Nice Time! Computer Nerds Take On Government-Benefit 'Time Tax'
Heart-hug emoji!
If you want a brief vision of bureaucratic hell, it's hard to top the opening paragraph of this Atlantic article by Annie Lowrey. We've actually edited it down a bit for space, even:
A mother in Louisiana is struggling to pay her bills and decides to apply for Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits, better known as food stamps. She starts to fill out the state’s 26-page, 8,350-word application. Page one instructs her to distinguish between SNAP and two other programs. [...] Page three lets her know that she needs to collect paperwork or data in up to 13 different categories—pharmacy printouts from the past three months, four pay stubs, baptismal certificates, proof of who lives in the home. [...] Page 15 asks her to detail her income from 24 different sources; page 16 asks about 14 different housing expenses; page 19 asks about 10 types of assets members of her family might own. The process is invasive, time-consuming, and confusing. She might never finish the application. If she does, she could be rejected for doing the paperwork wrong.
Here's another one, courtesy of your editrix: When her good son was a small buttercup of a baby, the state of California rejected his Medi-Cal (California Medicaid) application, similar to the above, because his birth mother hadn't signed it. His birth mother was deceased.
This is no way to provide service to people who are in need of government assistance, and in some states the paperwork hurdles seem consciously designed to prevent people from getting the help they qualify for, and as Lowrey notes, Florida's unemployment insurance program was literally built with the goal of making benefits difficult to collect, which created chaos during the pandemic.
Happily, there's a hero in this story, or rather, an entire organization of them: Code for America (CFA), a nonprofit based in San Francisco, has been working to make the process of interacting with government, including applying for benefits, easier and more accessible to people. Previous CFA initiatives have helped people clear their criminal records, created tools to apply for tax credits more easily, and referred folks to volunteer tax preparers, because you can't claim the Earned Income Tax Credit if you don't file.
And now, with $100 million in new funding, the group is embarking on a major expansion in which it plans to partner "with 15 states to reach 13 million people and unlock $30 billion in benefits in the areas of food assistance, health care, and other basic needs." It's a huge step that's going to make people's lives better, so hooray for the geeks and the people they're going to help.
Even better, Lowrey notes at The Atlantic, this is something of a trend. CFA's expansion is
just one part of a much larger effort to unwind the administrative burdens that annoy and impoverish countless families and erode trust in the country’s institutions. A number of states are redoing their benefit applications using accessible-design principles, bills to slash red tape and simplify benefits administration are pending in Congress, and President Joe Biden is using executive orders to cut down on the “time tax” the government puts on low-income families.
That "time tax" — the huge amount of time that it takes for people to navigate the process of simply proving they really do qualify for government benefits — isn't just a burden, it's one of the main reasons people don't get, or keep, assistance that could keep them out of poverty. Lowrey uses Louisiana as an example, but notes that it's completely typical:
An estimated one in four recipients of SNAP in the state “churns” off and on the program in a given year due to paperwork troubles. Families that endure the arduous application process wait, on average, 32 months to receive a housing voucher. Louisiana runs one of the smallest cash-welfare programs in the country, and closes 5 to 10 percent of cases a month for procedural errors or in order to punish a recipient for noncompliance. [...] In 2019, the state disenrolled 21,893 kids—kids!—from its public health-insurance program due to “failure to comply with procedures.”
Predictably, that results in greater levels of hunger, housing insecurity, poverty, and just all-around misery for low-income people, and for fuckssake it doesn't have to be so bad. We have programs that are supposed to help people in poverty, but as Lowrey puts it, "Even if safety-net programs are meant to help struggling people, in many cases they are not designed for struggling people to access."
Sometimes that's entirely by design, as with the work requirements that Arkansas Republicans imposed for people to stay on Medicaid. To stay eligible, Medicaid beneficiaries had to document that they were working or volunteering, or were exempt from the requirement, but the only way to do that was on a state website; no paper forms allowed. At the time (2018), Arkansas had some of the lowest internet access in the USA. Wasn't that a neat trick! Big surprise: People were confused and outright thwarted by the process and lost their healthcare. Happily, a court put the work requirements on hold in 2019, before the Biden administration killed off Medicaid work requirements altogether a year ago.
