Reason #6389 that Trump was Elected

Gov’t Dependency Plunges Under Trump — Why Aren’t We Celebrating?

Friday’s jobs report showed that the economy created 224,000 new jobs, yet the unemployment rate edged up to 3.7%.

Both are welcome news. The unemployment rate went up because 158,000 rejoined the labor market. These are people who previously didn’t have a job and weren’t looking for one.

The labor market is tight enough that people who’d given up on work are getting lured back into the job market. And they’re finding work.

As of June, there were 5.6 million more people with jobs than when President Trump took office — despite claims by prominent economists that the economy was already at full employment when he was sworn in.

The healthy labor market has resulted in something even more important yet little noticed: A sharp trend away from dependency on federal welfare and other benefits.

Take a look at the numbers:

Food Stamps. The Department of Agriculture reports that April enrollment in food stamps — which is officially called the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program — was down more than 308,000. So far this year, SNAP enrollment has declined by nearly 1.2 million. And since Trump took office, the number of people collecting food stamps has plunged by more than 6.7 million. Enrollment is now lower than it’s been since August 2009.

Disability. The number of workers on Social Security’s Disability Insurance program has sharply declined as well. It went from 88 million in January 2017 to 84.9 million as of May. That’s the lowest it’s been since August 2011. Some of that decline is because beneficiaries who turn 65 shift over to regular Social Security. But the data also show that new disability applications are down. Average monthly applications for SSDI this year is 9% below where it was in 2016, government data show.

Medicaid. Enrollment in Medicaid also has dropped sharply since Trump took office — despite the fact that Virginia decided to expand its program under Obamacare, which added some 300,000 to its Medicaid rolls over those years. As of this March, the total number of people on Medicaid and CHIP — the health insurance program for children — was down by 2.5 million.

Obamacare. The number enrolled in Obamacare has declined every year since Trump took office as well, and is now 1 million below where it was at the end of 2016.

Welfare. The number of those collecting welfare — either on the federal Temporary Assistance for Needy Families or what are called “separate state programs” — has dropped by more than 800,000 under Trump.

This is all good news, and most of it is in sharp contrast to the previous administration. Food stamp enrollment was 13 million higher when Obama left office than when he came in. There were 1.4 million more workers on disability. Medicaid enrollment exploded thanks to Obamacare. The number on welfare was only slightly lower by the end of Obama’s two terms in office, despite the fact that the recession ended six months after he was sworn in.

In a less biased news media world, the decline in government dependency would be front-page news.

To the liberals in the news, less people dependent on the government and less likely to vote for Democrats. No reason to celebrate that!

Reason #6663 That Trump Was Elected

Huge Number Of Illegals Opting Out Of Welfare Programs Fearing Trump Admin Crackdown

Illegal immigrants are opting out of government welfare programs out of fear of Trump Administration crackdowns coming done the pike, reported POLITICO on Monday.

Due to a proposed Trump Administration rule to deny legal status to illegals on welfare, both legal and illegal immigrants have been inundating health care providers with calls demanding they be dropped from federal assistance programs like WIC. "Agencies in at least 18 states say they’ve seen drops of up to 20 percent in enrollment, and they attribute the change largely to fears about the immigration policy," says the report.

WIC, or the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children, is a federally-funded assistance program from the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA), providing health benefits and services for low income mothers and their children.

Illegal immigrants are asking to be dropped from the welfare program because they are scared of being deported, while some legal immigrants apparently believe their legal status will be in jeopardy because of rumors circulating about potential Trump Administration rules, according to health officials speaking to POLITICO.

I guess they didn't need it that bad, after all.

Jobs For Bureaucrats

Students in the Joliet Job Corps Security/Military Career Preparation 

Read it and weep: Failure: The $1.7 Billion Federal Job Corps Program Doesn’t ‘Demonstrate Beneficial Job Training Outcomes’

The Department of Labor’s Job Corps program receives an annual budget of $1.7 billion dollars. You’d think a program that is a sacred cow to people on both sides of the aisle and with that budget pushes out success after success.
Nope. This Great Society program birthed by JFK’s brother-in-law R. Sargent Shriver has turned into a money pit, a waste of that taxpayer money, according to those close to the program who spoke to The New York Times:

“Job Corps doesn’t work,” said Teresa Sanders, a former teacher at the North Texas center who quit in frustration in 2015 after a rash of violent episodes inside the center, but who keeps in touch with dozens of former students through a Facebook page. “The adults are making money, the politicians are getting photo ops. But we are all failing the students.”
In April, the Labor Department’s own inspector general starkly concluded that “Job Corps could not demonstrate beneficial job training outcomes.”
The labor secretary, Alexander Acosta, who oversees Job Corps, is the latest in a succession of federal officials, starting in the Reagan administration, who have vowed to overhaul the program. Job Corps, Mr. Acosta said in an email, “requires fundamental reform.”
“It is not enough to make changes at the margins,” he added. “We need large-scale changes.”

