Crush Liberalism

Bloomberg wants to pay the poor to try and live right

From FNC (h/t Kanaka Girl):

Poor residents will be rewarded for good behavior — like $300 for doing well on school tests, $150 for holding a job and $200 for visiting the doctor — under an experimental anti-poverty program that city officials detailed Monday.

The rewards have been used in other countries, including Brazil and Mexico, and have drawn widespread praise for changing behavior among the poor. Mayor Michael Bloomberg traveled to Mexico this spring to study the healthy lifestyle payments, also known as conditional cash transfers.

In New York, the two-year pilot program with about 14,000 participants will use private funds Bloomberg has raised because he did not want to spend government money on something that is highly experimental. More than $43 million has been raised toward the $53 million goal, Deputy Mayor Linda Gibbs said.

The theory behind cash rewards is that poor people are trapped in a cycle of repeated setbacks that keep them from climbing out of poverty. A person who doesn’t keep up with his vaccinations and doctor’s visits, for example, may get sick more often and struggle to stay employed.

Bloomberg, a billionaire Republican, said he believes paying people in such circumstances to make good decisions could help break those patterns. The program “gives New Yorkers in poverty a financial incentive to look ahead and make decisions that will improve their prospects for the future,” he said in a statement.

Seems like a patently ludicrous idea. However, something even stupider follows:

But some critics have raised questions about cash reward programs, saying they promote the misguided idea that poor people could be successful if they just made better choices.

“It just reinforces the impression that if everybody would just work hard enough and change their personal behavior we could solve poverty in this country, and that’s not reflected in the facts,” said Margy Waller, co-founder of Inclusion, a research and policy group in Washington.

Wow. Just “wow”. The idea that poor people could be successful if they made better choices is “misguided”? Poor people changing their self-destructive personal behavior wouldn’t help get them out of poverty? Simply astonishing!

No wonder this lady served as a domestic policy adviser to Bubba! She reinforces leftist politicians’ warped and perverted view that people are simply unable to help themselves out of their predicaments and need the heavy hand of Big Mama Government to provide for them for the rest of their lives. After all, keep a person dependent on government, and you’ve got a guaranteed Democrat voter for the rest of that person’s life (and, in the case of Democrats, even after that person is dead).

June 19, 2007 - Posted by crushliberalism | Bloomberg, economic ignorance