Read More:
Arkansas Fixin' To Bone Lazy Poors Who Don't Live Online Like Common Bloggers
Biden Administration Drives Stake Through Heart Of Medicaid Work Requirements
Such extra hoops aren't solely a Republican thing, either. Republicans genuinely have "wielded administrative burdens as a quiet way to throttle enrollment." But as Lowrey notes, Democrats have tended to use "means testing" as a way to make sure benefits go to low-income folks (which may also make the aid more politically palatable). The problem is that such tests overlook "the growing difficulty of understanding, applying for, and holding on to benefits."
So what will CFA be doing to ease those burdens? In Louisiana already, the group created a system that sent text messages to remind people in various safety-net programs when they have to be at an interview, a simple tool that "increased the share of applicants receiving SNAP from 67 percent to 81 percent, and bumped up the proportion of people successfully renewing their SNAP benefits."
With the new funding, the group intends to do some long-range projects to help people navigate the systems that are supposed to be helping them, starting with efforts to cut down on "churn" that results in people losing benefits because of missed deadlines and paperwork. Tracey Patterson, a CFA boffin who works on safety-net programs, told Lowrey,
“How can we make sure people aren’t getting dropped off of Medicaid or SNAP, because they didn’t realize that there was paperwork that they had to do, or it was too confusing or stressful at the time that it was received?”
But wait! Shouldn't government be solving its inefficiency problems without a nonprofit coming in and doing the government's job? Patterson explained that while civil servants do give lots of thought to these problems, her group can provide tech skills (and yes, money) that state agencies simply don't have. CFA can “act as the risk absorber,” she said, “to try something new, pilot it, test it out, and evaluate it—that’s quite difficult for governments to do in-house.”
Also too, Lowrey notes, the pandemic provided government with a kick in the pants to streamline getting cash to people:
States suspended in-person interviews for SNAP. School districts gave everyone free lunch. Congress sent no-strings-attached stimulus checks to low-income households and cash payments to parents. Medicaid programs were barred from kicking anyone off.
F'rinstance, the American Rescue Plan's expanded child tax credit went to all qualifying parents with young kids, providing a necessary cushion during the pandemic and cutting child poverty, and almost nobody had to apply for it (except for folks who didn't file taxes). It did some very real good for American kids, at least before Joe Manchin refused to continue it (he wanted the benefits means tested, which would have limited its appeal to the middle class and added more damn "time tax" for low-income folks who would benefit most).
Terri Ricks, the deputy secretary of the Louisiana Department of Children and Family Services, told Lowrey that the relaxed qualifications for some benefits during the pandemic "helped us to understand that maybe some of the rules that we have in play—we really don’t need them."
Now wouldn't that be a hell of a good thing for federal and state agencies to realize! Oh, but then government might help people, and Republicans certainly won't stand for that.
[Atlantic / Code for America / Photo:Code For America. Creative Commons License 2.0]
Yr Wonkette is funded entirely by reader donations. If you can, please give $5 or $10 a month to help us keep bringing you nice time stories!
Law Not Applying To Madison Cawthorn Again, Gun At Airport Edition (Again)
Baby did a bad bad thing.
BREAKING! Madison Cawthorn: not a genius.
WSOC-TV out of Charlotte was first to break the news that the Boy Wonder congressman got caught trying to take a loaded gun onto a plane at Charlotte Douglas International Airport Tuesday morning. Because Republicans won't let you into their cocaine boner orgies if you're not packing heat. ALLEGEDLY.
This isn't the first time the 26-year-old North Carolina congressman tried to bring a firearm onto a plane — it isn't even the first time he tried that shit in North Carolina. In February 2021, the TSA found an unloaded Glock 9mm and a loaded magazine in this brain genius's carry-on luggage.
Because no one ever accused our Maddy of being a quick study. Or of having good judgment.