NH Job Corps Center in Manchester

The North Texas Job Corps Center just north of Dallas houses 436 students in a building surrounded by a chain-link fence and you can only enter “through a gate manned 24 hours by guards hired to keep out any intruders.” Student Donnell Strange told the NYT the camp is “a little like prison.”

In April, The Wall Street Journal reported that 87% of those in the Job Corps lives in these dorms. The program “provides meals, medical care, books, clothing, and supplies, as well as an allowance for childcare and living expenses.” This costs a single taxpayer around $33,990.

But even those students in the program and college students who study these sorts of programs have started to question the validity of the Jobs Corp:
. . .
Even teachers advise students to escape:

One vocational instructor at North Texas, all too aware of the program’s shortcomings, has tried to focus on the barest basics of being a wage-earning employee: Show up on time, do not cuss out the boss and refrain from drinking or getting high during work hours.
But for the two or three students he feels are work-ready, he offers different advice: Drop out of the Job Corps the minute someone offers you a decent job paying around $12 per hour. The teacher wanted his name withheld because his approach conflicted with that of the management company.

Look at what the Inspector General found in April:

Job Corps’ record-keeping is a hot mess, but in 27 of 50 cases where full employment data existed, graduates were working the same sort of low-wage, low-skill jobs they held before training. One participant completed 347 days of Job Corps carpentry training but five years later worked as a convenience-store clerk for $11,000 a year. Job Corps called this as a successful outcome, so what do failures look like?
In 2011 the IG found the program matched more than 1,500 students with “jobs that required little or no previous work-related skills, knowledge, or experience, such as fast food cooks and dishwashers that potentially could have been obtained without Job Corps training.” The audit also found Job Corps had placed nearly one in five graduates in jobs that “did not relate or poorly related to the students’ training.”
The new report suggests that Job Corps’ biggest beneficiaries may be government contractors, not rookie job seekers. Job Corps spent more than $100 million between 2010 and 2011 on transition-service specialists to place students in a job after training.

Who says it doesn't make jobs?

Reason #5898 That Trump Was Elected

Mexican man assumed American identity for 37 years

A Mexican man who was deported twice and had a history of arrests was able to assume the identity of an American citizen and receive more than $360,000 in government benefits for nearly four decades, California court records show.

Andres Avelino Anduaga used a fake birth certificate starting in 1980 to develop a seemingly legitimate persona by applying for a California driver's license, Social Security number and U.S. passport, according to documents obtained by the San Diego Union-Tribune. The official U.S. documents identified him as Abraham Riojos, born in Texas in 1958.

Anduaga, who's actually 66 years old and a resident of Tijuana, Mexico, pleaded guilty last week in San Diego to theft of public property and being a previously removed unauthorized immigrant in the U.S., the newspaper reported Saturday.

He has agreed to pay back government agencies what he stole but could face additional fines and 12 years in prison when sentenced in May.

$360 k in 37 years?  That's not even $10 k per year, not even a living wage. Now wonder he couldn't afford to live in the US!

Investigators turned to border crossing records, finding frequent travels indicating Riojos had likely been living in Mexico.

So where did the money come from?

An analysis of Anduaga's benefits showed he first applied for Supplemental Security Income benefits in 1989 and was awarded payments retroactive to 1988. He received monthly payments — $244,441 total — until Aug. 1, 2016, according to his plea agreement.

He also qualified for Medi-Cal benefits and payments and received $112,981 total. In addition, he illegally received more than $3,486 in food stamps under a county program, according to records.

DACA ends with a whimper:  DACA's March 5 'deadline' marks only inaction. Trump offered Democrats a great deal, and they refused. They'd rather have the issue than a solution.

Reasons #5638-5639 That Trump Was Elected

U.S. Job Openings Surge to Record in Sign of Robust Labor Demand

A June surge in U.S. job openings to a record indicates demand for workers remained strong at the end of the second quarter, a Labor Department report showed Tuesday.

The gain in job openings underscores the need for workers in an economy that’s continuing to expand. At the same time, the pool of qualified Americans is shrinking and making some positions tougher to fill, one reason economists expect the monthly pace of hiring will eventually cool. July figures released last week showed payrolls increased more than forecast while the unemployment rate matched a 16-year low, as Americans came off the sidelines to join the labor force and many found work.

More Than 1.1 Million Fewer Americans on Food Stamps Under Trump

More than 1.1 million Americans dropped off the food stamp rolls since President Trump took office in January 2017, according to the latest U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) statistics on food stamp enrollment.

Participation in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) dropped to 41,496,255 in May 2017, the most recent data available from the USDA, from 42,691,363 in January 2017 when Trump took office.

