“able-bodied adults to work for food stamps”
“Gov. John Kasich’s administration will limit food stamps for more than 130,000 adults in all but a few economically depressed areas starting Jan. 1.
To qualify for benefits, able-bodied adults without children will be required to spend at least 20 hours a week working, training for a job, volunteering or performing a similar type of activity unless they live in one of 16 counties exempt because of high unemployment. The requirements begin next month; however, those failing to meet them would not lose benefits until Jan. 1.
‘It’s important that we provide more than just a monetary benefit, that we provide job training, an additional level of support that helps put (food-stamp recipients) on a path toward a career and out of poverty,’ said Ben Johnson, spokesman for the Ohio Department of Job and Family Services.
For years, Ohio has taken advantage of a federal waiver exempting food-stamps recipients from the work requirements that Kasich championed while U.S. House Budget Committee chairman during the mid-1990s. Kasich and former Rep. Bob Ney, R-Heath, co-sponsored an amendment requiring able-bodied recipients without dependents to work that was included in sweeping welfare-reform legislation adopted in 1996.
‘The governor believes in a work requirement,’ Kasich spokesman Rob Nichols said yesterday. ‘But when the economy is bad and people are hurting, the waiver can be helpful. Now, fortunately, Ohio’s economy is improving.’”
This comes from a Governor who looks like he could use a little physical work himself.
I was confused, until I realized that Kasich had been mis-spelled Kaisch in the first sentence.
J Goodwin:
Seriously? If that is all it takes . . .
Goodwin
that’s interesting. i think cognitive theory would have predicted you wouldn’t notice the misspelling.
It is hard to be able-bodied without food.
Mr. Critter:
I am starting to like you. In the military, there was a couple of times I lacked food for a couple of days. It is hard to keep your wits about you much less walk.
Shades of the old English 1834 work laws that basically forced the unemployed into unpaid labor in workhouses. I think they outlawed slavery in 1833 and reintroduced it in 1834.
This would only be controversial on a liberal website like Angry Bear. If you are able bodied you should be required to work to get money from the public. There is plenty of work to do: sweep streets etc.
If you pay people to do nothing, they will continue to do nothing.
Sammy:
Kasich is little more than a hypocrite pandering to a select group of overly wealthy individuals and interests. The state does not have enough jobs in which to put 130,000 people to work as admitted by the Ohio Department of Jobs. Furthermore he waives a Federal exemption to this requirement. What is the point as costs are down from the previous year and employment is growing within the state.
To your statement:
“’To dig holes in the ground,’ paid for out of savings, will increase, not only employment, but the real national dividend of useful goods and services. It is not reasonable, however, that a sensible community should be content to remain dependent on such fortuitous and often wasteful mitigations when once we understand the influences upon which effective demand depends.”
The government would be wiser to put people to work for the short term rather than mandate them to work with nothing in which to work. Read more on Edward Lambert’s effective demand to understand where we are today.
If you don’t feed people, they die. Dead people do nothing also.