If this is, as it appears to be, a video of Madison Cawthorn smoking a blunt, it should be noted that he recently voted against decriminalizing marijuana.pic.twitter.com/cvqBDRY8la— PatriotTakes \ud83c\uddfa\ud83c\uddf8 (@PatriotTakes \ud83c\uddfa\ud83c\uddf8) 1650735449
Cawthorn, whose own marriage recently dissolved after just eight months, is given to extemporizing on the depravity of "the Left," whom he accuses of wanting to "destroy the nuclear family in America." And while we at this mommyblog are agnostic on his underwear preferences — live your best life, kid! — we're really not here to be lectured on "what is gender" by someone whose private conduct doesn't come close to living up to the standards of morality he's flogging for everyone else.
Also, for a guy who just called Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy a "thug," this dude is not so much for following the law.
Madison Cawthorn pulled over by police AGAIN. Cop has to confiscate his driver\u2019s license because, get this, it\u2019s invalid. Officer then has Cawthorn switch places with his passenger, so she can drive instead.pic.twitter.com/fv94BQRvOT— Mike Sington (@Mike Sington) 1650537542
At 10:26 p.m. on March 3 of this year, North Carolina troopers pulled over a truck after it crossed the center line. It turned out to be Cawthorn behind the wheel, despite having a suspended license. As with the gun in his luggage, it's not the first time this manchild got stopped for driving without a license. Cawthorn, who has multiple pending speeding tickets, was charged with driving on a suspended license in 2017, although the charge was eventually dropped.
We are starting to detect a pattern here. Something like stupid, stupid, stupid, followed by stupid, and then stupid again. Nowhere in this series does the word "consequence" appear. Ditto for "jail," or "permanent record," or "moral disapproval of his peers," who just described a Black judicial nominee's old speeding tickets as a "rap sheet."
The Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department declined a request from WSOC-TV as to whether the toddler congressman would be charged in connection with the event. Let's go out on a limb here and say not bloody likely.
And while we're on the subject of screaming hypocrisy, check out this piece in the Washington Examiner all but accusing the "beleaguered" congressman of participating in a pump and dump crypto scheme using insider information. It involved the Let's Go Brandon coin, of course, because these people's stupidity is matched only by their utterly banal predictability.
"LGB legends. ... Tomorrow we go to the moon!" he posted to Instagram on December 29, posing at a party with James Koutoulas, the hedge fund manager running the Let's Go Brandon meme coin. The next day, after NASCAR driver Brandon Brown announced that Koutoulas and LGB would sponsor his 2022 season, the value jumped by 75 percent. Within a month, the currency was worthless, although Koutoulas has relaunched it and Cawthorn is still pumping it.
Amazing to see Patriots like this shouting us out!\n\n@jameskoutoulas and @CawthornforNC going strong at this weekend American Freedom Tour event in Fort Lauderdale!\n\n#letsgo #AFT #Freedompic.twitter.com/jhtXP8nXjt— LetsGo Brandon (@LetsGo Brandon) 1647907894
Cawthorn has a ready answer for the allegations, coming as they do from a conservative paper like Wash Ex. He's being targeted by the Republican establishment, to which he poses some kind of ... threat?
Madison Cawthorn is panicking: \u201cThey\u2019re trying to kill us with death by a thousand cuts.\u201dpic.twitter.com/2KTZ2xXMY0— Ron Filipkowski \ud83c\uddfa\ud83c\udde6 (@Ron Filipkowski \ud83c\uddfa\ud83c\udde6) 1651057392
"We have the North Carolina political establishment and one RINO senator who have really targeted me and are coming hard. They're putting hundreds of thousands of dollars, millions of dollars to be able to defeat me. And they're starting to say these ridiculous, salacious things," he said, assuring his loyal supporters that he wants to cut the federal income tax and "Social Security spending" and has brought lots of cash back home for his district — taking credit for COVID and infrastructure bills he himself voted against, and not for the first time.
"I do not apologize for making sure that we cultivate a following across all platforms, trying to reach out to my generation, who is the most medicated, addicted, the most depressed generation that's ever lived, and it's because of these radical liberal policies and the indoctrination that goes on inside of our schools," he continued.
