When I posted my Quick Takes from last week, Thomas was one of my commenters and had some interesting comments. As I could tell from these two comments (here and here), he had much more experience with this than I did so I asked him if he wanted to do a guest post for me. We had a nice Twitter exchange to brainstorm some ideas yesterday and this is the guest post that resulted. If anyone else has life experience in this area and wants to do a guest post, email me — I’m jen at grace-filled dot net.

Here’s Thomas:

Hi, I’m Thomas from Listening for the Shepherd. I’m a 28 year old man living in Michigan. I’ve been married for one year and we do not have children yet. I’m a convert to the Catholic faith. I have an undergraduate degree in History and English linguistics. I work as a data analyst. My wife is in grad school. We have a nice suburban home, good cars, we give to charity, and we can afford to take vacations. I’m middle class now, but that’s very new to me. I was raised in poverty in America.

Jen asked me to post about my experiences growing up in poverty in America and to share a few suggestions on how to improve the system.

My Experience
My parents both came from poor families and by the time they were 17 years old, my parents had both dropped out of high school and married each other. My mom worked at McDonalds. I’m not sure what my dad was doing. He’s had so many different jobs I can never keep track. Whatever it was, the pay was lousy. I was born less than a year later.

My mom mostly stayed home to take care of me after I was born. My dad has bounced from one lousy dead-end job to another. We moved a lot. We mostly lived in apartments and trailers, but we also often lived all in one room at the home of a friend or relative, sometimes for years at a time. Eventually, we were always evicted. I changed schools 13 times, by my best calculations. That number doesn’t include switching schools within the same district due to getting older. We moved more often than that, not all the moves caused a change of school. Those changes involved five school districts, we went back and forth from one district to another a lot.

My family has never been on the streets, but there were many times when we didn’t really have a home. We were on food stamps for much of my childhood. They always ran short the final week of the month. Food stamps don’t cover toilet paper, and I can’t tell you how many different odd things I’ve had to wipe myself with. Most of my childhood healthcare has came from Medicaid. Sometimes a decent job came along and things were better for a while. My family did alright economically when I was in middle school, and it was then that I got my brother. If things had been better when I was in high school, I would have another sibling. (Fellow pro-lifers take note.)

My Suggestions
These are suggestions on how to improve the current system, not a drastic overhaul.

-All states should issue food stamp “debit cards” like Michigan. Monthly mailings is a waste of state resources, especially when many recipients move frequently. Having recipients go pick them up wastes their resources (gas, childcare, etc) as well as state resources, since someone has to be employed to hand them to the recipients if they’re picking them up, in dozens to hundreds of locations.

-Food stamps should not be disbursed only once a month. This leads to issues in many households the last week of the month. Also, fresh foods need to be purchased more often. I would recommend disbursal on during both the first and third weeks of the month. This more closely mirrors many bi-weekly paycheck schedules, and families are more accustomed to planning for two weeks.

-Food stamps should also cover some non-food items, like toilet paper, shampoo, dish soap, detergent, and other cleansers and toiletries. These are essential items for everyone. Children need them too, not just food. Jen and I discussed on Twitter that perhaps at least 80% of the allotted funds would have to go to fresh foods and the other 20% could go to approved non-food items and luxury foods (frozen dinners, chips, etc). This would promote budgeting (how much to toilet paper and how much to ice cream?) and healthy food consumption, without totally dictating diet. It would also cut down on wasteful spending at convenience stores, since only a small amount could be spent at them.

-The whole of welfare needs to have an attitude shift. people on welfare need to be treated like people who need help, not like criminals trying to scam somebody. There are people like that, but that’s a small portion. Also, treating people that way makes them more likely to act that way. Suppose someone on welfare makes $20 babysitting. Do you really think that they should receive $20 less in food stamps that month? How are they ever going to get ahead? Maybe they need that money to help catch up on their bills. Non-reliable sources of income shouldn’t count against the reliable source of assistance.

-Also, we should be slower to cut off benefits. If you’ve been on assistance a long time and you suddenly get a decent job, you’re not instantly going to be doing alright, especially since you probably have bills to catch up on and other needs you haven’t addressed in a while. Also, the newly hired are the first fired. It’s very common to loose a job in the first 90 days of employment. Insurance benefits also often don’t kick in until after 90 days. Welfare benefits should continue until at least a month after that point, perhaps at a lesser rate.

-Recipients should be able to easily update their information online, or over the phone. This would make it easier for them to keep up with the demanding “paperwork” associated with being on welfare, and it would also cut down on the need for caseworkers to meet with clients to do things that someone really shouldn’t have to paid to do. This would be aided if the government kept better centralized database records. When a caseworker enters someones name in their database, they should see their marital status and how many kids they have automatically. Why should (dated) paper certificates need to be brought in?

Note: Some might be concerned about such all-encompassing databases existing. I’m telling you they already do. Both the government and corporations have profiles on millions of people. We might as well use the information to make it easier to help people.

These are just a few ideas on how to better help people using the current system.

Thanks Thomas!