Scott Sumner: People on Welfare Just Don't Want to Work

     He thinks that welfare makes people lazy-give someone welfare and they'll never get a job.
Why get a job-when you can get something for free?

     http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2015/02/experiments_in.html

     I can speak as someone who has been on UI that it's not quite the Heaven he imagines it would be. I was on UI during 2011 and 2012 and I didn't think 'Gee, now I have it made, I'll never work again.'

     Part of that no doubt was because in the US at least what you get on UI is so meager. I was getting $133 a week-wow! Easy street. I had to struggle from whistling 'Happy days are hear again!'

    At least, for me this was hardly the case. I wasn't wildly happy. I was stuck living in my parents; basement and miserable about that.

     I had to fight depression all the time. I didn't want to live there forever even if my Dad at times seemed to think I was getting a sweet deal 'lving rent free'-as someone who had been on their own for 15 years, I'd rather have paid the rent.

     I wanted to get back on my feet, get my own place again,and get back to my own life which felt like it was on hold. $133 couldn't come close to getting me that-though it did give me enough money at least to set up interviews and take the bus out to be interviewed. Of course, I often would end up wasting the money on fast food.

    So I wanted a job badly. Here Sumner cites an Economist piece that looks at a rather extreme situation-an Indian reservation.

    "ON A rainy weekday afternoon, Mike Justice pushes his two-year-old son in a pram up a hill on the Siletz Reservation, a desolate, wooded area along the coast of Oregon. Although there are jobs at the nearby casino, Mr Justice, a member of the nearly 5,000-strong Siletz tribe, is unemployed. He and his girlfriend Jamie, a recovering drug addict, live off her welfare payments of a few hundred dollars a month, plus the roughly $1,200 he receives annually in "per capita payments", cash the tribe distributes each year from its casino profits. That puts the family of three below the poverty line."

   "It is not ideal, Mr Justice admits, but he says it is better than pouring hours into a casino job that pays minimum wage and barely covers the cost of commuting. Some 13% of Mr Justice's tribe work at the Chinook Winds Casino, including his mother, but it does not appeal to him. The casino lies an hour away down a long, windy road. He has no car, and the shuttle bus runs only a few times a day. "Once you get off your shift, you may have to wait three hours for the shuttle, and then spend another hour on the road," he says. "For me, it's just not worth it."

     http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2015/02/experiments_in.html

     Well, of course, a job at the Casino at that level of compensation isn't worth it. However, this doesn't prove to me that Mike Justice is lazy, just rational. As much as I wanted a job, I wanted one that gave me some chance at saving enough to get back on my feet again, It's true that if you offered me a job that paid less than the $133 a week-after taxes-there'd be little reason for me to have wanted to take it, and I wouldn't have. 

    Why would anyone want to make less working than not working? This doesn't prove whether or not a person prefers working or not working. I remember going for an interview at Dunkin Donuts. Although I had a Bachelor's degree in accounting, I had long since accepted the reality of taking jobs way beneath my level of education-as many college graduates over the last 15 years have come to do. 

     At one time, if you had a college degree, you were guaranteed a decent paying job. This has long since stopped being the case-unfortunately, for me, I entered the workforce just around the time this stopped being the case. In my the first 6 months of my first year after graduating, 2001, I was always able to find entry level jobs in accounting through accounting temp agencies, especially, Accountemps. However, in June of that year, a particular assignment I had with them at a waste disposal company-I was doing their accounts receivables and invoicing, ended. The guy I had dealt with at Accountemps assured me he'd get me something else soon, and up until then he always had but he never got back to me. I called him a lot over the next year and it was the same thing-nothing going on. 

     What I'm discussing here, is kind of off the topic-less about the number of available jobs than the amount of quality jobs, but it's the crux of the matter as well. We've had lots of job creation during the Obama years-as opposed to the Bush years, but so much of it has been more crummy jobs. Sumner fails to  distinguish this. He acts as if a job is a job is a job no matter the pay. 

     When I went to that DD job I realized taht it wasn't very appealing-$8 an hour but only for 15 to 20 hours a week-it's true I realized that I wouldn't want it anyway. Even at 20 hours a week it would be at best a wash compared to what I was getting-$133 in unemployment-once you took out taxes. That doesn't even speak to travelling expenses. 

     Again, Sumner sees it as 'If you pay people for not working why would they want to work' but this abstracts the question of what they are being paid for not working. In my situation I wanted to work but only for a job that paid more than what I was getting which I eventually found. 

    Sumner sees it as a job is a job:

    "Kevin Goodell, a 51-year-old Siletz tribal member, works on the tribe's forestry crew. It had several job openings last year--but no qualified applicants, according to Mr Goodell. He says he tried to get young people interested, but they told him they didn't want to work in the woods. With free housing and health care, "a lot of people have figured out a way to use the system to survive," he says. "Why get a job if you don't need one?"

     "Yes, why get a job?"

      It's the wrong question whether you'd rather work for meager pay or not work for meager pay. On the choice to work or not work a lot of people would actually rather work. 

     http://www.cfeps.org/pubs/wp-pdf/WP50-Tcherneva-Wray.pdf

     With the Jefes' program in Argentina, what happened was that some conservatives came into office who didn't like the program and tried to get people off of it by paying them more money not to work. It was a deliberate move to undermine the job guarantee program.

     The question is what will people do if you offer them decent money for staying home or decent money to work? According to what they saw in Argentina, a lot of people will choose work. There are any number of drawbacks from not having a job. One is boredom, another is lack of a feeling of accomplishment. 

      The question can't be settled by comparing meager money for working vs. meager money for not working. Ideally, a lot of liberals have come to the conclusion that the goal should be a job guarantee rather than guaranteed income. Sumner prefers a wage subsidy. 

     Why work? I think there are many more reasons than simply because welfare benefits have been cut. For one thing someone like me at the time wants to make more money and actually wants to accomplish something in life. Besides this many people get a sense of accomplishment from working and don't without it. 

     I think most people rather than not work for meager funds would rather work for much better funds. A lot of people even given the choice between decent funds for not working and decent funds for working would still choose to work.