food stamps

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Trump’s $300 million ballroom: What else could that money buy?

How about daycare for the children of single mothers? The average cost of it in this country is $343 per week, or $16,464 a year. Even with just one child, that would take a mighty bite out of the single mother’s average yearly earnings of $39,120. Instead of a gilded ballroom, that $300 million could provide a one-year $6000 daycare subsidy for 50,000 single moms. This could help change lives for the better.

Or, that $300 million could pay tuition at community colleges, which averages about $5200 a year. Another 57,692 lives changed for the better.

Or, that $300 million could be invested in CHIP, the Children’s Health Insurance Program, or WIC, the Women, Infants and Children food program. Another 42 million lives changed for the better.

That would be a legacy any president could take pride in.

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Walk in these scuffed shoes, Wall Street Journal editors

jobless

The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page has tut-tutted 90.6 million Americans for being jobless, disabled, uninsured or broke enough to need food stamps.

They “aren’t even looking for a job,” sniffed the Journal, blaming this on too easily accessed social safety net components “that substitute for work” – unemployment insurance, disability payments, food stamps and (“soon”) Obamacare.

According to this view, only the threat of destitution will motivate workers to get jobs.

Why is it that, in this view, workers deserve the stick while executives are thought to merit the carrot of incentives?

Considering the kind of low-wage, dead-end drudgery produced by the ever-expanding “service economy” of burger flipping and bathroom cleaning, it’s understandable why motivation might be hard to maintain. Those seem to be the only kind of jobs that haven’t been outsourced by the hundreds of thousands to subsistence-wage workers in India or Mexico.

I propose a challenge for the Journal’s editorial writers: a one-month sojourn for each of them in the shoes of a laid-off teacher, a disabled factory worker or a single mother whose full-time job doesn’t pay a living wage or provide health insurance.

Move into their homes, shop for clothes with them at Goodwill, wait with them to see a doctor in a community health clinic.

Then tell us what you think based on your experiences, instead of offering judgments that substitute for first-hand knowledge.