Pennsylvania Moves to Starve Poor People
That’s the message I came away with after reading an online article from a Philadelphia Inquirer reporter about a decision by the state of Pennsylvania to limit eligibility for food stamps. The article is a perfect example of the difficulty advocates for limited government face in communicating their ideas through the mainstream press.
At issue is the PA Department of Public Welfare’s decision to eliminate eligibility for food stamps for people under the age of 60 who have more than $2,000 in assets (the value of one’s house, retirement benefits, and car would be excluded). The DPW estimates that only “2 percent of the 1.8 million Pennsylvanians receiving food stamps would be affected by the asset test.” Indeed, the DPW’s website notes that “Because of changes to SNAP, most Pennsylvania households are not subject to a net income limit, nor are they subject to any resource or asset limits.”
(SNAP is the acronym for the federal Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, which was known as the Food Stamp program until 2008 when Congress changed its name to sound more palatable. The program is run jointly by the U.S. Department of Agriculture and state governments, but federal taxpayers pay for the direct benefits.)
One of the “changes” that the DPW refers to is categorical eligibility, which basically means that Pennsylvania households already receiving benefits from other welfare programs, including cash welfare and Supplemental Security Income, automatically qualify for food stamps. In recent years, both the state of Pennsylvania and the federal government have made it easier to qualify for food stamps benefits.
Unfortunately, the Inquirer reporter either wasn’t aware of these details or didn’t deem them important enough for inclusion. Instead, he quotes ten—let me repeat that, ten—critics of the DPW’s decision. The critics include a “national hunger expert,” the legal director of a “leading anti-hunger group,” the executive director of the Greater Philadelphia Coalition Against Hunger, the executive director of the “liberal Pennsylvania Budget and Policy Center,” and an older woman who says that she’ll “have to give up paying for my health insurance.”
It took me all of two minutes to get a quote from Nathan Benefield, the director of policy analysis at Pennsylvania’s pro-liberty Commonwealth Foundation:
Unfortunately for taxpayers, politicians in Harrisburg and Washington have for the past few years considered it a “success” to have more families on welfare. Pennsylvania welfare eligibility and spending—including for food stamps—has exploded, threatening to crowd out everything else in the state budget. Means testing for assets is a common-sense reform to ensure those who truly need aid get it.
There, was that so hard?
Of course, journalists who are interested in getting the pro-liberty take on welfare reform are welcome to contact my colleagues and me at the Cato Institute. Honestly, we don’t want people to starve in order to save a buck—we just believe that the federal government is an improper and less effective means for assisting those who are truly in need. Pressed for time? Here are Cato essays on food subsidies, welfare, and federal subsidies to state and local government.
School Choice Murder-Suicide in Pennsylvania
A huge school choice opportunity has been lost for the moment in Pennsylvania. But that lost opportunity is not the voucher program that has drawn so much attention.
The political conflagration touched off by the push for a targeted, failing-schools voucher program incinerated along with it a massive expansion of an existing, popular, successful, bipartisan-supported, and better program; the Educational Improvement Tax Credit (EITC). The House passed this expansion of credit program by a massive margin. And when I say “massive,” I mean 96 percent in favor to 4 percent opposed. Unfortunately, a stand-alone credit bill was not considered in the Senate, and the expansion fell by the wayside as the voucher battle raged.
In the next session, it would be good policy and politics to consider vouchers and credits separately. They are substantively different means of fostering choice, and the public deserves a clear debate and vote on both policies in separate bills.
The Educational Improvement Tax Credit program is vastly superior to all of the voucher bills. Vouchers are open to credible legal challenges, afford no accountability directly to taxpayers, and government money brings stifling government regulations. Furthermore, giving vouchers only to kids in or around “failing schools” won’t produce a dynamic market because there is an ambiguous, limited, and potentially shifting customer base. A failing-schools voucher program is a terrible policy design.
The EITC should not be legislatively handcuffed to vouchers. Vouchers are an inferior policy and a proven political liability. For once the popular, politically smart, most principled, and most effective thing to do are all the same; drop the voucher drama and expand the education tax credit program.
Tuesday Links
- “Vouchers and tax credits differ from one another in important ways, and Pennsylvanians deserve to have their representatives consider them one at a time.”
- “So, if the Supreme Court’s precedents defer to Congress’ assessments of its powers, but Congress is relying for ‘constitutional authority’ on the Supreme Court’s precedents, then NO ONE is actually looking at the Constitution itself to see if a bill is within Congress’ enumerated powers.”
- “Carbon dioxide, thought to be a significant cause of the warming of surface temperature since the mid-1970s, is currently the respiration of the world’s economic civilization. Getting rid of it isn’t as simple as banning CFCs and switching to another refrigerant.”
- “As Arthur Schlesinger Jr. explained in his book of that name, the presidency’s transformation from limited, constitutional office to Supreme Warlord of the Earth has been ‘as much a matter of congressional abdication as of presidential usurpation.’”
- It’s the expenditures, stupid:
Educational Freedom in Pennsylvania
The Pennsylvania state House has just passed an expansion of its existing k-12 scholarship-donation tax credit program. The vote was a deafening 190 to 7 in a state that has voted Democratic in every one of the last five presidential elections.
Nevertheless, there is serious opposition to this expansion of education tax credits in the Senate, where several prominent lawmakers prefer a voucher bill. It’s not clear which path the legislature will ultimately take, but there seems to be considerable agreement on the goal: giving parents true freedom of choice in education.
