Multiple and Interrelated Benefits

It would be a mistake to leave the reader with the conclusion that most social policies and

social programs pursue their objectives through single benefit or service strategies. Although

there are instances of that, it is not the general case, especially in relation to programs

that intend to deal with the social problem of poverty. It is common for citizens to

think of programs like Social Security or even unemployment security as providing only

a single benefit, but in fact eligibility for one benefit form very often automatically qualifies

a person for multiple benefits. The fact of interrelated benefit packages certainly

makes the analysis of social policy with respect to benefit forms, in particular, a lively

and complex venture. It is not surprising that programs and policies should have more

than a single kind of benefit; after all, we have already seen that multiple goals or objectives

are commonplace. Where that is the case and where such goals are diverse it would

be expected that different benefit types and thus multiple benefits would occur. Lewis and

Morrison found that multiple benefits can occur in two major forms: (1) benefits from

one program can alter benefits in other programs and (2) program benefits can change

personal tax liability.6

The U.S. Unemployment Insurance (UI) program is an example of a benefit that

generates multiple benefits: eligible, involuntarily unemployed workers might receive

both a cash payment, services from the state vocational and rehabilitation service, and

referral to employers searching for workers. The purpose of rehabilitation services is

to retrain the employee and to provide trained and ready-to-work employees for employers.

Maintaining the stability of a large workforce for the economic enterprise of

the country as well as for relief of unemployment is a goal of the UI program. The

TANF program (Temporary Assistance to Needy Families) is another example of a

highly complex package of benefits and services. It is difficult to elaborate because of

interstate variation, but the list that follows characterizes the most general case: a cash

benefit, a medical card, child support enforcement, special food allowance for infants

and pregnant mothers, vocational training, family planning services, and so forth. Notice

that elements in this benefit package are mostly compulsory: child support enforcement,

job searches, and/or vocational training are compulsory. In the past,

“benefits” were sometimes used punitively against clients: sterilization, family planning,

and abortion. Furthermore, some program policies automatically disqualify a recipient

from benefits from another program. We will discuss those complex examples

in Chapter 9, which deals with program and policy interrelationships.

Criteria for Evaluating the Merit of Benefit

and Service Types

Stigmatization, Cost-Effectiveness, Substitutability,

Target Efficiency, and Trade-Offs

Whenever there is a benefit to be given in remedy of a specific tangible need, it can be

given in the form of cash or it can be given it in the form of directly consumable articles

(e.g., food or clothing). The question is: “Which form is best, why, and from what point of view?” Almost all U.S. public benefits available in income maintenance programs

could be given in kind. The issue touches on more than income-related benefits. Think

for a moment about the delivery of medical care benefits and services. A cash approach

would give dollars directly to families in need, that amount equivalent to whatever was

the price of the necessary medical care. This benefit is most commonly given not in the

form of cash, but in the form of a credit or voucher—a strategy that is more related to

an in-kind benefit than a cash strategy.

Such examples serve to illustrate how the evaluation criteria apply to this general

question. From the consumer’s point of view, the major difference is the degree to which

a choice can be exercised with regard to the goods or services delivered—the evaluation

criterion we earlier called consumer sovereignty. From the benefit giver’s point of view, the

major difference is the ability to exercise control over the nature of the article and the way

it is consumed—the evaluation criterion we earlier called target efficiency. If a family needs

cheese and you give them $5 to buy it, the family can decide whom to buy it from, when

to make the purchase, under what conditions, and at what price—an example of maximum

consumer sovereignty. If you give the family a letter telling the cheese store to give

the family $5 worth of cheddar and to add it to your bill, the choices that can be made by

the family are thereby limited. But notice that from the point of view of the benefit giver

(the person who is paying for the cheese), it may be important to restrict the choices. For

example, the benefit giver may get a special price from the cheese dealer if a great deal of

cheese is purchased this way and our cheese dealer can purchase more economically if he

can count on volume sales. Not only that, the merchant knows that no advertising expense

is incurred. Thus, the benefit giver is able to help more hungry people because

cheese can be purchased for less in an in-kind, rather than a cash, benefit form. Under

this condition (but only this condition), giving the benefit in an in-kind form satisfies the

evaluation criterion of cost-effectiveness—the benefit is delivered at a cost that is effectively

the lowest relative to the other available and practical forms and means of delivery.

