that government programs have some effect. Such black and white thinking.
You say it has to do with “culture and societal homogeneity”? I’ve heard this racist dogwhistle before. And sure enough you go on to blame immigrants as “part of the problem”. Contrary to what you say, immigrants to the US commit fewer crimes than non-immigrant Americans. Contrary to conservative stereotypes, immigrants to the US fare very well on most metrics.
When you say “societal homogeneity” and lack of immigrants, how do you explain Canada, which is one of the most racially and culturally diverse countries in the world, more so, in fact, than the US? Canada has way more immigrants per capita than the US, and Toronto has about the same proportion of black people as LA. Canada has many more Muslim immigrants. And yet, poor people in Canada have much better outcomes than the US. Crime is a fraction of what it is in the US across the board. Universal publicly funded healthcare, one of the best public education systems in the world, and, as of a decade ago, a direct cash transfer program to poor families have all lowered the poverty rate. It is insane to claim that this has “nothing to do with government programs”, and that Canada is such an alien and different culture to the US.
I am not the cartoon monster you’re so keen on fighting, but I think you’re the type that looks for windmills to joust at online. I’m not interested in engaging in a pointless debate with someone who has already decided I’m evil. Go play Hero somewhere else.
I didn’t say you’re evil. Let’s not focus on hurt feelings. You made specific claims, and I gave arguments against them.
Better outcomes have nothing to do with government programs. That is an extreme position. I have never heard anyone endorse it with a straight face until now. Obviously, no economist left, right, or centre believes anything this extreme.
Immigrants cause problems in the US. The data does not bear this out. In the US, they commit fewer crimes and there’s no evidence that immigrants treat their children worse or educate them poorly. This is just false.
Other countries do better due to culture and societal homogeneity. I gave you a concrete counter example of a country that is as similar to the US as possible in almost every way. In fact, Canada is more diverse, and has more immigrants. And yet, the outcomes are much better across the board.
If you’re being intellectually honest, you should be willing to modify your beliefs based on argument and evidence, not just double down.
