New and Creative Ways to Dole Out Money

MyWay/AP:

NEW YORK (AP) – Poor residents will be rewarded for good behavior – like $300 for doing well on school tests, $150 for holding a job and $200 for visiting the doctor – under an experimental anti-poverty program that city officials detailed Monday.

The rewards have been used in other countries, including Brazil and Mexico, and have drawn widespread praise for changing behavior among the poor. Mayor Michael Bloomberg traveled to Mexico this spring to study the healthy lifestyle payments, also known as conditional cash transfers.

(snip)

The theory behind cash rewards is that poor people are trapped in a cycle of repeated setbacks that keep them from climbing out of poverty. A person who doesn’t keep up with his vaccinations and doctor’s visits, for example, may get sick more often and struggle to stay employed.

(snip)

Among the possible rewards in New York’s program are $25 for attending parent-teacher conferences, $25 per month for a child who maintains a 95 percent school attendance record, $400 for graduating high school, $100 for each family member who sees the dentist every six months and $150 a month for adults who work full time.

My take is that anyone who has enough ambition to do well on school tests, hold down a job, (not hard for non-whites to do in affirmative action-crazy NYC), attend PTO conferences, make their children go to school 19 days out of 20, graduate high school (once again, not hard for non-whites to do in NYC’s dumbed down public school system), visit the dentist twice a year, visit primary care physicians about that often, and get vaccinations (being mindful that the “poor” pay very little if anything for such health care), then they probably wouldn’t stay poor for long, if they ever are/were.

But, there are some people who think the plan is half-baked. But before you jump up and down, and think that these dissenters have come around to the IQ-realist way of thinking:

But some critics have raised questions about cash reward programs, saying they promote the misguided idea that poor people could be successful if they just made better choices.

“It just reinforces the impression that if everybody would just work hard enough and change their personal behavior we could solve poverty in this country, and that’s not reflected in the facts,” said Margy Waller, co-founder of Inclusion, a research and policy group in Washington.

Waller, who served as a domestic policy adviser in the Clinton administration, said it would be more effective to focus on labor issues, such as making sure wage laws are enforced and improving benefits for working people.

In other words, Miss Waller is a leftist Democrat, who is arguing with Mike Bloomberg, a liberal Republican, on the proper way to dole out government benefits. Evidently, the option of not spending this money at all, either for omnibus welfare, or for this “conditional cash transfer” scheme, is not considered. This is New York City, after all.

I actually agree that “personal behavior” is the key to eliminating or ameliorating poverty, but some people are unable to change their behavior.

Nevertheless, if the fundamental assumption is that the money should be spent on social insurance/welfare/transfer payments, I would rather see more of it spent on carrot-stick schemes like this, and less of it spent on blanket welfare.

UPDATE 6:30 PM:  Just as I call him a “liberal Republican,” Mayor Bloomberg has officially left the Republican Party to become an independent.  He only joined the Republican Party because there were too many people in front of him in the city’s Democrat Party such that he would have never become Mayor if he would have stayed.

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