According to the latest data, SNAP enrollment during the first few months of Trump’s presidency decreased by 2.79 percent.

Food stamp participation on average in 2017 has dropped to its lowest level since 2010, and the latest numbers show that this trend is continuing.

Under democrats that would be a crisis, not an advance. Can't let too many of the proles become self sufficient.

Reason #5498 That Trump Was Elected

Enough said.

Linked at Pirate's Cove in the weekly "Sorta Blogless Sunday Pinup" and links.

Zoo Welfare System Corrupts Panda Mom

Live Broadcast Of Panda Birth Cancelled After It Emerges The Mother Was Faking Her Pregnancy

Wow, we even get a hot tub!

The broadcast was planned after giant panda Ai Hin began showing signs of pregnancy at the Chengdu Breeding Research Centre in China, AFP reports state news agency Xinhua as saying.

Pandas thought to be pregnant receive 24-hour care, more food, and live in an air-conditioned single room.

Wu Kongju, who works at the centre, told Xinhua: “They also receive more buns, fruits and bamboo, so some clever pandas have used this to their advantage to improve their quality of life.”

It is thought Ai Hin may have experienced a “phantom pregnancy”.

The Chinese news agency says that bears have been known to display signs of being pregnant after becoming aware of the preferential treatment.

That's pretty clever for a bear to figure out it's being favored because it's keepers suspect it's pregnant. It makes you wonder about our definition of intelligence. Maybe we shouldn't let them go instinct after all.

I've cited this before with respect to the corrupting influence of welfare, Optimal Foraging Theory:

Optimal foraging theory is an idea in ecology based on the study of foraging behavior and states that organisms forage in such a way as to maximize their net energy intake per unit time. In other words, they behave in such a way as to find, capture and consume food containing the most calories while expending the least amount of time possible in doing so. The understanding of many ecological concepts such as adaptation, energy flow and competition hinges on the ability to comprehend what food items animals select, and why.

When you extend the idea to humanity, you can immediately see how a welfare system balloons from a system intended to help the poor who cannot take care of themselves to a system covering a large fraction of the child bearing population.  It's not even immoral, it's an instinctive, basic biological adaption to resources. Just because you get those resources at the welfare office instead of clubbing a bear doesn't change the basic situation.

No, But You Could Stand to Skip a Few Meals

NYC Democrat: Republicans are only interested in cutting food stamps because they “just want people to starve”

The farm bill passed through the House two weeks ago with a vote of 251 yeas to 166 nays, with the nays composed of a slim majority of the Democratic coalition — and at least one of the opposing Democrats’ thought process on the matter went a little something like this, via CNS News:

I voted against the farm bill essentially because it contains $8 billion in cuts to the food stamp program. … That’s just immoral, frankly. I don’t see how we can do that. Not in this recession, where people can’t find jobs, we’re not extending unemployment insurance, and now we want to starve people? That’s wrong. … Any program, humans beings will find a way to have some fraud. We have plenty of protections to minimize the fraud. If Republicans wanted to say, let’s put in this extra protection, that extra protection, that would be something else. They’re just using that as an excuse. They just want people to starve, and it’s disgusting.

I guess by his estimation, a slight majority of his own caucus "just want people to starve as well." There can't possibly be any other motive to vote against a program for giving something to people for doing nothing.

Project Veritas Takes On Obamacare

We knew all along that the organizations that were going to go out and push Obamacare, and worse yet, spend our tax money to do it, were going to be the same ACORN bedbugs that scattered away from the light the last time James O'Keefe pulled down the covers. And yet, they fall for it yet again.It's almost like they don't care if they get caught.

The Truth about Navigators

James O’Keefe, the guerrilla videographer who helped bring down ACORN (the “community organizing” group that Barack Obama worked for as a lawyer and trainer) and got NPR’s president fired, is back.

This time, his undercover investigators focused on Obamacare’s “navigators,” the nearly 50,000 people who, in the words of the Department of Health and Human Services, “will serve as an in-person resource for Americans who want additional assistance in shopping for and enrolling in plans” on the Obamacare exchanges (at least when they’re finally working). The total value of grants doled out for nonprofits and community organizations to hire navigators has topped $67 million nationwide, and some of the money is going to a group run by ACORN’s highly controversial founder.

The events of O’Keefe’s video of a Texas navigator site run by the National Urban League are a familiar sight to viewers of his past efforts exposing Medicaid and voter fraud. Government-paid workers supposedly trained to uphold the law advise clients on how to lie on government forms, evade legal requirements, and ignore proper procedures.

“You lie because your premiums will be higher,” one navigator advises an investigator for O’Keefe’s Project Veritas, who tells the worker he sometimes smokes. “Don’t tell them that. Don’t tell ’em.”

It was pretty racist of O'Keefe to use a black man African American to investigate what amounts to massive welfare fraud in the name of health insurance, don't you think?

