10 ms·

Modeling Potential Income and Welfare – Benefits in Illinois (2014) [pdf]

70 points by gasull 8y ago

angel_j 8y ago
Too bad there isn't money to be made "disrupting" poverty.
- chasing 8y ago
  It's worse than that. Many powerful forces in this country will kick in to gear to make sure you get hurt for even trying.
  - angel_j 8y ago
    It's worse than THAT. If you're not creating poverty and strife, you're doing venture capitalism wrong.
    - wand3r 8y ago
      How did you draw that conclusion? It is debatable whether VC creates net jobs and distributes value creation broadly enough but clearly VC isn’t the weapon you make it out to be. Marc Andreesen makes a strong defense of this point in a few talks about innovation/disruption but even if you don’t think VC is an ideal model the companies must be adding value to survive and both employees and non—shareholders capture that value. Social Capital is an example of a fund that appears to be making money and doing great things; you can lose money being terrible and make money doing good.
      - angel_j 8y ago
        Practically all woke criticism of capitalism says that it would be impossible without wealth and income disparity and untold "externalized" ecological costs (including human ecologies, such as those that result i.e. people who can't rise out of poverty in the richest country). Those things are havok. Meanwhile, everybody likes to ride high on the idea that they are making the world a better place, with capitalism; but this requires one to consciously, one might says, conspicuously, ignore what it takes for the things they take for granted to be produced, the shoes, phones and "sharing economy". To answer your question, Venture Capitalism is capitalism, so that's the conclusion.
- johndevor 8y ago
  Try building a business and hiring a person in poverty.
  - angel_j 8y ago
    I am a person in poverty.
- thaumasiotes 8y ago
  Wal-Mart is one of the most successful businesses of all time. What would "disrupting" poverty be, if not enabling the poor to afford things they couldn't before?
  - maym86 8y ago
    It would be better if they paid people well and treated them with dignity. You could argue that Walmart created more poverty by crushing wages and benefits of it's employees and forcing them to work long hours just to earn enough to live. Disrupting poverty would be to offer employees a living wage and benefits for a 40 hour work week.
  - topspin 8y ago
    > Wal-Mart is one of the most successful businesses of all time. Why? I'll offer a reason; unlike many of their competitors they've deftly avoided unionization. I offer no proof that this is the reason, and you offer no reason at all. Only "they're successful so they're right." What do you hope to achieve with this simple minded assertion? > What would "disrupting" poverty be, if not enabling the poor to afford things they couldn't before? Walmart isn't magical; equivalent goods are not an order of magnitude lower in price then elsewhere, and the benefit of the small difference in cost applies only to consumer goods Walmart sells; not housing, utilities, vehicles, taxes, healthcare, etc. These represent a vastly greater burden than the marginal savings obtained shopping at Walmart. At best Walmart is minor mitigation. This sophistry appears in every discussion of poverty, welfare, etc.
    - dang 8y ago
      > Only "they're successful so they're right." You have some good points, but please don't use quotes to make it look like you're quoting someone when you're not. That's an internet trope that makes it hard to continue serious conversation. Attributing it to them explicitly as a "simple minded assertion" is even worse, and also breaks the site rule which asks you to "respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
pedro_hab 8y ago
When I first heard of Welfare Cliff I was shocked, coming from Brazilian public schools I realized how much propaganda is spread there. They teach how the US is imperialist and how they only care about money and some other soviet stories. To give out some money is one thing, we have that in Brazil, but to give out so much money it is better not to work is shocking.
- danharaj 8y ago
  > but to give out so much money it is better not to work is shocking That's not how it works.
  - tfolbrecht 8y ago
    I invite you to the American South. I'll hold your hand and walk you through it.
    - danharaj 8y ago
      Welfare cliffs are caused by flaws in how they are calculated with respect to income, not their magnitude. Now, what does your comment have to do with that? Care to elaborate?
      - freehunter 8y ago
        I would invite you to elaborate. The parent apparently has a misunderstanding, and all you've offered as a counterpoint is "that's not how it works". When someone tried to engage in a discussion, your response should be to explain your understanding, not to ask them to clarify their misunderstanding.
        danharaj 8y ago
        > PDF link to a 2014 study of the welfare cliff, the circumstances in which families on welfare become trapped in staying poor because the cost of replacing the benefits outpaces their ability to gain the same in income. It's the first sentence of the link guys, come on.