Well, obviously. You have to do insider trading on social media, to give a little hope to the Gen Z kids.
"And so we're starting to see this coordinated drip campaign. When I say a drip campaign it's where they're going to drop an attack article every one or two days, just to try and kill us with a death by a thousand cuts. And that is really their main strategy. Anyways, I'm very proud of my constituents who are seeing through this political shenanigans."
On that account, though, he's probably right. Because it sure as hell looks like he's getting fragged by his own side for being more trouble than he's worth. And Your Wonkette is here for it.
[WSOC-TV / Asheville Citizen Times / Wash Ex]
Follow Liz Dye on Twitter!
Click the widget to keep your Wonkette ad-free and feisty. And if you're ordering from Amazon, use this link, because reasons.
Michigan Candidate 'Trucker Randy' Not Racist, Just Upset By All The Race-Mixing On His TV
He’s actually pretty racist.
Randy Bishop, a candidate for Michigan state Senate, swears that he’s not racist. This is usually what people say in the immediate afterglow of a racist statement. They suddenly feel self-conscious and insist they’re not racist no matter how much they enjoyed the previous racist activity.
Bishop, also known as “Trucker Randy,” whined on his radio show last month that the media is out to destroy the traditional “nuclear family,” which he apparently defines as a couple so white they refuse to tan on principle. He thinks that every commercial on TV, and not just BET, features an interracial couple. I’m assuming he just stumbled upon one such couple while flipping channels and freaked out, like when Black people tour homes in his neighborhood.
"Can't even watch a college basketball tournament without commercials telling me I have to feel guilty because I think a family should be a white mom, a white dad and white kids," Bishop said. "They want us to die and go away. And they're going to try to do it through politics this year. Well, we have got to be just as smart.”
Poor baby fears white genocide because advertisers acknowledge that interracial couples exist and drive Hyundais.
Look how scary this is!
Perhaps mixing his racist metaphors, Bishop ranted for a while about Black people controlling the media and society in general.
Why are we allowing such a small percentage of our population to control our society? Because they own the media. Because they own the politicians. Because they own the public schools.
He’s obviously overstating our influence. We don’t even have a Black James Bond yet.
Bishop claimed his racist rant was taken out of context, but he wasn’t performing a monologue from a Quentin Tarantino script. He told Michigan Live: “I don’t have a racist bone in my body,” which is true because bones aren’t racist. They’re just lumps of calcium. However, people are racist, and Bishop clearly is.
Despite promoting the Big Lie and demanding a “forensic audit” of the 2020 presidential election, Bishop is running for Michigan's 37th Senate District seat as a "Democrat." It’s not a shock that Bishop slipped past our screening process. We let Kyrsten Sinema run as a Democrat when she’s only a preening jackass.
During the same racist broadcast, Bishop said: “We need to run the absolute craziest strategy in the history of Michigan politics this year. We need to confuse the Democrats.” He claims his goal isn’t sabotage but bipartisanship, though Joe Manchin can confirm that the two are closely related.
“The labels that the parties, both Republicans and Democrats, have put on these candidates; I’d like to get rid of the labels altogether,” Bishop said. “Run on the issues, forget the labels.”
The compelling issue here is that Bishop is shockingly racist and Michigan Democrats swiftly repudiated his no race-mixing platform.
He is a dishonest minor social media personality that enjoys getting attention from making outrageous statements. He shows nothing but disrespect to our system of government by using a run for office to promote his personal agenda, entirely based on lies, hate and fear. 2/3— Michigan Democrats (@Michigan Democrats) 1650846255
Views such as the ones Trucker Randy Bishop espouses have no place in the Democratic Party. Candidates who say or believe these things are not welcome. Randy Bishop is not a Democrat.
He is a dishonest minor social media personality that enjoys getting attention from making outrageous statements. He shows nothing but disrespect to our system of government by using a run for office to promote his personal agenda, entirely based on lies, hate and fear.
Disgusting racist belief systems are not welcome in the Democratic Party and frankly should not be welcome in any political party or community. We will not support his efforts to run for Senate and find it deeply insulting that he would dare to put a D next to his name.
