Morning Reads – Thursday, January 11, 2018

You know Eiger, I don’t have problems with cutting corperate taxes to get raises and have better wages. I like getting more money. The kicker is making sure the country has not cut to the point that government can’t function or pay for items it needs (ie. Kansas). We could have placed the new corporate rate at say 24% and still have the huge dividends flowing into my 401(k) in the last 10 days, have money for infrastructure so corporate American can move their people/stuff and have water and sewer connections to function. And just MAYBE show a little compassion for these not so lucky to be getting mega tax breaks, or having issues because of what live hands them, in some cases through no fault of their own. I don’t know if you ever do work with the people on these programs, but not one of the ones I have worked with as a volunteer in the last 10 years ever wants to be in poverty. The work and yet they struggle.

Job training, that is most likely going to get cut to balance the budget…

However, I have not seen the lack of training as the issue. Across the board, it is the finite cutoffs for removing a person from a program, instead of scaling them off of them.

A few years ago I was a mentor for a woman who left her abusive husband and was trying to raise her children with in the programs she needed to just survive. The group I volunteer with helped her find a job, daycare for two of the youngest and a government funded home before I even meet her. I taught her how to balance a checkbook, set budgets, use and pay off her one credit card to raise her credit score, basic cooking, how to find cheep entertainment for the kids. She was doing so well, that another business she worked with offered her a better paying job. Not so large of an increase to lose her home or the WIC for her children, but it was large enough that she would lose the daycare for the two youngest. The cheapest daycare would cost 5 time more a week then what she would gain. She had no choice but to turn down a job that paid more, had better benefits and more options for advancement. Now, if the program had scalable cost to her income instead of ‘If you make less then X you can get Y’ rules in the bill that funded the cost, she could have gotten a higher paying job to work her way out of poverty, learned to add a budget line for daycare and work her way up the ladder. Instead she had to wait 3 years until both kids were in the Pre-K and afterschool programs before she could take a better position. Three years of lower wages, lost chances to earn even more and maybe get off of WIC or out of the projects. Also less taxes got to uncle Sam and into the SSI and Medicaid programs.

She advanced out of my mentoring, but I did talk to her at Christmas time. She is hoping with the tax cut and the possibility of her new employer giving her a raise larger then expected she might be able to move out of government funded housing and into a neighborhood that has a better high school for the oldest to attend in the fall and a better afterschool program for her 3 youngest. I pointed out the additional child credit will help too next year. However, the employer she turned down four years ago already handed out bonces, and introduced additional on the job training most likely related to the tax cuts. Just think how much more she could be making if she didn’t have to turn that job down.

That’s what keeps people in the system longer then needed.

I leave you people alone for six hours… SMH.

In the case where he and his family had to go through a hearing, the Medicaid fraud worker was a new hire and this was one of his first cases. He was questioning whether the doctor was gaming the system. The original video was taken by his sister’s neighbor. It was not the first time he was questions, but normally his medical files have stopped a full investigations. His mother and sister are very aware of what it would look like if he is being watched. They are very protective of him.