Callie Gable finds that John J. DiIulio, Jr., has concerns with Paul Ryan’s idea of turning anti-poverty funds to the states.
He mentions Pennsylvania’s Summer Food Service Program, a federal program intended to replace the nutrition kids get during the school year from free or subsidized lunches, to illustrate how complicated tracking aid and its impacts can be. The program is funded through the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which gives the money to the state of Pennsylvania, which then distributes the money to three major cities in Pennsylvania, which pass it on to Pennsylvania school systems, which give it to individual schools, which then work with any number of local providers.
This money changes hands five times before finally being translated into lunches for kids. And after that, it’s hard to be sure that the community providers are using the funds efficiently and providing a quality service. That’s just one, ancillary program.
My preferred approach to consolidating anti-poverty programs is to send lump-sum funds to individuals, while limiting the use of such funds to “merit goods” such as health care, food, housing, and education. However, I do think that state and local governments must then play a role in identifying specific needs in their jurisdictions and coming up with programs to address those.
Gable point to an article DiIulio wrote in 2012, where he said
About three-quarters of non-profit organizations, including most faith-based ones, spend under a half a million dollars a year and receive little or no government grant or contract money. But the quarter of the sector’s organizations that boast its biggest annual budgets are highly dependent on direct government funding, meaning that one-third of all non-profit dollars are from government, paid through grants or contracts.
This gets back to a point that I have made, which is that I do not think we want to put non-profit organizations on some kind of pedestal.
I do not think that the lump-sum funds would be adequate for everyone. For example, a child with learning disabilities would need more support. A person with a high-cost illness would need more support. etc.
Thank you; that is a very helpful clarification. Uniform, merit-good-eligible lump-sum payments from the federal government for all normal adults, and local discretion and experimentation regarding populations which require further special assistance.
What percentage of additional support is affordable and probable.
It is going to be something like ten percent. That means ten families support one extra needs family.
My point is the extra needs don’t necessitate a nation sized risk pool.
If you’ve been to a Pachenko shop in Japan, and the ubiquitous exchange store down the street, you see one obvious problem with the fungibility of merit-good credits. I like the idea, but it would be interesting to see the grey and black markets for merit good exchanges pop up, and the inevitable enforcement regime. Perhaps you dealt with that in another thread.
Why not look at what happened under President Reagan when the federal government turned the responsibility for mental health care over to the state and local governments.
They did not take up the responsibility. Rather they turned the mentally ill out onto the streets.
This created the problem of homeless people.
Would you believe that before 1980 the US had essentially no homeless people.
It was so rare that the sight seeing buses in New York included a passage thru the Bowery so people could see the homeless people there. Yes, homeless people were so rare that they actually ware a tourist attraction.
Why should I expect a different reaction to Ryan’s proposals?