Republican Wayne Schmidt currently represents the 37th Senate District. It's solidly Republican, so he's probably not going anywhere, even if he’s running against a virulent racist. Although Bishop officially left the Antrim County Republican Party in 2018, he now leads the Antrim County Conservative Union — another clue that he’s probably not an actual Democrat. It’s unclear if the ACCU’s dress code requires a hood.
OPEN THREAD.
[The Daily Beast / Deadline Detroit / Michigan Live]
Follow Stephen Robinson on Twitter.
Do your Amazon shopping through this link, because reasons.
Yr Wonkette is 100 percent ad-free and entirely supported by reader donations. That's you! Please click the clickie, if you are able.
Well Of Course Republicans Want To Institutionalize Bullying. It's What They Love.
Florida to protect children from cooperation, self-awareness, respect.
A little over a week ago, the Florida Department of Education announced it had rejected 54 mathematics textbooks that had been submitted for use in the state's schools, because they allegedly included "critical race theory" or other topics that were supposedly "prohibited" under Florida law. Gov. Ron DeSantis suggested that the textbook publishers had tried get away with sneaking all sorts of terrible things into the textbooks, including "indoctrinating concepts like race essentialism, especially, bizarrely, for elementary school students," although neither his office nor the state Education department actually provided any examples.
Asked for details on what was in the rejected textbooks, the state punted. First, DeSantis's spokesperson Christina Pushaw presented an example of a worksheet from Missouri in 2022 that had nothing to do with the Florida textbooks. For its part, the Department of Education offered examples of supposedly verboten materials that had been "provided to the department by the public" — in other words, stuff Floridians objected to in other texts, but which also were not from the textbooks that were actually rejected.
Read More: DeSantis Spox Finally Explains What She Thinks Critical Race Theory Is
Finally, though, the New York Times was able to review 21 of the books that Florida rejected (free Times linky), as provided by publishers, and it made some reasonable guesses about what may have been the reasons for rejecting the books. Big surprise: The Times found "little that touched on race, never mind an academic framework like critical race theory." The closest thing, if you squint funny, might be a McGraw Hill pre-algebra textbook that included mini-biographies of several mathematicians in history, many of whom were women or people of color. Shocking! We suppose it's also possible there was incredibly scandalous stuff in the 33 books the Times didn't review, which undoubtedly included problems like "1619 + 1492 = Pervasive White Guilt."
What the Times did find, however, were some examples of another forbidden concept in Florida schools, social-emotional learning (SEL), which has become another target of the Right, because unlike critical race theory, it really exists, and pushes a horrifying socialist agenda of "[helping] students develop mind-sets that can support academic success."
Yes, really.
One publisher's rejected texts identifies
five core skills students should develop: self-awareness, self-management, responsible decision-making, social awareness and relationship building. This framework was developed by CASEL, an education nonprofit. [Emphasis added — Dok Zoom]
Now, you might well ask, what's so scary about those? They sound like skills that would really help kids to learn better. And in fact, the Times notes, "Research suggests that students with these skills earn higher test scores."
Here's a sample of a textbook page, from "enVision Florida B.E.S.T. Mathematics Grade 1," that sneaks a little bit of social-emotional learning into a math problem:
See how it's indoctrinating children with leftist ideology? No, neither do we, although as somebody on Twitter said, the graphic design, with those Uncanny Valley CGI kids, might be a valid reason for cancelling the books. Plus, Andy's stance seems pretty threatening, as if he's about to demand reparations.
Just as, a decade ago, Common Core was socialism for reasons that nobody could quite define, social-emotional learning is also a source of corruption, socialism, and probably Gay Antifa Transgender Indoctrination, too, although righties seem awfully unclear on explaining why. One rightwing blog seized on some cherry-picked quotes to suggest SEL is aimed at turning kids into "leftist activists." Another explained that SEL and Common Core both push "Marxism." The Epoch Times warned that schools are actually replacing academics with "far left" socialist indoctrination that's "designed not to educate but to transform children’s core values, attitudes, beliefs, and behavior."