Note that it is also true that the benefit goes directly for the specific social problem

of concern—hunger. This is an example of the evaluation criterion called target efficiency,

a virtue here because the efficiency involved makes it possible to benefit more

hungry people. There is not much else to do with cheese except eat it, though a genuinely

imaginative person might use it to catch mice, or sell it to a neighbor at a cut-rate price,

or trade it for another commodity. And, of course, there is a well-known street trade in

food stamps.

Here are the arguments against the preceding conclusions. With regard to the

lower expense of in-kind benefits, they say, it is not entirely clear whether economies of

scale work in a way that inevitably yields a lower unit cost than cash (and, thus, generate

a cost-effective benefit form). A person can take the view that the only way to establish

a true cost is through an exchange in a free market, even a cheese market. How can the

benefit giver really know that the price charged by the cheese merchant was the best

price on that day for that amount of cheese of that particular kind? Whereas the price

quoted to the in-kind benefit giver may have been the best price the benefit giver could

have obtained that day, suppose there was a cheese crisis the day following; if the family

had cash with which to deal, they might have obtained twice as much cheese for half the

price. On the other hand, the cheese merchant may have had bad luck selling his Swiss

that week and would’ve sold twice as much to the family for half the price. (Of course, it might also have worked in exactly the opposite direction.) The same argument raises an

objection to an extension of social control via the purchase of cheese. The cost to the

family is a lack of consumer autonomy, and that makes them even more dependent and

less able to cope with the stresses of life. After all, this argument goes, independence and

self-reliance are built on experience in such small matters as deciding whether to buy

cheddar, Swiss, or mozzarella. Notice how important are the details, for it is on them

that the ultimate conclusion depends.

Notice the trade-offs operating here between the various evaluation criteria. A

trade-off occurs when the policy system has to suffer some disadvantage in order to get

another advantage. In general, benefits delivered in the form of cash increase consumer

sovereignty and reduce target efficiency. Another example of trade-offs is with regard to

programs to reduce poverty. When such programs create low unemployment (a virtue),

economists believe that they will invariably increase inflation (a vice) as more employed

workers become consumers with money to spend. Although considered by economists

to be a side effect—and certainly it is in the sense that it was not intended—it is undeniably

an important effect on the lives of most people. But then it pays to notice that

economists aren’t always right: In the 1994–1998 period of historically low unemployment

rates, inflation did not appear as economists predicted.

Somewhat more serious is the argument that the price of in-kind benefits is stigmatization.

When the consumption or acquisition of benefits is public, certain kinds of items

become associated with “being on welfare,” and negative attributions are made to those

so identified. Although someone seen eating a slice of cheddar cheese attracts little attention,

it certainly is the case that disparaging comments are made to women who spend

WIC vouchers in grocery stores (a mild form of in-kind benefit). According to Terkel,

local welfare agencies bought certain kinds of shoes and dresses during the depression,

and those who wore them were sure to inspire negative comments from others.7

Some of these objections to in-kind benefit forms do not apply in all instances; it is

surely not the case that all noncash forms stigmatize recipients—not all consumption or

delivery of the article or good is public. For example, one way to avoid public consumption

or delivery of foodstuffs in a noncash form is to use a subsidy method that was common

in England. If the U.S. government wished to increase the nutritional level of its

low-income citizens, it could subsidize the price of a popular food to the point where it

could become the least expensive, most nutritious food available (e.g., bread or milk

products). The public treasury could subsidize the bakers or grocers, perhaps 40 cents a

loaf; every month, those vendors would tote up how many loaves they sold and submit a

bill to the public treasury. In return, they would agree to sell bread for half the former

price, maybe 35 cents a loaf. Thus, the consumer gets bread at a reduction and the baker

or grocer still makes a profit. Would the consumption of bread increase? Very likely.

