No, Welfare Does Not Pay More Than Work

As low as minimum wage is, it's still more than welfare. The only welfare that pays more than work - way more than work - is corporate welfare in the form of trillions of dollars in subsidies to Big Oil, Big Coal, Big Gas, Big Ag, Big Pharma and Wall Street every year.

Josh Barro at Business Insider:

The Cato Institute is out with an update to their 1995 study which purports to show that, in most states, welfare pays better than work.

They add up benefits available through eight programs to a low-income woman with two children, and find total benefit values well in excess of full-time minimum wage work, or even, in some states, middle-skill work.

The study is called "The Welfare-Versus-Work Tradeoff," and it's meant to show why people don't get off welfare. And it's B.S., for three reasons.

1. Very few people actually qualify for all eight of the programs Cato looks at. Particularly, Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (cash welfare) and housing assistance can provide some very expensive benefits. But fewer than two million households get TANF and only about four million get housing assistance. It is much more typical for a welfare beneficiary to be getting SNAP (food stamps) and Medicaid (health insurance), but no assistance with housing or cash. So, the typical welfare benefit is much lower than Cato makes out, making staying on welfare less appealing.

2. Welfare benefits for single adults are much less generous than those for women with children.

3. Not all benefits are lost when a welfare recipient starts working. SNAP benefits phase out gradually with rising income. People who go back to work don't necessarily lose health benefits, either. Some get new health benefits through work. The children of low-income uninsured workers qualify for the Children's Health Insurance Program in most states. In some states, low-income working adults even qualify for Medicaid. So, going back to work doesn't mean nearly the loss of benefits that Cato implies.

Not to mention that at least 25 percent of people eligible for food stamps, TANF, subsidized house and other "welfare" benefits don't even apply for the benefits they deserve.

And speaking of "deserving," how much do the taxpayers waste on corporate welfare? Billions of dollars per year just for the fossil fuel industry: even if you distributed it evenly among all the stockholders, it's got to be more than a single mother of two gets from our shredded safety net.