Since beginning my autodidactic study of economics, I’ve begun to see welfare as a surprisingly destructive force. It plunders economically the productive people who pay for it, and plunders morally the communities who receive it as well as the bureaucracies which administer it.
“This week, California’s Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger is taking that goal quite literally, proposing to eliminate cash assistance for the state’s poorest families altogether. Legislators, poverty researchers and poor parents alike greeted with astonishment his unprecedented call to drop the state’s welfare-to-work program, known as CalWORKs.
The governor’s proposal would make California the only state in the nation to reject Temporary Assistance to Needy Families block grants, the federal program that allows states to draw funds as long as they impose strict time limits and work requirements on recipients.
Rejecting the $3.7 billion federal grant would save the state its matching portion of $1.8 billion. But it also would result in the loss of $600 million in federal stimulus funds – money economists and poverty watchers say is desperately needed to invigorate a moribund economy.
The proposal landed in uncharted territory in the Capitol and beyond, with no one able to predict what legislators ultimately will do as the extraordinary recession deepens.
As of late Wednesday afternoon, Schwarzenegger’s proposal to eliminate CalWORKs appeared to be, if not dead on arrival in the Democrat-controlled Legislature, then on life support.” (Read more from mercurynews.com)