$2.00/Day Quiz No. 1 - Less Than $2.00/person/day OF CASH

[johnkarls]

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1. Was the “Aid To Families With Dependent Children” Program (AFDC) enacted in 1935 as a cornerstone of FDR’s “New Deal”?

2. Did Bill Clinton win the 1992 Presidential Election with 43.0% of the popular vote by campaigning “against welfare as we know it”?

3. Was Bill Clinton able to win re-election in 1996 with 49.2% of the popular vote by campaigning on the fact that he had signed the repeal of the AFDC on 8/22/1996 just before the Democratic Party Nominating Convention?

4. Did Bill Clinton’s 8/22/1996 repeal of AFDC include a new “Temporary Assistance for Needy Families” Program (TANF) which (A) put a 60-month lifetime cap on benefits, (B) required recipients to find employment within 24 months, and (C) put administration of TANF in the hands of each state, EACH OF WHICH WAS GIVEN DISCRETION TO PAY NO BENEFITS WHATSOEVER!!!???

5. Did Bill Clinton repeal AFDC on 8/22/1996 despite a 256-170 vote in the U.S. House of Representatives which would have been more than sufficient to sustain a veto since a veto-override requires a 2/3 vote of each House of Congress?

6. Did our author, Sociology Prof. Kathryn Edin, write her first book on how single mothers make ends meet after touring the country for 6 years BEFORE Bill Clinton’s abolition of AFDC? And did she find that people on welfare generally received about $500/month?

7. Was our author surprised when she led a research team beginning in 2010 to investigate the effect of the AFDC repeal to find that there had been a significant increase since 1996 in the number of households living on less than $2.00 per person per day?

8. Are such “households” essentially homeless unless they have a housing subsidy of some kind (only approximately 20% of them do) -- otherwise “couch surfing” with friends/relatives, in a homeless shelter or out on the street?

9. Did our author then recruit as a co-author for our focus book, Prof. H. Luke Shaefer, a U/Michigan expert on the U.S. Census Bureau’s Survey of Income and Program Participation, who was a visiting Prof. at Harvard while our author was also a visiting Prof. at Harvard?

10. Did Prof. Shaefer’s analysis of the Census Bureau statistics based on interviews with tens of thousands of American households, show that between the abolition of AFDC in 1996 and 2011 the number of families living in $2/person/day poverty HAD MORE THAN DOUBLED, TO 1.5 MILLION HOUSHOLDS???

11. DID THESE HOUSEHOLDS INCLUDE 3 MILLION CHILDREN!!!???

12. Did Edin and Shaefer then begin ethnographic studies across the country that showed the primary reason for such extreme poverty is the “perilous world of low-wage work” that is very sparse compared to the number of people living in extreme poverty, often sporadic, and often effectively out of reach for someone who doesn’t own a cell phone?

13. Do many of the states that have NOT abolished entirely TANF payments to the poor, discourage applicants by requiring weeks of applying for jobs before qualifying for TANF, by requiring documents that the poor cannot find or do not know how to get, by understaffing welfare offices so that lines become prohibitively long, and by simply turning down applications with no explanation?

14. Because of TANF’s requirement to find work, does high unemployment (i.e., low job availability) often force single mothers to sell their blood plasma to hospitals, scavenge for cans and bottles in trash barrels, and/or sell sex???

15. Since we always hear that child-care expenses are so prohibitive, has anybody given any thought to providing training for extreme-poverty mothers so that at least some of them can provide qualified day-care for both their own children and the children of other extreme-poverty mothers?

16. Did Prof. Edin, who has a Christian religious background, find that most academics in the field view Christians as NOT ONLY FAILING “to love their neighbors as themselves” BUT ACTUALLY as bigots who hate the poor??? Is that view correct???

17. What is Zakat?

[johnkarls]

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