Among the fun stuff I've had to do since losing my job and all that jazz is the admin-stuff related to getting access to healthcare and unemployment benefits.
I finally had my interview today with the County of Santa Clara social services office, who thought I was still gainfully employed, in part, I guess, because I hadn't yet applied for unemployment. The healthcare part itself wasn't so bad, because the lady on the phone with me seemed considerate and knowledgeable. But the signing up for unemployment stuff was a little weird.
Let me clarify. It's not weird that it asks if you're looking for work, or if you're willing to give up your private contracting work if offered a job. And it's not weird for them to ask questions to ensure that you actually need the money, and aren't planning on swindling the state.
What I find interesting is the undertone of some of the questions around whether you deserve to receive benefits. The word "deserve" doesn't appear in any of the web pages I had to fill out, but it was implicit in the whole process, somehow. Just desserts, for lack of a better term, are at the heart of how the country looks at benefits and poor people, so I wanted to talk a little about that today.
"Just desserts", incidentally, is what Republicans seem to think people on food stamps buy when they go to the store. Desserts, steak, all the expensive stuff - I've seen someone complain about this on Facebook, and I've been in a car with someone complaining about this IRL. It's probably the heart of my argument here, much more so than the questionnaires and interviews I went through today.
The argument from these two people (and I have no reason to think they're alone in saying this stuff) implies that the people on food stamps shouldn't be buying expensive stuff. I'm the first to admit I don't know how food stamps work - but it stands to reason that if you're buying grass-fed filet mignons every night, your food stamps won't last very long. It also stands to reason that if you're a generally smart person, then you probably know that stretching your food stamps by buying only Cheetohs and ramen is a ticket to obesity and bad health.
As I say, I don't know how the SNAP benefit (to give it its proper name) works, and I assume that someone has figured out a way to cheat. But I get the sense that Republicans, and right-wing people in other countries, would rather see a thousand people starve or suffer malnutrition than have a single family game the system. Which is allied to that Protestant, or more precisely Calvinist, work ethic, where if you're poor it's a sign of God's displeasure and you're going to Hell. So when they go to the store and see someone buying "all the expensive food", as my two interlocutors so vaguely put it, they're filled with this righteous rage that someone's eating well while they themselves have to scrimp and save and go to Ranch 99 or something.
This idea of deserving what you get is also at the heart of our judicial/penal system. Australians, in my experience, seem to really love implying that if you go to prison you get whatever you deserve when you're in there. Murderers, rapists, kiddie-fiddlers - all deserve no consideration of their human rights or anything like that. But that viewpoint ignores people who commit less serious crimes, and who aren't hardened, serial offenders. After all, in this country at least, you can still go to jail for relatively minor crimes like narcotics possession, and some places strip you of the right to vote forever. Other places still actively use convicts as unpaid servants and laborers, in an interesting reading of the Thirteenth Amendment banning slavery.
Maybe it's a bit provocative to equate convicts with people on benefits, but it's not hard to see the same attitudes at work against both groups. The idea seems to be that if you've slipped up once, you are a failed person and can't ever rejoin proper society again. And I agree that for some crimes this is true - which is why we have things like life imprisonment.
But for convicts, we have to think seriously about whether punishments fit crimes, and whether we're interested in rehabilitating convicts at all. If we aren't, how can we honestly call ourselves a just society, when a violent (but not necessarily deadly) crime strips you of the right to vote forever?
And for people on benefits, we need to find a better way to get them off benefits than taking their benefits away. It's like unemployment figures: the official rate ignores those who are under-employed and those who have completely given up on ever finding a job again. You can slice those numbers to tell whatever story you want, but if your welfare rolls go down because you've booted a bunch of people off unemployment and food stamps, then you haven't actually solved the problem.
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