A key point to consider, then, is which type of program is most likely to preserve the freedom and diversity of the education marketplace, thereby giving families a meaningful range of alternatives to choose from. I ran a regression study on precisely this question last fall (now forthcoming in the peer-reviewed Journal of School Choice). What I found is that vouchers impose a large and statistically highly significant burden of additional regulation on private schools while tax credits do not.
This is not the only advantage of the tax credit program, but it is a compelling one.
Pennsylvania School Choice Bills
Much attention and controversy have been focused in recent months on Pennsylvania Senate Bill 1, which would create a government-funded school voucher program. Less attention, and far less controversy, accompanied the passage yesterday of an expansion of the state’s existing education tax credit program out of the House education committee. The vote was 21 to 4.
Apart from the seemingly more favorable reception it is receiving, the tax credit program has three notable advantages: it is less likely to curtail educational freedom by suffocating participating private schools with regulation (which would defeat the purpose of a school choice program), it does not force taxpayers to support types of education that may violate their convictions, and it encourages direct co-payments by parents toward the cost their children’s education, when they can afford to do so (which is associated in the international and historical research with higher school efficiency and greater responsiveness to parents’ demands).
Worth thinking about.
Monday Links
- A year later, Obamacare makes Pennsylvanians say “no thank you.”
- In a peculiar set of responses to inquiries about Libya, the Obama administration makes “kinetic military action” against the English language.
- Full or substantial government health insurance makes for an inefficient and expensive health care system.
- Emotionalism as democratic waves spread across the Middle East makes incoherent foreign policy.
- As long as big ticket items continue to make the cut, our fiscal house will remain in disarray.
- If you didn’t get a chance to celebrate Earth Hour Cato-style over the weekend, check out this clip of senior fellow Jerry Taylor making the case against “green” subsidies:
Who’s Blogging about Cato
Here’s a roundup of bloggers who are writing about Cato research and commentary:
- Blogging for CEI’s OpenMarkets.org, Ryan Young used Edward Crane’s op-ed about conservatives’ shortcomings.
- At The Hill‘s Congress Blog, Minnesota Rep. Michele Bachmann cited Cato research that shows that taxpayers spend about $300 billion per year on tax preparation services.
- Cory Doggett blogs regularly about oil issues, and has been writing a lot lately about Patrick J. Michaels’ work on climate change.
- At The Liberty Papers, Brad Warbiany quoted David Rittgers on the drug war in Afghanistan.
- FreedomPolitics.com editor Bill Goodwin blogged about the controversy over private property and the 9/11 memorial in Pennsylvania, linking to Ilya Shapiro’s commentary.
Are you blogging about Cato, but not on the list? Drop us a line and let us know!
Will Specter Turn Left?
I offer some evidence in today’s Chicago Tribune:
Last week, Pennsylvania Sen. Arlen Specter was one of the most liberal Republicans in the Senate. Today, he’s the most conservative Democrat….
But party-switchers often change their votes as well as their labels.
The day after Republicans won control of the Senate in 1994, Sen. Richard Shelby of Alabama switched to the Republican Party. He had been a relatively conservative Democrat and had high-profile conflicts with President Bill Clinton, so the switch wasn’t a great surprise. But observers might be surprised to look back at what happened to Shelby’s voting record. According to the American Conservative Union, for eight years Shelby’s conservative voting percentage had ranged between 43 and 76. Even in 1994, as Shelby often found himself opposing the Clinton administration, the ACU gave him only a 55. But from 1995 to 2000, his ACU rating only once dipped below 90, and he scored a perfectly conservative 100 in 2000 and 2001….
In 2001, Sen. Jim Jeffords of Vermont left the Republican Party and became an independent. Conservatives said he was actually voting like a liberal Democrat. But that wasn’t quite right. Since he entered the Senate in 1989, his average ACU rating had been 27 — definitely the most liberal Republican, but not Ted Kennedy country. His ADA average was 58 — liberal for a Republican, but a long way from Vermont Democrat Pat Leahy. After the switch, Jeffords’ ACU rating started falling like GOP approval ratings: from 40 in 1999 to 29 in the year of the switch to 6, 10, 4, 8 and 4 during the rest of his tenure.
Specter says he won’t become a party-line Democrat, any more than he’s been a reliable Republican vote. But the evidence from previous party-switchers is that his votes will end up much more in line with his new party.
Women’s Suffrage Abandoned. “Too Unpopular,” says Anthony.
Reversing his earlier support for private school choice in the District of Columbia, Washington Post columnist Jay Mathews now calls for the end of the DC Opportunity Scholarship program. Why? “Vouchers help [low income] kids, but not enough of them. The vouchers are too at odds with the general public view of education. They don’t have much of a future.”
So private school choice programs work, but because they are not growing quite fast enough for Mr. Mathews’ taste we should abandon the entire enterprise? Why keep striving for total victory when can seize defeat today!
The thing is, major social changes are usually, what’s the word… oh yes: hard. Susan B. Anthony co-founded the National Women’s Suffrage Association in 1869. She died in 1906 – 14 years, 5 months and five days before passage of the 19th Amendment. If a social reform is right and just, it will inspire reformers who will fight for it every bit as long as it takes.
And even those who decide what social reforms to support based on their popularity should take note that school choice programs are proliferating all over the country. And newer tax credit programs, such as Florida’s, Pennsylvania’s, and Arizona’s, are all growing at a faster rate than older voucher programs like the one in Milwaukee. More than that, the politics of school choice have already begun to change at the state level. While Democrats in Congress had no qualms slipping a shiv into the futures of 1,700 poor kids, more and more of their fellow party members at the state level are deciding to back educational freedom.
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