mancerayder 8y ago
It's hard to stomach the commentary on Reddit. I glanced at that thread and could post examples of this; in short you have a lot of speculative, off-the-cuff, freeform-braindump-type advice giving and opinions. I have a lot of trouble with Reddit although HN folks have mentioned certain subreddits have articulate people in them with interesting back and forths. Yes, though, the spirit of the thread is correct: the health care costs and insurance mechanisms are absurd and hit the lower-middle class the hardest.
- freehunter 8y ago
  >certain subreddits have articulate people in them with interesting back and forths Very, very few. Even on some of the "deep" subreddits, they went off the rails years ago and are now echo chambers where the most insightful comments are just re-statements of the article's main point. The closest thing you get is the heavily moderated subreddits like askscience or history or space, etc. But even then, good luck navigating any discussion, because 9 out of 10 comments will be "this comment was deleted by a moderator", with a few now-contextless comments thrown in here and there.
blfr 8y ago
One commenter on Reddit notes the "programs provide a necessary relief, but they definitely aren't built to help people truly improve their circumstances in sustainable and lasting ways." They're probably not designed at all. There is no grand plan anywhere. Regulations are a hodgepodge of legislation and executive decisions made by people with conflicting incentives, little to no feedback and expertise, limited resources, and very real abuse/exploitation.
- jnwatson 8y ago
  I’m not completely in the UBI (Universal Basic Income) camp, however your comment made me realize how much better UBI would work. There would be no step functions, no mishmash of overlapping agencies, no complicated eligibility tests, no massive bureaucracy to navigate.
  - marcell 8y ago
    It’s a terrible way to solve the problem. If someone has $20k/yr of benefits from Medicaid what are they going to do on $10k/yr of UBI?
    - AnthonyMouse 8y ago
      > If someone has $20k/yr of benefits from Medicaid what are they going to do on $10k/yr of UBI? Buy health insurance, which costs less than $20k/year (because the average person receives less than that amount in benefits).
      - marcell 8y ago
        This is dodging the question. For one thing, The price you pay for health insurance is not the same as it’s cost. The price of insurance is lower than the price of care because people who are healthy buy insurance. Moreover, the general point stands: what does UBI do for people who currently receive more $ benefits than what the UBI level would be?
ScottBurson 8y ago
This is a point I tried to make in conversations I was having back in 1994 or so about the welfare reform that was then being debated. It's a rather technical point, though, so it was hard to get it heard in all the shouting about welfare moms. Step-function subsidies are evil. (A "step function", in math, is a function whose value changes sharply at a single point, like a stairstep.) They're evil for just the reason being discussed here, that they create a point where a small increase in earnings causes a large decrease in total income. When it comes to income taxes, our legislators are smart enough to use piecewise linear functions, but somehow this very small amount of mathematical sophistication goes out the window when it comes to subsidies for the poor. And people's lives are ruined.
- usaar333 8y ago
  > Our legislators are smart enough to use piecewise linear function Yes, but it's also hard to avoid when you are offering non cash welfare. An example for middle income people is affordable housing. You get into the unit (saving you $25k+ over market rate) if income below $X. Otherwise, you don't. I haven't figured out a way to avoid this cliff that isn't exceedingly complicated or violates the intention of the program.
  - komali2 8y ago
    I'm very interested in solutions to this, as a bay area resident - somehow separating units into "the poor people houses" and "the rest of the people houses" doesn't quite seem like the right long term solution to anything. I don't have a solution, hence why I ask.
    - comicjk 8y ago
      You could give poor families a housing subsidy, which drops off smoothy as a function of income. You can't give a family half a house, but you can easily give them half as big a subsidy, knowing that they can more than make up the difference with their higher income. This also means that the family receiving the subsidy can live wherever they want. I think some of the smarter housing programs already work this way.
sctb 8y ago
We've updated the link from https://www.reddit.com/r/povertyfinance/comments/87or18/the_welfare_cliff/ https://www.reddit.com/r/povertyfinance/comments/87or18/the_....
linkmotif 8y ago
