Rampant Welfare Fraud Is A Myth Ontario PCs Have Used To Vilify The Poor

The last time the party exaggerated claims of widespread social assistance fraud, it do so in order to justify deep cuts.

Any day now, Ontario Social Services Minister Lisa MacLeod will release her promised reform plan for social assistance. Given the new Ford government has already rolled back recent social assistance enhancements and ended the basic income pilot, it seems likely that further cuts will be announced.

Q&A: We All Benefit from Welfare. Most of Us Just Don’t Realize It.

In recent decades, Americans have become increasingly angry at the federal government, anger that helped propel Donald Trump to the White House. And yet, more Americans than ever are benefiting from government social programs, many of which the Trump administration is actively working to destroy. Political scientist Suzanne Mettler calls this paradox “the government-citizen disconnect.” Such is the title of Mettler’s new book, which draws on original survey data to explore how the use of 21 federal social policies is connected to Americans’ attitudes about government. She finds that 96 percent of Americans have used at least one of these policies. But partly because of policy design—which makes means-tested programs for the poor more visible than policies for the rich hidden in the tax code—many Americans don’t recognize the value of government social programs. Critically, wealthier Americans—who tend to exert more influence over national politics—often don’t see themselves as benefiting from government support.

Welfare Was ‘Reformed’ 20 Years Ago This Week. I’ve Suffered the Consequences.

This country has a penchant for plans to end poverty that do nothing to actually help families struggling to make ends meet.

This week marks the 20th anniversary of welfare reform, which created work requirements and other barriers for families who need the most basic cash assistance.  The legislation was aimed at getting people to become self-sufficient.  As then-President Bill Clinton put it, “No one who can work should be able to stay on welfare forever.”

Ontario's soaring poverty gap ‘starkest’ for single adults as welfare rates stagnate

After five years on welfare, Pauline Bryant figures she was probably over-qualified to help others “get by on next to nothing” as a part-time community engagement worker last year.

Although the job gave Bryant an extra $600 a month, it didn’t provide medical benefits or enough money to escape welfare. But it eased her sense of isolation.

“What I liked best about working with others on low income was the message: ‘You are not alone,’ ” says Bryant, 53. “That’s what I held onto. I realized it’s not just me.”

Hillary Clinton Defends Welfare Reform

In running to be the Democratic presidential nominee, Bernie Sanders has used the issue of welfare reform against rival Hillary Clinton, a bill he didn’t vote for at the time but for which Clinton helped round up votes while her husband was president.

Now Clinton has spoken out to explain her support of the law at the time and the way she views it in an interview with WNYC.

PMQs: David Cameron Accused Of Employing More Staff For Benefits Crackdown Than Collecting Tax

David Cameron has been accused of employing ten times as many civil servants to crackdown on benefit fraud than chasing tax avoidance.

But the Prime Minister rejected the claim by the Scottish National Party’s Angus Robertson as “bogus” during his weekly parliamentary grilling that was dominated by the fall-out from the Panama Papers.

During Prime Minister’s Questions, Robertson, the SNP’s leader in Westminster, told the Commons that 3,250 Department for Work and Pensions staff have been specifically investigating benefit fraud - while only 300 HM Revenue and Customs staff have been investigating tax evasion.

Nothing Bill Clinton Said To Defend His Welfare Reform Is True

Everything Bill Clinton said Thursday to defend his 1996 welfare reform law was false.

Clinton claimed that he left the program with plenty of money for poor people, suggested that it helped reduce black poverty and that it was only the mean, nasty Republicans from the George W. Bush era who gutted it and hurt the poor. Clinton’s distortions of economic history and his own record are so outrageous that — you will be shocked — it is difficult to believe he was being honest.

It’s Time for Welfare Reform Again

In 1992, Bill Clinton ran for president promising to “end welfare as we know it.” In 2016, Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders should promise to bring welfare back.

Thus far, they are doing no such thing. Neither Clinton nor Sanders has a welfare-reform proposal, despite the raft of options they have floated for helping lower-income families. Neither Clinton nor Sanders brings up welfare when discussing what good they would do for the poor. Neither campaign even bothered to get back to me when I requested comment for this piece. But our broken welfare program has left hundreds of thousands of people in extreme poverty, living on less than $2 a day per person. A battle between a fiercely progressive presidential candidate and an only slightly less fiercely progressive presidential candidate has somehow managed to overlook and avoid confronting the ragged hole at the very bottom of our safety net. This is a policy outrage and a moral blight.

Minister, Is $21 a Week Enough for Food?

Individuals dependent on the provincial government for financial assistance in British Columbia have about $21 a week to spend on food, according to the organizers of the Welfare Food Challenge that launched this week.

Asked if $21 a week is enough for food, the minister for social development Michelle Stilwell said, "I think certainly the comprehensive support system we have in place for individuals on income assistance and persons with disabilities helps support them in a multitude of ways."

Cost of Ontario’s 1995 ‘welfare diet’ soars amid inadequate rates

Despite more than a decade of yearly rate increases and small policy adjustments, people who rely on social assistance are hungrier today than in 1995, when the former Mike Harris Conservative government gutted the province’s welfare system, according to a new report.

Twenty years ago this month, Harris’s social services minister David Tsubouchi suggested a single, able-bodied person on welfare could survive on a monthly food budget of $90.21.