How long before the Obama administration manages to cook up some real charges against O'Keefe and send him to the American equivalent of Siberia?

Stacy McCain has more links:

Mary Katharine Ham at Hot Air:

The navigator system— with grants given to plenty of left-leaning community organizers to lead citizens to the entitlement—was always fertile ground for mischief. It’s been made more problematic by the incompetence of the administration.

Navigators were originally required to go through 30 hours of training, but that requirement was later cut to 20 hours because the navigator program, like the rest of Obamacare, was falling on its face. . . .

Obamacare is a system so complex, so incompetently administered that it doesn’t even require malice on the part of navigators or the bill’s allies to screw up people’s lives royally.

Da Tech Guy has an exclusive video interview with Project Veritas executive director Daniel Francisco. Permit me to suggest that this would be a good time to go make a contribution to Project Veritas.

Reporter Astonished to Find Poor, Uneducated Make Lousy Dieticians

Yet another big article from this mornings Post:

 
Too much of too little

...For almost a decade, Blanca had supported her five children by stretching $430 in monthly food stamp benefits, adding lard to thicken her refried beans and buying instant soup by the case at a nearby dollar store. She shopped for “quantity over quality,” she said, aiming to fill a grocery cart for $100 or less.

But the cheap foods she could afford on the standard government allotment of about $1.50 per meal also tended to be among the least nutritious — heavy in preservatives, fats, salt and refined sugar. Now Clarissa, her 13-year-old daughter, had a darkening ring around her neck that suggested early-onset diabetes from too much sugar. Now Antonio, 9, was sharing dosages of his mother’s cholesterol medication. Now Blanca herself was too sick to work, receiving disability payments at age 40 and testing her blood-sugar level twice each day to guard against the stroke doctors warned was forthcoming as a result of her diet...

The story focuses on a second generation Mexican American family living on the Food Stamp Program (SNAP) in the Rio Grande valley in Texas, struggling with the cost of food by eating largely convenience food, high in sugars and fats, not so much because she doesn't have the time (she's not working, she's on disability as a result of her lousy diet), but because that's all she knows how to do, and leading her own children down the same path.

Parenthetically, I would note that the photos both on line, and in the dead tree addition demonstrate that Blanca has a pretty nice SUV for the family of 3...  It's all about priorities.

However, I do wonder if she might not be descended from Pima Indians in Mexico.  The Pimas have long been observed to have high rates of obesity and diabetes in the United States than their Mexican counterparts have on a more traditional diet.

Whoda Thunk?

Well, I would, actually:

Alan Greenspan shocked to discover that giving people free stuff decreases the incentive to save money

In his new book "The Map and the Territory," to be released on Tuesday, Mr. Greenspan, 87, goes on a hunt for what has gone wrong in American politics and in the U.S. economy. He doesn't blame the current administration for today's partisan divide. The culprit? "It's the benefits," he says, pointing to the disagreements between Republicans and Democrats over how to deal with the growth of entitlements.

In the book, he also ponders why the Fed failed to predict the financial crisis, where he himself went wrong and how that discovery has completely changed his worldview.

Mr. Greenspan's biggest revelation came one day about a year ago when he was playing with gross domestic savings numbers. What he found, to his surprise and initial skepticism, was that an increase in entitlements has closely corresponded to a decline in the country's savings. "We had this extraordinary increase in benefits, with each party trying to outbid the other," he says. "That practice has been eroding the country's flow of savings that's so critical in financing our capital investment." The decline in savings has been partly offset by borrowing from abroad, which brings us to our current foreign debt: "$5 trillion and counting," he says.

It's just astonishing to me that after his leading the Fed, and all but completely control the US economy, he can be surprised.

Democrats Like Taxes

 I'm pleasantly surprised that the Post has the guts to publish this

Who likes taxes? Democrats, and no one else

A clear majority of Americans have an unfavorable view of the federal income tax system, according to new Washington Post-ABC News polling. But, in a somewhat remarkable finding, a majority of Democrats view the tax system in a positive light while Republicans and Independents carry the exact opposite view.

Fifty-three percent of self-identified Democrats in the Post-ABC survey view the income tax system favorably while 43 percent see it unfavorably. That’s a stark contrast to the 66 percent of Republicans and 62 percent of independents who have an unfavorable opinion of the tax system.

Democrats are the party of people who benefit from taxes; government workers, and those dependent on the government.  They're simply voting money out of your pocket and into theirs.

In other related news, MSNBC host Melissa Harris-Perry admits that people who actually work for their money deserve to keep, well, a little of it.  How gracious of her.

Americans will always want some level of inequality, because it’s a representation of meritocracy. People who work hard and sacrifice and save their money and make major contributions — we think that they should earn a little more. They should have more resources, and that’s fine. But...