I haven’t had income in a few years because I’ve been working on a personal project that has yet to materialize. I am on Obamacare and it’s really good. It’s free, better than anything on the market you can buy with money. $1 rx copay, no copay for visits, no referrals to specialists, and the network seems to have all the highly rated specialists in the area. When you see a doctor there are no unexpected, unintelligible bills months later that you have to argue endlessly. It keeps me from taking side jobs because I’d immediately have too much money and would have to buy inferior insurance. I know this is very different from the much more difficult and real circumstance in the OP but having heard of welfare entrapment for a long time it was odd for me to realize that it had sort of happened to me too. Welfare, man.
- selimthegrim 8y ago
  You mean Medicaid, not Obamacare (a policy purchased on the exchange)
  - linkmotif 8y ago
    Correct. In Maryland and probably other states it’s Medicaid that pays MCOs. “Obamacare” seems to be a colloquialism for all programs that resulted from the ACA. I believe MCOs paid by Medicaid are from the ACA. Certainly the ACA mandated I had to enroll, buy a plan or pay the penalty.
cozzyd 8y ago
Just in case people don't know, the Illinois Policy Institute is an antitax lobbying group.
thermodynthrway 8y ago
TLDR, in many situations in Illinois you make more money (due to benefits) by making less, up to a staggering income level of ~$70000 a year in some cases. I have seen this first hand. When I was broke in community college I became eligable for $200 month food subsidy which quickly dropped off a cliff if I worked more than 26 hours a week. So I worked just under that. Any more would be a net loss until ~35 hours due to my low wage per hour not making up for benefits lost. I did some more math, and it turned out I would make only ~10% less money if I could find a job with very high hourly pay and very low hours per week. With the incredibly broken way the system was set up, I ended up finding a website admin job that paid 18 hourly but only 4 hours a week to maximize the benefit. Some would say I "messed with" the system, but I was going to be broke either way and it made zero sense to work more for less money when I was going to school. I quickly moved out of Illinois from this and a hundred other political happenings that convinced me the government there was just unfixably corrupt and broken. I'm not surprised this is coming from Illinois, at all. Incredibly high taxes from benefits allocated absurdly. Laughable benefits for students and other blocs that don't "bring in the vote". The state has a shadow governer Madigan who has run the state for two decades no matter who was in charge on paper. Illinois is teetering on bankrupcy and the only state with a shinking population due to so much out migration. And the average person leaving makes almost $30,000 more a year than the average person moving in. Because anyone that can afford to leave is on the way out due to extremely high taxes. Businesses have been fleeing in droves for over a decade, and it's rated in many small business polls as one of the top 5 worst states to run a business. The state has turned to raiding the public universities and local governments in recent years. Cutting funding so severely that several large public universities are almost bankrupt. My education grants dropped from 10k a year from my low income to zero in a single semester because of budget cuts, and I have about 20k in student loan debt as a result. Basically, don't move to Illinois, it has easily the crappiest most corrupt government of any state. The financials are so bad they've narrowly avoided bankrupcy and have a junk credit rating. If you move there be prepared to pay down the previous decade of uncontrollable debt to the state in taxes due to the inability of Madigan and friends to balance a budget while maintaining their staggering level of corruption
- selimthegrim 8y ago
  You could move to Louisiana where you would have been ineligible as an enrolled student for your food subsidy unless you worked at least 20 hours a week or earned $600 a month. Go fish.
kolbe 8y ago
Chicagoan here. I grew up in Northern California (moved here for college and have stayed for 15 years). I have nothing but the utmost respect for the environment, for minority rights, and for helping the less fortunate. But here in Shitcago, I get shouted down as a traitorous, MAGA-loving nazi because I criticize the very obvious flaws that we have in our welfare programs, pensions and unions. Welfare cliffs like these ones are borderline inhumane, robbing people of their ability to improve themselves as human beings and to have the self-respect of being a great as they would like to be. We arguably hurt people with these programs, and we PAY TO HURT them. Now this isn't to say that there aren't great programs that we can undertake to help those in need by redistributing wealth in productive ways, but it is not at all clear to me that supporting our current welfare and educational system is at all synonymous with supporting the idea of helping and educating people.
burntrelish1273 8y ago
Queue the top 10% heartless, utopian, clueless people whom have never had to go hungry espouse their rhetoric about "reform" when it's a transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich with blood money because that's exactly what Medic-Aid and SNAP cuts are. There are systemic problems in the US with many programs being inconsistent and incomplete, but arbitrary, giant changes and cuts don't demonstrate leadership.

