THIS is what poverty sometimes looks like in America: parents here in Appalachian hill country pulling their children out of literacy classes. Moms and dads fear that if kids learn to read, they are less likely to qualify for a monthly check for having an intellectual disability.
Many people in hillside mobile homes here are poor and desperate, and a $698 monthly check per child from the Supplemental Security Income program goes a long way — and those checks continue until the child turns 18.
Most wrenching of all are the parents who think it’s best if a child stays illiterate, because then the family may be able to claim a disability check each month.
“One of the ways you get on this program is having problems in school,” notes Richard V. Burkhauser, a Cornell University economist who co-wrote a book last year about these disability programs. “If you do better in school, you threaten the income of the parents. It’s a terrible incentive.”
About four decades ago, most of the children S.S.I. covered had severe physical handicaps or mental retardation that made it difficult for parents to hold jobs — about 1 percent of all poor children. But now 55 percent of the disabilities it covers are fuzzier intellectual disabilities short of mental retardation, where the diagnosis is less clear-cut. More than 1.2 million children across America — a full 8 percent of all low-income children — are now enrolled in S.S.I. as disabled, at an annual cost of more than $9 billion.
That is a burden on taxpayers, of course, but it can be even worse for children whose families have a huge stake in their failing in school. Those kids may never recover: a 2009 study found that nearly two-thirds of these children make the transition at age 18 into S.S.I. for the adult disabled. They may never hold a job in their entire lives and are condemned to a life of poverty on the dole — and that’s the outcome of a program intended to fight poverty.
Just another reason why all welfare programs should be abolished. Helping the needy should be done by good-hearted individuals, not by the state. It's not "charity" if you're forced to do it, and it's not "helping" if all you're doing is enabling.
Oh, Jesus Fucking Christ on rubber crutches...here's the New Jew Times rolling out Appalachian hill folk and trailer denizens as the new face of welfare. OMFG, white people are keeping their children from reading so that they can get a check. How many people did they find doing this out in White Folks County, West Virginia...a dozen?
Meanwhile, we're now into our 4th and 5th generations of welfare dependent niggers, and their fat assed breeding sow mothers who have niglets by 3 and 4 different men, none of whom they have ever been married to. You show me a single black mother who doesn't have at least one of her kids classified as "learning disabled" in order to get that extra "crazy check" coming into the nigger nest, and I'll go find you a Chinaman who was captain of his high school's football team.
This is old news to anyone who is honest, has been paying attention, or has had to live in an area whose population is north of 20% jigaboo. I grew up watching these food stamp hustling, section 8 voucher grabbing, crazy check scheming, rat breeding layabouts and ne'er-do-wells. The New York Times could have written this story 30 years ago if they would have gotten a reporter off of their Jew ass and sent them south of the Mason-Dixon line. What's so shocking about all of this Appalachian white niggery? The fact that it's WHITE PEOPLE behaving like retarded animals?