Ontario Needs To Spend Millions To Fix Troubled Welfare Payment System

TORONTO - Ontario's minister of community and social services can't say whether the government will have to shell out more money to fix a support payment system that has already cost the province an additional $29 million.

The Social Assistance Management System, which is responsible for welfare and disability support payments, has been plagued by problems since it was implemented in the fall, a government-commissioned report found.

Kansas To Impose Unprecedented Restriction On Welfare Recipients

The Kansas legislature has sent a bill to Gov. Sam Brownback’s (R) desk that limits welfare recipients to withdrawing just $25 a day from their benefits and enacts a range of other restrictions.

If Brownback signs the law, recipients of the state’s Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) program would only be able to withdraw $25 a day with their benefits cards from ATMs, which act like debt cards. No other states or the federal government currently limit withdrawals.

Policy Allows Families on Welfare to Keep More Cash

The British Columbia government this week announced a change to welfare policy, which it said would help more than 10,600 families. But within hours of the announcement, more detailed figures from a government staffer showed that the number of families that stand to gain is fewer than 600.

"There'd be about 10,600 individuals who will benefit from this change," Michelle Stilwell, the minister of social development and social innovation, told reporters Tuesday while announcing an increase to the earnings exemption limit.

Earnings exemptions allow a person receiving income assistance to earn and keep a certain amount of money before the government begins reducing their welfare payment.

Frozen: BC Welfare Rates Haven't Risen in Eight Years

In a gesture to British Columbia's lower-income residents, the government last month ended a much-reviled clawback on child support payments. But it did not increase general welfare rates. In fact, income assistance rates haven't budged for eight years.

And the province's finance minister has no immediate plans to raise rates.

"We continue to examine the rates," Mike de Jong told The Tyee in an interview. "As our financial health improves, it's an area that we may acquire more of an ability to address. We haven't found ourselves in that position to this point."

Denmark's Welfare System Means It Has One Of The Narrowest Wealth Gaps In The World

COPENHAGEN - This is what it's like to live in Denmark, a nation with a narrower wealth gap than almost anywhere else: You've been jobless for more than a year. You have no university degree, no advanced skills. You have to pay a mortgage. And your husband is nearing retirement.

You aren't worried.

If you're 51-year-old Lotte Geleff, who lost her job as an office clerk in January 2013, you know you'll receive an unemployment benefit of 10,500 kroner ($1,902) a month after taxes for up to two years. You're part of a national system of free health care and education for everyone, job training, subsidized child care, a generous pension system and fuel subsidies and rent allowances for the elderly.

And high taxes.

After $66 Million Spent on 'Talk,' Has BC Reworked Aboriginal Child Welfare?

It's been over six months since B.C.'s child watchdog revealed the province spent roughly $66 million between 2002 and 2013 on "talk" with indigenous family service organizations and governments, rather than concrete services for kids and families.

The sum was in addition to the $90 million the government provides to indigenous organizations to run child and family services every year.

"What this report reveals may shock some British Columbians, and hopefully it will prompt some change in how [the ministry] and the provincial government as a whole approaches the difficult job of serving this vulnerable sector of our population," child and youth representative Mary Ellen Turpel-Lafond said at the release of the report, "When Talk Trumped Service," in November.

How Big Banks Swipe Millions From Welfare Recipients

Dominique Hudson is fed up with giving Wells Fargo her bus money.

Each month, the 18-year-old from Oakland, Calif., pays the bank about $12 in ATM fees to access cash from CalWORKS, California’s principle welfare program. The mother of a 3-year-old boy who relies on the public bus to get to her minimum wage job at a grocery store, Hudson could use that money for about five commutes.

Ministry Cuts Funds to Aboriginal Child Welfare Programs

Two months after a watchdog report criticized how the B.C. government delivers aboriginal child welfare services in the province, saying it was all talk and no action, the government has cut funding to 18 indigenous-run projects intended to deliver those services, effective the end of this month.

Indigenous Approaches, or IAs, are community-based projects designed to identify and fill perceived gaps in the ministry's child welfare services for aboriginal families.

Despite comprising four per cent of B.C.'s population, over half of the children in government care currently are aboriginal. Projects funded through the IA program are intended to combat that by funding services like patient navigators, people whose job it is to guide parents or guardians through interactions with government social workers and family courts; establishing community gardens to prevent child hunger and neglect for low-income families; and training social workers in the culture, history, and traditions of the First Nations they work with to help them better understand the community they serve.*

Tory MP Nadhim Zahawi Calls For 'Two Child Limit' On Benefits

Families would only be able to claim benefits for two children under plans put forward by a member of David Cameron's policy board aimed at cutting billions of pounds off the welfare bill.

The radical proposals set out by Tory MP Nadhim Zahawi would limit child benefit and child tax credits to families' first two children.

Writing in the Mail on Sunday he said capping benefits by family size would "save billions and help the next generation think more carefully about their relationship with the welfare state".

Welfare minister urges local councils to invest in food banks

The welfare minister, Lord Freud, has been accused of "rowing away from the principle of welfare" after he urged local authorities to invest money in food banks, saying that it was "absolutely appropriate" that charities provided free food parcels for people who could not afford groceries.

Freud made his comments at a conference on welfare reform, after being asked by an audience member whether it was sustainable that working people were increasingly turning to food banks and hardship funds to get by.