As "evidence," articles like these play a fun game of substitution themselves: Instead of explaining why "self-awareness, self-management, responsible decision-making" and the like are somehow inherently leftist, the articles point to other things in progressive education that should scare conservatives, like discussions of diversity and systemic racism, and then they insist that SEL is pushing those scary social justice concerns. After all, many of the educators who like SEL also think racism is a real problem, so obviously SEL is pushing "wokeness."
For comment on the Florida textbooks, the Times turned to rightwing CRT bloody-shirt waver Christopher Rufo, who was happy to say a bunch of words about the evils of SEL without actually explaining a goddamn thing:
In a March interview conducted over email, Mr. Rufo stated that while social-emotional learning sounds “positive and uncontroversial” in theory, “in practice, SEL serves as a delivery mechanism for radical pedagogies such as critical race theory and gender deconstructionism.”
“The intention of SEL,” he continued, “is to soften children at an emotional level, reinterpret their normative behavior as an expression of ‘repression,’ ‘whiteness,’ or ‘internalized racism,’ and then rewire their behavior according to the dictates of left-wing ideology.”
You will wait in vain for Mr. Rufo to explain the "practice" here, because it's awfully difficult to show any link between Math-robot-child Andy's call to "disagree respectfully" in a classroom discussion and those frightening attacks on American values Rufo complains about.
So instead of actually building an argument, the assertion is enough. And let's be completely clear here: This is absolutely nothing new. It's just a continuation of the Right's same old war on public education as ever, but with the buzzwords changed around some. Instead of complaining that the schools are advancing "secular humanism" — or its cousin, the dreaded "critical thinking" — as they did in the 1980s and '90s, the anti-education forces are now against the evils of cooperation, empathy, and learning together, because all social skills are apparently social-ist, too. It's as if they've internalized Margaret Thatcher's dictum that "there's no such thing as society" so completely that any mention of working together or being part of a group looks like an effort to force children onto a collective farm.
Read More:
Texas GOP Will Literally And Non-Metaphorically Ban Critical Thinking In Schools
Family Jesus Council: Anti-Bullying Campaign Is Extremely Homosexual
Newt Gingrich Laments That Teachers Aren't Bullying Gay Children Enough
These fulminations about the dangers of empathy and equity are absolutely nothing new. Just as in the past, the Right can't stand being told that bullying is a bad thing. After all, if you aren't actively bashing minorities and sinners, people might get some uppity ideas about belonging in America, and the Right can't have that. The old gay-bashing is simply being updated and called "parental rights," which boils down to the "right" to ensure that children be "protected" from any mention of the existence of gay and trans people, lest they be "groomed" into not hating them.
Rufo, for his part, finds all this very exciting, telling the New York Times for a profile published Sunday (free link) that he thinks the Right's backlash over LGBTQ rights could make for a way bigger, better moral panic than even the epic shit fits over "critical race theory." Or as Rufo put it, “The reservoir of sentiment on the sexuality issue is deeper and more explosive than the sentiment on the race issues," because there's no shortage of hatred out there for the GOP to harness.
Mind you, Rufo carefully pretended to distance himself from that "groomer" talk, telling the Times that's a very serious word, and that "It’s wrong, factually and morally, to accuse someone of being a groomer with no basis and evidence." Not that those concerns have actually tempered his own writing; the Times points out that Rufo has also written that
American schools were “hunting grounds” for teachers, and that “parents have good reason” to worry about “‘grooming’ in public schools.”
He's super excited about the prospects for whipping up fear and paranoia about gay and trans people, too, telling the Times he's launching a new series of articles that will scare the living shit out of rightwing voters. Or as Rufo puts it,
“You have to provide the vocabulary for people to talk about” gender issues, he said. “Once that happens, it’s going to be explosive.”
Gosh, we can hardly wait to see what that involves, as if it will be any more nuanced than screaming in the nicest possible terms that all Democrats want to offer up your children to pedophiles. What an intellectual adventure.
[NYT free link / NYT also free link]
Yr Wonkette is funded entirely by reader donations. If you can, please give $5 or $10 a month to help us keep you up to date on the latest fronts in the culture wars.