Would consumers be stigmatized for buying bread? Not very likely, because everyone

pays the same price. Would the benefit go only to those who “really” need it? No, because

there would be considerable “seepage” to those not in low-income brackets (again,

a question about the target efficiency criterion). Would this form of the benefit be more

cost-effective than cash? That question can be answered only through the empirical

study of increased nutrition as a result of the increased use of the subsidized foodstuffs The increase in nutrition resulting from the cash-benefit strategy would also have to be

studied and the net results of the two compared.

Note that the cost of achieving the nutritional goal is the cost of the subsidy for the

foodstuffs actually bought by the poor; the cost of the destigmatization of the in-kind

strategy is exactly the cost of subsidizing the foodstuffs bought by the nonpoor. Thus, in

this case, the exact cost of the trade-off can be specified. Those who strongly support cash

benefits argue that such a benefit form clearly has an advantage along the lines of ensuring

consumer sovereignty by means of which receivers maintain control over when,

what, and how things are bought. From the consumer’s point of view, that autonomy is a

major issue.

The Political and Public Administration Viewpoint

How does all this look from the benefit giver’s view, the perspective of the legislature,

and the public program manager? Politicians and bureaucrats have their own preferences

for benefit forms, as well as evaluation criteria of their own. Linder and Peters

think that one such is administrative complexity, for example.8

It’s only natural to expect that public administrators will value a benefit form that

is simple rather than complicated to administer. It would seem preferable to administer

a fairly simple program delivering a partial cash subsidy to the elderly to pay part of their

winter heating bill rather than administer an in-kind commodity program for the same

purpose—one in which the benefit would be gas or oil or electricity (or cow chips for

that matter), which the government owned and would deliver directly to consumers.

Think of the problems of storage, delivery, services, and all the rest. A cash benefit

places the responsibility on the beneficiary for obtaining the product needed and, thus,

avoids the administrative complexities. Or consider a program that delivers services for

severely mentally ill children. Such a program may involve such complexities as administering

income or asset tests to a wide variety of income levels (e.g., to determine

whether to charge for hospitalization); coordinating the program activities of a wide variety

of professionals; facing high costs per case and treatment strategies of uncertain

and sometimes controversial validity to consumers potentially capable of deviant and

antisocial behavior. On the other hand, the public policy may choose to deliver this benefit

in a form that simply subsidizes the costs of such services in the private sector by the

consumer. In this case, the public administrator looks to the cost issues and struggles

with determining whether charges are fair and whether services were actually delivered,

but certainly that is less complex than taking responsibility for their actual delivery. The

form taken by the benefit is determining here. Material, hard benefits are obviously

simpler to administer than personal social services, which are often intangible and often

controversial as to their effectiveness. It is quite likely that less complex practices also

entail low administrative cost, another evaluation criterion of preference to public administrators

and political figures who must account to the public in such matters.

Another evaluation criterion common to public administration and the political

context is the extent of adaptability across different kinds of users. A subsidy (equivalent to

cash) is obviously quite adaptable to different kinds of users: those who heat with gas versus electricity; those who live in apartments versus their own homes; those who live

in rural areas versus central cities. An in-kind benefit may not be so adaptable across

the diverse users in those examples. Political risk is also an evaluation criterion in this

context; for example, the level of public visibility of the benefit form may be an issue

here. The cash-equivalent subsidy for the winter heating program for the low-income

elderly is quite invisible in that such programs can be handled via the U.S. mail. Note,

however, that even if benefit receipt were visible, in this case it might be a political advantage

rather than a liability; the viewpoint in our society is that the low-income elderly

are surely “deserving poor,” and that a politician who helps them projects the

image of a social and moral conscience—good political images, no doubt. Contrast the

