I guess my main point would be: If it's supposed to be about good jobs, as SUBSIDY-Sam Brownback says it is, then, when you force the price of a commodity toooo low, and in this case the commodity would be the labor of the poor who have been disqualified
by bureaucrats (who obtain their own paychecks through a type of SOCIALISM for those who get political patronage in our state, NOT on their qualifications to do the work they are doing, i.e. it's all ideology), how in f-ing hell do Republicans think the job-market is going to bid any higher for that labor than what the current price is, which can apparently range from $0 - $280. @ mo.
WHY would whatever jobs that do materialize out of this EXPERIMENT pay more than the going rate for those bodies? They won't, because no one is going to pay more than the going rate. Those won't be good jobs not only because wages will be low but also because Medicaid is gone.
Actually, I have an answer to this question of how Republicans think "decent" paying jobs will come out of this situation and it has to do with something else that is characteristic of the CHURCH-state in Kansas. People will get "decent" (ha!) wages depending upon their acceptance of certain other unstated, non-job-related, "qualifications", which happen ever so co-incidentally to be rather similar to those of the ideological social engineering bureaucrats who are doing this, ergo . . .
Kansas has turned into a market for indentured servants.
“Everybody is concerned that we are shrinking the social safety net. So much of it is happening behind closed doors and under the radar.”
Some 384,000 Kansans, or 13.8 percent of the state’s population, live at or below the poverty line, $23,050 a year for a family of four. That’s up by nearly 80,000 people since before the recession hit in 2008. Among children, the numbers have jumped 34,000, from 14.5 percent to nearly 19 percent. . . .
In May, the sweeping Brownback-led tax code changes that eliminated income taxes for an estimated 191,000 small businesses took away longstanding tax breaks for child- and dependent-care expenses and money spent on food taxes that helped a combined 430,000 Kansans, including the working poor.
Another policy, enacted months before, eliminated food stamps to the families of 2,200 Kansas children, all U.S. citizens, because some income in their households came from family members who were in the country illegally. The state determined they should not be counted in the formula to determine benefits.
Families that qualify for TANF cash assistance, which amounts to $280 a month on average, are among the poorest of the poor, with annual incomes no greater than 28 percent of the federal poverty level — about $6,500 for a family of four.
When Brownback took office, 39,000 severely poor Kansans received TANF. Since October 2011, when the administration instituted stricter rules defining who could receive the cash assistance, 38 percent of them — or almost 15,000 people — no longer do. . . .
In Kansas, the food stamp program has grown substantially under Brownback — up 21 percent, from 260,000 to 315,000 recipients, since he took office. Monthly spending per person has nearly doubled, from $66 to $125.
Even at $16,500 a year in food stamps, if the Hartzes’ food benefit were counted as income, they would still be living at less than 40 percent of the federal poverty level for a family their size.
Read more here:
http://www.kansascity.com/2013/01/05/3996591/poverty-in-kansas-some-fear-that.html#storylink=cpy
7 replies
Poverty in Kansas (Original post)
lastlib (21,569 posts) 
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