There was chaos at City Hall on Tuesday as protesters took over a meeting about Chicago's status as a sanctuary city. ... "Do you as a resident of the City of Chicago believe that we should remain a sanctuary city?" ... The crowd responded with boos and catcalls. The mostly African-American crowd jammed the City Council gallery, with hundreds more downstairs on the first floor held back by officers with bicycles. They're angry the city is spending tens of millions of dollars to shelter migrants, money they say should be going to help Chicagoans in poor neighborhoods.
Well, that's inconvenient for The Powers That Be. One group of useful idiots has realized that another group of useful idiots poses a danger to them, and is reacting. And in other news, MetLife has sold off a bunch of retail space in Water Tower Place in Chicongo for conversion into medical offices or "another type of use". What do you want to bet that old or dying malls in the U.S. start getting converted into immigrant housing?
Additionally, in the US at least, the welfare trap keeps a lot of potentially productive people on the fence and out of action because of how obtuse and out of date some of the restrictions are.
Which ends up even being even more undermining when combined with a totally broken and haphazard economy.
Not that I'd be one to promote or suggest even broader handouts, but there really needs to be less hand wringing over letting people on welfare actually save up their money in order to build up some financial security. The key should be on trying to get people to pull themselves off of the welfare, and a lot of people are only going to do that if they think they can safely survive a few trip ups.
Well, or you could eliminate it altogether obviously and let them sink or swim. I don't have a particularly strong argument against that option admittedly, though I'm not always a fan of taking things completely off the table wholesale unless they've proven to be truly cancerous.
Maybe something along those general lines yeah.
It probably has to be tailored or tiered somewhat based on the circumstances, IE if we're talking welfare based on income, welfare based on (potentially short term) disability, long term disability, etc.
I'm aware that the current system does branch that out into at least two different categories/departments, but even that was pretty dated, based on some research when I was curious about the actual federal bills/laws.
I don't remember how recently it was updated or what was entailed in said updates, but it looked like the majority of the groundwork was outlined back in the 80's, and a lot of the present specifics still seem designed after that fact.
The welfare trap is really so insidious that it really does feel intentionally designed to keep you down.
Like, you could want to be off it. But doing so would put you in a bad spot. Plenty of solid workers I know are stuck in the limbo of "If I work even a single more hour a week, I'd lose my benefits." Which means losing 100s of dollars in exchange for like $30 more on a paycheck. Not only taking away money for trying to improve their station, but actively penalizing doing anything but the barest minimum.
And I can't truly fault a man for choosing to work 20 hours, and get to spend a lot of time with his kids, thanks to those benefits rather than give it all up for the chance to work a full 40 and still earn less overall. Which of course means being stuck in poverty indefinitely because you are earning too little to ever save up.
Even more frustrating is that the actual leeches on the system are using that exact same setup just to be parasites, so any change or attempt to help one or remove the other will inversely effect the opposite side.