70 points by gasull 8y ago

angel_j 8y ago

Too bad there isn't money to be made "disrupting" poverty.

chasing 8y ago
It's worse than that. Many powerful forces in this country will kick in to gear to make sure you get hurt for even trying.
- angel_j 8y ago
  It's worse than THAT. If you're not creating poverty and strife, you're doing venture capitalism wrong.
  - wand3r 8y ago
    How did you draw that conclusion? It is debatable whether VC creates net jobs and distributes value creation broadly enough but clearly VC isn’t the weapon you make it out to be. Marc Andreesen makes a strong defense of this point in a few talks about innovation/disruption but even if you don’t think VC is an ideal model the companies must be adding value to survive and both employees and non—shareholders capture that value. Social Capital is an example of a fund that appears to be making money and doing great things; you can lose money being terrible and make money doing good.
    - angel_j 8y ago
      Practically all woke criticism of capitalism says that it would be impossible without wealth and income disparity and untold "externalized" ecological costs (including human ecologies, such as those that result i.e. people who can't rise out of poverty in the richest country). Those things are havok. Meanwhile, everybody likes to ride high on the idea that they are making the world a better place, with capitalism; but this requires one to consciously, one might says, conspicuously, ignore what it takes for the things they take for granted to be produced, the shoes, phones and "sharing economy". To answer your question, Venture Capitalism is capitalism, so that's the conclusion.
johndevor 8y ago
Try building a business and hiring a person in poverty.
- angel_j 8y ago
  I am a person in poverty.
thaumasiotes 8y ago
Wal-Mart is one of the most successful businesses of all time. What would "disrupting" poverty be, if not enabling the poor to afford things they couldn't before?
- maym86 8y ago
  It would be better if they paid people well and treated them with dignity. You could argue that Walmart created more poverty by crushing wages and benefits of it's employees and forcing them to work long hours just to earn enough to live. Disrupting poverty would be to offer employees a living wage and benefits for a 40 hour work week.
- topspin 8y ago
  > Wal-Mart is one of the most successful businesses of all time. Why? I'll offer a reason; unlike many of their competitors they've deftly avoided unionization. I offer no proof that this is the reason, and you offer no reason at all. Only "they're successful so they're right." What do you hope to achieve with this simple minded assertion? > What would "disrupting" poverty be, if not enabling the poor to afford things they couldn't before? Walmart isn't magical; equivalent goods are not an order of magnitude lower in price then elsewhere, and the benefit of the small difference in cost applies only to consumer goods Walmart sells; not housing, utilities, vehicles, taxes, healthcare, etc. These represent a vastly greater burden than the marginal savings obtained shopping at Walmart. At best Walmart is minor mitigation. This sophistry appears in every discussion of poverty, welfare, etc.
  - dang 8y ago
    > Only "they're successful so they're right." You have some good points, but please don't use quotes to make it look like you're quoting someone when you're not. That's an internet trope that makes it hard to continue serious conversation. Attributing it to them explicitly as a "simple minded assertion" is even worse, and also breaks the site rule which asks you to "respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

pedro_hab 8y ago

When I first heard of Welfare Cliff I was shocked, coming from Brazilian public schools I realized how much propaganda is spread there. They teach how the US is imperialist and how they only care about money and some other soviet stories. To give out some money is one thing, we have that in Brazil, but to give out so much money it is better not to work is shocking.

danharaj 8y ago
> but to give out so much money it is better not to work is shocking That's not how it works.
- tfolbrecht 8y ago
  I invite you to the American South. I'll hold your hand and walk you through it.
  - danharaj 8y ago
    Welfare cliffs are caused by flaws in how they are calculated with respect to income, not their magnitude. Now, what does your comment have to do with that? Care to elaborate?
    - freehunter 8y ago
      I would invite you to elaborate. The parent apparently has a misunderstanding, and all you've offered as a counterpoint is "that's not how it works". When someone tried to engage in a discussion, your response should be to explain your understanding, not to ask them to clarify their misunderstanding.
      - danharaj 8y ago
        > PDF link to a 2014 study of the welfare cliff, the circumstances in which families on welfare become trapped in staying poor because the cost of replacing the benefits outpaces their ability to gain the same in income. It's the first sentence of the link guys, come on.

