BrianGarst.com

From Fox News:

Poor residents will be rewarded for good behavior ? like $300 for doing well on school tests, $150 for holding a job and $200 for visiting the doctor ? under an experimental anti-poverty program that city officials detailed Monday.

The rewards have been used in other countries, including Brazil and Mexico, and have drawn widespread praise for changing behavior among the poor. Mayor Michael Bloomberg traveled to Mexico this spring to study the healthy lifestyle payments, also known as conditional cash transfers.

Well, it’s better than welfare, I’ll tell you that. A part of me wants to say, “Why should government have to spend money treating people like mice to be trained?” Principally it’s an important question. Unfortunately, we already spend far more money on social programs and they aren’t going away. So if we can spend less to get them to avoid needing those programs, it’s a good deal at least in comparison to what we have now. This is certainly preferable to welfare, for instance. Not everyone is behind this idea, leftists are up in arms over the idea that people can affect their own destiny by making good choices (shocking).

But some critics have raised questions about cash reward programs, saying they promote the misguided idea that poor people could be successful if they just made better choices.

We certainly don’t want that. Far better to ram the idea down their throat that they are victims of oppression and there is simply nothing they can do to improve their lot in life except vote Democrat and wait for the inevitable handout, of course.

“It just reinforces the impression that if everybody would just work hard enough and change their personal behavior we could solve poverty in this country, and that’s not reflected in the facts,” said Margy Waller, co-founder of Inclusion, a research and policy group in Washington.

Waller, who served as a domestic policy adviser in the Clinton administration, said it would be more effective to focus on labor issues, such as making sure wage laws are enforced and improving benefits for working people.

Brilliant! It would be more effective to focus on implementing policies that prevent poor people from entering the labor market! I guess Mrs. Waller wants to make sure that making better choices can’t be a solution for the poor, by taking away any and all possible opportunities in order to benefit gangster labor unions. Ah, the modern democratic party, such champions for the poor they are!

Hat tip: Crush Liberalism