level of political risk via the high public visibility of a program that generates benefits

in the form of psychiatric services for severely mentally ill children. Because such children

are capable of social deviance, they can be highly visible to a sensitive public and

if the benefits (no matter how great or obvious the need for them) are delivered to a

population group that is considered deviant, the political risk is high. It is widely believed

among social historians that the popularity of mental institutions as a benefit

form for the severely mentally ill or shelters for the homeless are, in the first instance,

appealing to politicians and public administrators simply because such institutions effectively

reduce the visibility to the public (hence the political risk) of the targeted social

problem and the people who are subject to it.9

Finally, another evaluation criterion, potential for failure to reduce or soften the impact

of the social problem, should attract the attention of the reader. There are few social programs

that have an unmitigated record of success. New programs should actually be

thought of as experimental ventures and should be proposed to decision makers as exactly

that. Too many unkept promises, and too many disappointments on the part of those who

fund programs create an enduring pessimism that will come to haunt social program

providers in the future. This evaluation criterion points to that issue; surely, before politically

astute legislators make a public commitment in support of a social program, they

make calculations of their potential for failure. Those who seek funding should be prepared

to make statements about the probability for success of their program design. Furthermore,

they should also be prepared to make proposals as clear experiments on ideas

that have no history. Experimental failures are not a moral mistake; program failures, for

which success has been widely advertised, are immense political mistakes.

Criteria for Evaluating the Merit of Benefit Types:

Consumer Sovereignty, Coercion, and Intrusiveness

This section considers an evaluation criterion that is preferred by the authors/analysts:

consumer sovereignty. One argument for its generally positive effects is that it allows for

making choices—a strengths approach. The cash benefit expended contributes to the

support of the general public economy in ways that in-kind benefits cannot. Cash benefits

support ordinary businesses and ordinary employers and employees. In-kind benefits,

if they are to achieve their major advantages of economy of scale and expense

reduction, must enter a special market at the producer and wholesaler levels—certainly not the same retail market corridor used by the ordinary citizen/consumer. Support of

that market bypasses many free markets, and in a way, that costs jobs because employers

will not need the employees that are created by the additional cash demand for

goods and products. In the long run, this argument speaks to the appealing idea of creating

more employment and more taxes paid by a mechanism that remains faithful to a

cash market system; cash benefits ensure that “the consumer is king.” The point is that,

in contrast to in-kind benefits, cash benefits have capacity for welfare-expenditure reductions

just because when welfare recipients spend welfare dollars, those dollars create

some employment while in-kind benefits do not. One wouldn’t expect that

free-market advocates would prefer a welfare benefit form that takes welfare beneficiaries

out of the free market in the ways outlined before. Radical free-marketeers often find

in-kind benefits attractive on the view that in-kind benefits are socially stigmatizing

and, thus, make welfare unattractive.

Still there are those who seriously advocate for in-kind benefits. Alva Myrdal, the

1983 Nobel Prize winner in economics, is an example. Most of the arguments discussed

before can be read in greater detail in her work.10 However, Myrdal makes two other

points we have not covered previously and are worth noting because they concern cogent

arguments about their limitations. The first is that the issue of consumer choice is not

very relevant when it comes to benefits targeted primarily toward children; children seldom

exercise much consumer choice in poor families. The second is that in-kind benefits

cannot be seriously preferred where family income is not adequate in the first place.

In the last analysis, Myrdal comes out for restricting in-kind benefits to secondary needs,

nonbasic food, shelter, and clothing. With that view, then, it would seem that the kinds

of benefits Myrdal really advocates as appropriate for in-kind forms are items such as

medical care, education, perhaps clothing, and surely expert services.