mancerayder 8y ago

It's hard to stomach the commentary on Reddit. I glanced at that thread and could post examples of this; in short you have a lot of speculative, off-the-cuff, freeform-braindump-type advice giving and opinions. I have a lot of trouble with Reddit although HN folks have mentioned certain subreddits have articulate people in them with interesting back and forths. Yes, though, the spirit of the thread is correct: the health care costs and insurance mechanisms are absurd and hit the lower-middle class the hardest.

freehunter 8y ago
>certain subreddits have articulate people in them with interesting back and forths Very, very few. Even on some of the "deep" subreddits, they went off the rails years ago and are now echo chambers where the most insightful comments are just re-statements of the article's main point. The closest thing you get is the heavily moderated subreddits like askscience or history or space, etc. But even then, good luck navigating any discussion, because 9 out of 10 comments will be "this comment was deleted by a moderator", with a few now-contextless comments thrown in here and there.

blfr 8y ago

One commenter on Reddit notes the "programs provide a necessary relief, but they definitely aren't built to help people truly improve their circumstances in sustainable and lasting ways." They're probably not designed at all. There is no grand plan anywhere. Regulations are a hodgepodge of legislation and executive decisions made by people with conflicting incentives, little to no feedback and expertise, limited resources, and very real abuse/exploitation.

jnwatson 8y ago
I’m not completely in the UBI (Universal Basic Income) camp, however your comment made me realize how much better UBI would work. There would be no step functions, no mishmash of overlapping agencies, no complicated eligibility tests, no massive bureaucracy to navigate.
- marcell 8y ago
  It’s a terrible way to solve the problem. If someone has $20k/yr of benefits from Medicaid what are they going to do on $10k/yr of UBI?
  - AnthonyMouse 8y ago
    > If someone has $20k/yr of benefits from Medicaid what are they going to do on $10k/yr of UBI? Buy health insurance, which costs less than $20k/year (because the average person receives less than that amount in benefits).
    - marcell 8y ago
      This is dodging the question. For one thing, The price you pay for health insurance is not the same as it’s cost. The price of insurance is lower than the price of care because people who are healthy buy insurance. Moreover, the general point stands: what does UBI do for people who currently receive more $ benefits than what the UBI level would be?

ScottBurson 8y ago

This is a point I tried to make in conversations I was having back in 1994 or so about the welfare reform that was then being debated. It's a rather technical point, though, so it was hard to get it heard in all the shouting about welfare moms. Step-function subsidies are evil. (A "step function", in math, is a function whose value changes sharply at a single point, like a stairstep.) They're evil for just the reason being discussed here, that they create a point where a small increase in earnings causes a large decrease in total income. When it comes to income taxes, our legislators are smart enough to use piecewise linear functions, but somehow this very small amount of mathematical sophistication goes out the window when it comes to subsidies for the poor. And people's lives are ruined.

usaar333 8y ago
> Our legislators are smart enough to use piecewise linear function Yes, but it's also hard to avoid when you are offering non cash welfare. An example for middle income people is affordable housing. You get into the unit (saving you $25k+ over market rate) if income below $X. Otherwise, you don't. I haven't figured out a way to avoid this cliff that isn't exceedingly complicated or violates the intention of the program.
- komali2 8y ago
  I'm very interested in solutions to this, as a bay area resident - somehow separating units into "the poor people houses" and "the rest of the people houses" doesn't quite seem like the right long term solution to anything. I don't have a solution, hence why I ask.
  - comicjk 8y ago
    You could give poor families a housing subsidy, which drops off smoothy as a function of income. You can't give a family half a house, but you can easily give them half as big a subsidy, knowing that they can more than make up the difference with their higher income. This also means that the family receiving the subsidy can live wherever they want. I think some of the smarter housing programs already work this way.

sctb 8y ago

We've updated the link from https://www.reddit.com/r/povertyfinance/comments/87or18/the_welfare_cliff/ https://www.reddit.com/r/povertyfinance/comments/87or18/the_....

