The Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996 reformed welfare so that adults could be required to work in order to receive their benefits. North Carolina made some exceptions when the recession hit, but according to a new vote in the senate, the period of relaxed requirements will be coming to an end.
Gov. Pat McCrory is reinstating the requirements that will make food stamp qualification more difficult for some 1,800 adults in North Carolina. According to the laws, adults between 18 and 49 who are able-bodied and without dependent children will have three months to find a job.
If recipients are unemployed, or working fewer than 20 hours per week, they could lose their benefits entirely. They can re-apply when they demonstrate that they've maintained work that qualifies for more than 30 days.
"If jobs are available, we want to encourage work," said Sherry Bradsher, deputy secretary for North Carolina's Department of Health and Human Services. "People are healthier and feel better about themselves and have a greater amount of dignity when they are working."
Numbers put out by the Obama administration continue to show that the national economy is improving. Because of this, North Carolina officials see no reason to continue to relax the policy.
OS... there's no way you can paint all 20 million people to be just innocently looking for jobs. It's a free paycheck, most of our lifestyle is built on laziness and things to make us more comfortable without looking for any real solutions.
I've seen people who do drugs and still get welfare.
I'm from NC and I support this. If they are not able to work, then we should take care of them. If they are too lazy to work, then I shouldn't have to feed them.
And what about the 20 million people (and/or their dependents) for whom THERE IS NO WORK?
Just let them starve to death?
The Mexicans don't seem to have any problem finding jobs.
Or, we could kick out all the illegals. That would free up millions of jobs.
Funny you mention socialism and welfare. I think Thatcher said it best:
"They always run out of other people's money."
Welfare programs cost taxpayers billons.
This law applies to able-bodied people with no children. If a Mexican can cross the border on a Thursday and have a job in NC on Monday, then there are jobs.
Obama is not strictly lying. He is using a measure of unemployment that, while the "official" number the government and the media typically report, is one that significantly underreports real unemployment.
Here's a handy primer:
http://www.investopedia.com/articles/investing/080415/true-unemployment-rate-u6-vs-u3.asp
Here's a table of U6 unemployment rates over the past several years:
http://portalseven.com/employment/unemployment_rate_u6.jsp
And if you multiply the official U6 rate (which is 9.7% instead of the independent-survey-baed 13.7%), you end up with a shade under 20 million underemployed/unemployed people. Subtract the 6 million open jobs available and you still have 14 MILLION PEOPLE for whom THERE ARE NO JOBS.
You can let them starve, force the economy to create more jobs at the cost of efficiency, or you can provide them with social welfare so they can afford food/clothing/shelter/etc.
But you can't wish the problem away because you want to believe in Reagan's "welfare queen" and "strapping young bucks"
I would disagree. A couple of reasons leap to mind though there is at least one other.
The first is caveats and detail. 'Welfare' means different things to different people and can be taken as a very broad brush indeed. There are many reasons why people aren't working and assuming some can when they can't and then expecting and demanding that those who can't do so is a recipe for disaster and potential extra cost.
The second is something that many nations including the US have been doing for a long time - using prisoners to do work. This isn't done because prisoners have unique skills but because they are a captive workforce and very cheap. Using benefit claimants to do the same (and for the same reason, let's be honest) will be another restriction on a job market that is difficult and insecure enough as it is for those seeking work.
i think theyre already doing that
I think it means that you have had to have worked in the past to receive them. That cannot be true because there are all kinds of mothers on welfare with a dozen kids who probably never worked a day in their lives.