The issue of substitutability of goods, also important to Myrdal, refers to the possibility

that a public policy or program the intent of which is to increase food purchases, for

example, may not do so because more food is not purchased. Instead, the family uses food

stamps to purchase the same amount of food they would have bought ordinarily; the

money released by the availability of food stamps can then be used to buy other commodities

of choice; the net gain, then, is not necessarily in food items. For example, the

socially conforming family may use the extra purchasing power to buy books or more

vegetables for the children. The less socially conforming may use it to buy illegal drugs,

clothes, or a good time. Substitutability is an important idea because it shows how the inkind

benefit, when it concerns items that are vitally necessary for survival, may not always

be an effective way of controlling the consumption pattern, amount, or kind of benefit

received. The same argument might be made with respect to the provision of vouchers

for medical care, physician prescriptions, and credit for child care or work clothing, for

example. Substitutability is probably a criterion that has wide relevance to the evaluation

of the merit of benefit forms, whatever those benefit forms might be.

Consumer sovereignty is a virtue because it works against coerciveness and intrusiveness

of government in the lives and private affairs of citizen-recipients of public benefits.

Coerciveness and intrusiveness into private lives should be conceded as an important

criteria for evaluating benefit and service types. It is important for readers to remember

that intrusiveness into private affairs can violate a citizen’s right to privacy—which itself derives from constitutional provisions. Being a recipient of public benefits doesn’t change

that. Obviously, some types of benefits and services are worse offenders than others in this

respect. The greatest potential for this offense is when beneficiaries are dependent on

public benefits for their very physical survival. That would direct us to means-tested programs

like TANF, food stamps, or SSI for the disabled or aged. Their means tests must be

repeated at intervals in order for the program administrators to carry out their responsibility

to see that beneficiaries are still actually eligible: for example, beneficiaries may be

living a shared life with a household member who is working and earning but not be reporting

it as household income. Notice that reporting it requires revelation of the beneficiaries’

personal relationships, where that would ordinarily be considered “private affairs”

were the person not a welfare beneficiary. One of the reasons means tests are objectionable

is that they cannot easily avoid this kind of intrusiveness. But notice in contrast programs

like Social Security Retirement and Disability, which are usually means tested but

only at the level of individuals, not households. No need there to be concerned about who

else is sharing a household, a bed, or an income as in TANF or food stamps.

AFDC, in particular, had a history of notorious intrusiveness. The best example is

the public welfare staff/county prosecutor “night-riders” in Newburgh, New York, who

routinely stationed themselves outside recipients’ dwellings after dark to see who came

and went. It was a county-administered program at that time and the local policy concerned

what was called the “man-in-the-house” rule: Any recipient who had a “man-inthe-

house” (anytime after dark presumably) lost her benefits (illegally as it turned out).

The point is that the eligibility rule has to do with who shares a household income, not

with who sleeps together. Besides being a violation of citizens’ privacy rights, knowing

that there was a “man in the house” doesn’t necessarily tell you anything about household

income sharing, though recipients were disentitled just on that basis. The reader

shouldn’t conclude that this is an argument against administrative rules; rather, it is an

argument about how such rules should be applied with due respect for their legality.

And it is advice to practitioners to be alert to abuses of that kind.

Of course, the reader must realize that there are social programs whose very nature

it is to intrude into private affairs, the obvious example being families whose children

are being severely physically abused. Notice that the issue there is social control

but of a kind that is legally sanctioned. Although that cannot justify just any kind of intrusion

or coercion, it is an important distinction because when the intrusion has occurred

by court order, it also means there is a way of remedying abuses through the court system

and the legally required defense attorney. In contrast, administrative, extrajudicial

coercion, and privacy intrusions occur buried in organizational privacy, without clear

and ready remedies.

Criteria for Evaluating the Fit of the Benefit/Service

Type to the Social Problem Analysis

Whatever the type of benefit, the basic question is whether it fits the social problem analysis,

that is, fits compatibly with the definition of the problem. One way to approach this

question of fit is to look at what the problem definition implies as the most prominent needs of the people who have the problem and ask whether the benefit the program delivers

is relevant to any of them. If it is not, then the benefits are clearly off target and irrelevant

to the social problem. They may even be desirable yet not a relevant benefit.