linkmotif 8y ago

I haven’t had income in a few years because I’ve been working on a personal project that has yet to materialize. I am on Obamacare and it’s really good. It’s free, better than anything on the market you can buy with money. $1 rx copay, no copay for visits, no referrals to specialists, and the network seems to have all the highly rated specialists in the area. When you see a doctor there are no unexpected, unintelligible bills months later that you have to argue endlessly. It keeps me from taking side jobs because I’d immediately have too much money and would have to buy inferior insurance. I know this is very different from the much more difficult and real circumstance in the OP but having heard of welfare entrapment for a long time it was odd for me to realize that it had sort of happened to me too. Welfare, man.

selimthegrim 8y ago
You mean Medicaid, not Obamacare (a policy purchased on the exchange)
- linkmotif 8y ago
  Correct. In Maryland and probably other states it’s Medicaid that pays MCOs. “Obamacare” seems to be a colloquialism for all programs that resulted from the ACA. I believe MCOs paid by Medicaid are from the ACA. Certainly the ACA mandated I had to enroll, buy a plan or pay the penalty.

cozzyd 8y ago

Just in case people don't know, the Illinois Policy Institute is an antitax lobbying group.

thermodynthrway 8y ago

TLDR, in many situations in Illinois you make more money (due to benefits) by making less, up to a staggering income level of ~$70000 a year in some cases. I have seen this first hand. When I was broke in community college I became eligable for $200 month food subsidy which quickly dropped off a cliff if I worked more than 26 hours a week. So I worked just under that. Any more would be a net loss until ~35 hours due to my low wage per hour not making up for benefits lost. I did some more math, and it turned out I would make only ~10% less money if I could find a job with very high hourly pay and very low hours per week. With the incredibly broken way the system was set up, I ended up finding a website admin job that paid 18 hourly but only 4 hours a week to maximize the benefit. Some would say I "messed with" the system, but I was going to be broke either way and it made zero sense to work more for less money when I was going to school. I quickly moved out of Illinois from this and a hundred other political happenings that convinced me the government there was just unfixably corrupt and broken. I'm not surprised this is coming from Illinois, at all. Incredibly high taxes from benefits allocated absurdly. Laughable benefits for students and other blocs that don't "bring in the vote". The state has a shadow governer Madigan who has run the state for two decades no matter who was in charge on paper. Illinois is teetering on bankrupcy and the only state with a shinking population due to so much out migration. And the average person leaving makes almost $30,000 more a year than the average person moving in. Because anyone that can afford to leave is on the way out due to extremely high taxes. Businesses have been fleeing in droves for over a decade, and it's rated in many small business polls as one of the top 5 worst states to run a business. The state has turned to raiding the public universities and local governments in recent years. Cutting funding so severely that several large public universities are almost bankrupt. My education grants dropped from 10k a year from my low income to zero in a single semester because of budget cuts, and I have about 20k in student loan debt as a result. Basically, don't move to Illinois, it has easily the crappiest most corrupt government of any state. The financials are so bad they've narrowly avoided bankrupcy and have a junk credit rating. If you move there be prepared to pay down the previous decade of uncontrollable debt to the state in taxes due to the inability of Madigan and friends to balance a budget while maintaining their staggering level of corruption

selimthegrim 8y ago
You could move to Louisiana where you would have been ineligible as an enrolled student for your food subsidy unless you worked at least 20 hours a week or earned $600 a month. Go fish.

kolbe 8y ago

Chicagoan here. I grew up in Northern California (moved here for college and have stayed for 15 years). I have nothing but the utmost respect for the environment, for minority rights, and for helping the less fortunate. But here in Shitcago, I get shouted down as a traitorous, MAGA-loving nazi because I criticize the very obvious flaws that we have in our welfare programs, pensions and unions. Welfare cliffs like these ones are borderline inhumane, robbing people of their ability to improve themselves as human beings and to have the self-respect of being a great as they would like to be. We arguably hurt people with these programs, and we PAY TO HURT them. Now this isn't to say that there aren't great programs that we can undertake to help those in need by redistributing wealth in productive ways, but it is not at all clear to me that supporting our current welfare and educational system is at all synonymous with supporting the idea of helping and educating people.

burntrelish1273 8y ago

Queue the top 10% heartless, utopian, clueless people whom have never had to go hungry espouse their rhetoric about "reform" when it's a transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich with blood money because that's exactly what Medic-Aid and SNAP cuts are. There are systemic problems in the US with many programs being inconsistent and incomplete, but arbitrary, giant changes and cuts don't demonstrate leadership.