The Walker administration Wednesday touted a new report that showed nearly 12,000 people on food stamps found work in the first year after the state implemented a new job-training requirement.
The report also showed more than 41,000 able-bodied adults without kids were cut off from the program over a nine-month period after they failed to meet the work requirement and exhausted their three months of time-limited benefits.
And I love this little piece of logic:
But Dem Rep. Deb Kolste, D-Janesville, said she wanted more details on the kinds of jobs participants obtained, wondering if the paychecks are enough. Kolste said she has no problem requiring those on food stamps to participate in job-training programs, but questioned cutting them off.
If we aren’t willing to cut them off, then what incentive do the participants have to do what they’re supposed to do? Clearly, the people who have dropped out of the program have made the calculation that they would rather give up the food stamps rather than go to training. Who are we to argue?
It is a good thing.
The liberal reaction still shocks me. The “how dare we let these people live and think on their own” liberal attitude wears me pretty thin.
For many that were kicked off the job training offered amounted to “mandatory volunteering” which allowed them to clean apartments or do menial labor in exchange for their benefits. Since single adults were getting the equivalent of $18 a month in food stamps it made more sense to go to the local food pantry rather than be used to do volunteer work for no pay that didn’t lead to marketable job skills. The $60 million could have been better spent enrolling Food Share recipients in tech school programs giving them the needed skills for all of the jobs that Walker claims are going unfilled because of a lack of skilled workers. A middle class man with 20 years of management experience was placed in a fast food job at minimum wage and told that some day he might be able to own a franchise. Others put in the “mandated volunteering program cleaning apartments were told this would build their resume. These people are poor and are forced to live in the shadows but are not stupid and can easily see that they are being used and victimized. The Food Share training program is working like Walker wanted it to……….to reduce the numbers receiving food stamps but not to make them independent skilled workers!