Welfare Is Great—for the Welfare Bureaucrats
The clients get a confusing maze and a lot of incentives to stay on welfare.
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The clients get a confusing maze and a lot of incentives to stay on welfare.
The bureaucracy surrounding welfare programs makes them very expensive, inefficient, and confusing to navigate.
The money gets to people quickly, and most of it goes for food, housing, or utilities. Recipients report better mental health and lower hunger rates.
Share After the pandemic took away Shardae Jenkins’s retail job, the 23-year-old single mother from Anacostia got behind on her bills and struggled to pay rent. She began wondering how she’d buy diapers for her one-year-old son. Then in August, some unexpected assistance arrived: $1,050 wired into her bank account—the first of five monthly installments. The cash came with no rules, so Jenkins used it to pay creditors and purchase necessities. In a time of crisis, it was a critical source of stability. Jenkins and her son are among the nearly 500 struggling families from the DC’s Ward...