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Welfare, no! Minimum wage, no!
WhoMe?, before the 1996 welfare reform act, the biggest government welfare program was Aid to Families with Dependent Children. Spending on it amounted to about .35% of the gross national product. (Hardly on a par with the military budget.)
Furthermore, of the 12.8 million people serviced by AFDC, 9.2 million were children, half of whom were under 6 years of age. Yet, even before welfare reform was enacted, 75% of the families receiving AFDC assistance exited the program within two years.
In addition to AFDC, supplemental insurance was paid to elderly and disabled Americans. There was no federal welfare program for able-bodied adults. See, for example:
epn.org
Granted, children cannot be said to have "earned" welfare payments; the same thing could be said of the disabled (including the chronically mentally ill, etc.). But still...
As for raising the minimum wage, that would not cost taxpayers anything. As a matter of fact, it could help create new taxpayers, by enabling workers to receive a wage high enough to bring them into a taxpaying category.
The only arguments I have seen against raising the minimum wage are practical ones: such as, it could force some employers, who don't make much of a profit anyway, to fire workers, or to replace them with illegal immigrant labor, etc., etc. In other words, it is argued that raising the minimum wage might be counter-productive, and hurt the workers rather than helping them.
jbe
P.S. Pardon my ignorance, but what do you mean by "outcome based education"? |
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