Think of an after-school recreational program for children who are disruptive in classrooms.

As desirable as this recreational program might be (perhaps it provides afterschool

hours supervision for working parents when no adult is at home), if the program

cannot make a case for some linkage with classroom behavior, then the program fails the

fitness test. Notice that you might create a fit by a design for the recreational program

that tailors itself to outcomes that are relevant to decreasing disruptive classroom behavior

in some way. That is, of course, exactly the point: If the tailoring is strong, the

program activities would likely be much more specific than just simply “recreational”—

recall that the definition of recreation is “doing what you want, when you want.”

The policy and program analyst should also look at the social problem theory and,

in particular, its derivative—the social program theory. Note that program theory will

specify some set of factors as a preferred outcome and describe how to set in motion a

chain of events (or processes) to obtain just that outcome. The benefit/service type must

be one of those events, causal antecedents likely to set this chain of events in motion.

And there must be a plausible and logical argument as to why this benefit would be expected

to have that result. That is what “fit of the benefit/service type” is all about. If that

argument is not there, then there is no fit.

There are some historical examples of bad consequences as a result of this lack of fit

with the social problem analysis. In the 1970s, federal payments to states for foster home

care were raised to 100 percent of state costs. There was an entirely innocent motive on

the part of the U.S. Congress: States complained that they didn’t have funds to provide all

the foster home care they needed to protect children from abuse and neglect. The legislation

and the federal dollars appropriated made cost-free foster home care available to

states. The benefit/service was a bad fit to the social problem of concern. The social problem

wasn’t just the lack of foster home care—couldn’t be, since foster home care is never

more than a means to some other end. In this case the “bad thing” that identifies the social

problem was the neglect and abuse of children. Clearly, foster care protects children

from immediate harm, but it doesn’t by itself change anything for next year or the year

after that. As it happened, within the year, there were massive increases in the numbers of

children removed from their homes and placed in public foster home care facilities. It

would appear that cost-free foster care created large-scale overuse of this service.11 Not

only that, many believe that cost-free foster home care funding was a major factor in children

continuing in long-term foster care, “stuck” there for interminable periods. That

phenomenon came to be called foster care drift, a phrase referring to children who neither

return to their own homes nor are placed in permanent adoption. Foster care drift has bad

consequences: Many children in foster care for long periods literally lose their place in

families since families are living, organic things, changing with age/stage development of

their members and adapting to the surrounding social and economic circumstances. The

program of cost-free foster home care actually created a whole new social problem—foster care

drift—an outcome that should be kept in mind when initiating new social programs.

It is a great temptation for legislators, policy makers, and social practitioners

alike to believe that a personal social service can (somehow) substitute for a necessary material need. It is almost always a mistake to believe that job training can provide a

livelihood when the economy itself is not at that moment providing jobs for that particular

person, to believe that various “counselings” can help a mother find a way to

deal with an aggressive child acting out when she has to work two jobs and twelve hours

a day in order to feed and provide shelter for her family. That is not to say that personal

social services are never effective, only to say that they can only be effective for people

who are at least minimally fed, housed, and clothed. It would seem to be obvious, but

the history of the provision of social welfare benefits in the United States shows that

important and very costly mistakes can be made in that regard. In legislating the 1962

amendments to the Social Security Act, social workers and other human service proponents

convinced Congress that personal social services should be institutionalized as

a major strategy against the problem of poverty. It wasn’t exactly a new idea—the

emergency relief legislation of the depression era in the early 1930s had provided for

special units of social workers to be available for difficult cases on an individualistic

basis to those who were poor and/or had personal problems. Prior to that time, private

charitable agencies as far back as the Charity Organization Societies of the mid-1800s

included social workers as part of a system to tailor cash assistance to individual characteristics

and to plan and implement service and benefit delivery. In its 1962 amendments,

the Social Security Act provided the first federal statutory instance in the

United States for the general provision of personal social services to families on relief.

