Won't someone think of the children?

by: Eric B.

Sat Jul 14, 2012 at 10:33:05 AM EDT

A few weeks ago, Maura Corrigan wrote an Op-Ed in one of the Detroit dailies about how her department is helping children, specifically foster children. She apparently cares about kids, unless they happen to be born into impoverished families.

Thomas was kicked off cash assistance last fall, when the state imposed strict time limits on benefits. Since then, she dropped out of school and lost her home. She tore the boards off an empty home in Detroit and moved in. There’s no heat, electricity or water. The family sleeps on the floor of the empty house and stores food in a Styrofoam cooler.

“Everyone has a story,” says Thomas. “Some are worse off than me. But when you don’t have money to buy tissues, it’s sad.”

Eight months into Michigan welfare reform, it’s difficult to gauge the statewide impact. Thomas has struggled with the changes, as have other families Bridge has tracked since they were removed from the dole. None have jobs. Some are virtually homeless.

It's difficult to gauge that impact, the article later points out, because you need to actually send workers into the streets to talk to the people affected to see how they're faring. That means that at a time when upward mobility and employability is increasingly dependant on access to communications technology, the Internet, and education, to measure how a social engineering program intended to "tough love" people off welfare and into a workforce with very few open jobs (and a good deal fewer openings that don't require specific training, education, and/or experience) is performing.

Michigan undertook this, as we remember, with an attitude best summed up by state Rep. Ken Horn, who said the fathers of these families ought to "man up" and swing a hammer and/or a paint brush. The trick, of course, is finding someone who'll pay you to do it.

It shouldn't be surprising that the state did this. There is the sheer arrogance of launching a social engineering program like this, insisting that you're going to solve a difficult problem like poverty through a program of tough love, and doing so without the first thought to putting in place a system to find out if it's working. Corrigan claimed a few months ago that her department did all this and it wasn't hurting anyone. She was apparently horribly wrong. Should this surprise anyone? This is, after all, the same woman who kicked the state's college students off food stamps at a time when college costs and a public disinvestment in higher education are threatening to turn a generation of students into lifelong indentured servants (and many of whom are working multiple jobs), on the grounds that when she was going through school -- at a time when the state covered about three-quarters of her expenses (i.e. she didn't really put herself through school, the public mostly paid for her education) -- she did so by working a part-time job.