According to Morris, at the same time Congress increased the federal dollar match (to

state funds) to 75 percent for this purpose as if to underscore their commitment to the

“rehabilitation” of the poor via personal social services.12 This effectively put into

practice the idea that services were an inextricable part, if not the major strategy, for a

solution to the problem of poverty. The social problem viewpoint was that the cause of

poverty was an interaction between lack of material resources and some personal attribute

(attitude, cultural approach to work) and was amenable to change by a service

strategy: family, group, and individual counseling; job and parent training; referral

agencies; and service coordination, which avoided duplication of services. Indeed, the

very name of the federal agency responsible for basic income maintenance programs

(e.g., AFDC) was changed to the Family Service Administration.13

Congress was convinced to increase appropriations by hundreds of millions of dollars

for services and the training of personal social service workers on behalf of those

ideas. Federal expenditures for personal social services increased from $194 million in

1963 to a billion and a half dollars by 1972.14 Not surprisingly, services weren’t successful

in reducing poverty. The money was directed at what was perceived to be the shortcomings

of individuals rather than the shortcomings of the economic system. The

mistake was to think that these services could somehow substitute for the problems of an

economy that created most of the poverty in the first place.

Here is an instance of a social problem analysis shown by subsequent events to be

dead wrong and it reveals, on the one hand, the limitations of the criterion of fit with

the social problem analysis. On the other hand, it shows how important it is to remake the

social problem analysis when that is the case. An obvious alternative hypothesis is that

the social problem is caused by external and environmental, not only personal, attributes.

The best training, education, and job referral systems cannot make up for a bad job market or low earnings combined with (for example) high child care and transportation costs.

The English historian Barbara Wootten puts it this way: “It is always easier to put up a

clinic than tear down a slum . . . we prefer today to analyze the infected individual rather

than . . . the infection from the environment.”15

But it isn’t that difficult to take all this history into account and then recreate a social

problem analysis based on a broader economic and social system viewpoint. If one

did, the implication would be reasonably clear that the most obvious cause of poverty is

lack of money and the most obvious remedy is via material benefits: cash and/or adequately

paid, full-time jobs. History shows that such jobs can be increased by a wide

range of governmental public policies including (but not limited to) the following:

“Trickle-down” policies that give tax cuts to employers and investors to invest in

new industrial plants and equipment to create new jobs (very slow in producing

effects and with sizable benefits to the wealthy)

Governmental policies to place new orders to private business for military equipment,

roads, bridges, and hydroelectric power dams in employment-distressed

regions (quicker effects for the middle class but expensive and controversially

cost-effective for the poor)

Projects directly administered by the federal and state government to construct

public buildings, roads and bridges, and national park facilities like the Works

Progress Administration (WPA) and the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) during

the 1930s’ depression (quickest for the poor but controversially cost-effective

for the product produced and politically very controversial in the United States,

though not in Europe)

And, of course, there is an incident in world history that, although not so intended,

dramatically demonstrates the effectiveness of public policy remedying poverty by hard

benefits like money or food or the access to opportunity for the ordinary jobs that produce

income. In the 1800s, Great Britain, stubbornly ignoring the relationship among

crime, poverty, and general economic distress, decided to solve its problem of an immense

overload of civil prisoners by shipping them off to their colonies in Australia and

New Zealand—out of sight, out of mind, out of trouble. No one believed that these colonial

societies would be successful. As hindsight shows, not only did that happen but successful

modern social and economic structures were built on a populace of convicted

criminals. The desire to work and the ability to compete and survive are shown by this

example not to have been lacking in the convict society. The economic and social development

of these countries is the premier example of the importance of having available

sufficient economic opportunity created by public social utilities (when the private sector

cannot provide it). Given abundant land made available by explicit public policy in the

form of subsidies, land grants, transportation, and settlement, a society made up of convicted

criminals created a hardworking, ordered, socially conforming, and economically

productive life.16 The mistake in the British approach to its social problem of crime was

an ideological error in the British understanding of the problem of criminal behavior—

the problem was thought to be totally about moral lack, not of economic opportunity.

However, when given a labor market that provided opportunity, these early Australian and New Zealand settlers took advantage of its benefits and turned them to their own

self-interest. Personal social services were not required. One might say that the lesson to

be learned from this history is that it takes very dramatic, hard-benefit–oriented mechanisms

(jobs and money) to produce a major impact on serious national poverty and crime

and no personal social service strategy—training, rehabilitation, job search sophistication,

however well financed or conceived—can substitute for it. Will there be some who

don’t work however many jobs are available? Of course there will be, because no social

program or policy is ever perfect.

Criteria for Evaluating the Merit of Benefit

Forms: Adequacy, Equity, and Efficiency

We have already considered adequacy and efficiency in the earlier section on the fit of the

benefit form with the social problem analysis. But there are moments when equity has a

special relevance to the choice of benefit type. Educational vouchers, it turns out, provide

a good example. Here is the argument. Suppose that instead of providing neighborhood

schools for children, a school district decides to issue educational vouchers. When presented

to a private school, the school district will guarantee payment of a child’s tuition

costs from tax funds. Commonly, educational vouchers pay tuition costs up to the dollar

per pupil costs in the local school district—some places that could amount to, say, $5,000

per year per child, not an insignificant sum of money. Those who object to this form of

educational benefit argue that for most private schools, the tuition is always more than

the voucher will provide, so that only those families with greater-than-average income

who can make up the difference can take advantage of them. And, if a significant number

of parents choose vouchers and private schools, the number of citizens who support public

schools will not only diminish but also actively oppose their improvement since they

are paying double educational costs. Indeed, with less pupils, per pupil costs rise, and at

some point, these cost increases mean less will be provided for public school students.

Some voucher opponents argue that ultimately vouchers mean that public schools are

only for those of less-than-average income and will not have enough support from taxpayers

to avoid serious deterioration in teaching staff and curriculum offerings, not to

mention buildings and facilities.

That is, of course, a consequence that is seriously inequitable because it falls primarily

on low-income citizens who are least able to accommodate to it. The issue here

is not that vouchers are inevitably inequitable, only that where it creates inequities, the

voucher policy design must have features that eliminate it. Vouchers can have some important

positive qualities, particularly the increase in what we have earlier called consumer

sovereignty—parents can exercise free choice over what kind of school their

children attend. The trade-off here is between that free choice and the inequity in the

form of lower-class schooling it visits on children who remain in public schools. There

are a number of ways of reducing the inequity. Most of the solutions turn on different

ways of equalizing educational costs so that all parents have the opportunity to send

their children to private schools: for example, private schools could be prevented from

charging more than the local district per pupil costs, the school district could subsidize private schools at a higher rate than their own per pupil cost, and so on. Note that all the

previous discussion avoids other important issues in public payments to private schools,

notably the issue of church–state separation.

Summary

Nine types of benefits and services were presented for use in the analysis of social programs

and policy provisions: cash, material goods and commodities, expert services,

positive discrimination, credits/vouchers, market/wholesale subsidies, government loan

guarantees, protective regulation, and power over decisions. Criteria for evaluating the

merit of benefits and services were presented: fit with the social problem analysis, fit with

the program design, potential for stigmatization, target efficiency, cost-effectiveness,

consumer sovereignty, substitutability, and trade-offs, among others. Interrelationships

between benefits and benefit packages accruing from more than a single program will be

the sole concern in a subsequent chapter of this book.

Resouces Chaper 5 of Social Policy and Social Programs Write a 300 word summary evaluating the benefit types and services of the same agency or organization you used in pervious assignments 

 

The information that is stated above is the pages 96-107 from the text book that you will need to complete this assignment Use the criteria for evaluating benefits and services , located in the above information 

Please no Plagirism-