The following, is an email making the rounds. I was able to get very close the the format that I received it in. I really HATE the dirt in politics and emails like this make me hate republicans. ============================================= As Benjamin Franklin once said, ”When the people find that they can vote themselves money, that will herald the end of the republic”. I think we are very close to that point. Have a nice day!! Wake up America The new breadwinner in the family... Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! An emergency room physician told me that a woman in her late 20's came to the ER today with her 8thpregnancy. She told the first doctor she saw: "My Mama told me that I am the breadwinner for the family." He asked her to explain. She said that she can make babies, and babies get money from the State for the family. It goes like this: The Grandma calls the Department of Child & Family Services, and states that the unemployed daughter is not capable of caring for all of her kids. DCFS agrees, and tells her the children will need to go into foster care. The Grandma then volunteers to be the foster parent, and receives a check for $1500 per child each month in Illinois. $144,000 annually, tax-free and nobody has to go to work! In fact, they get more if there is no husband/father/man in the home! Not to mention free healthcare (Medicaid), plus a monthly card entitling them to free groceries and a voucher for 250 free Obamaphone minutes each month. This does not include WIC and other welfare benefits...that they are "entitled" to. Indeed, Grandma was correct that her fertile daughter is the "breadwinner" for the family. This is how the liberal politicians spend our tax dollars. When this generous program was invented in the '60s, the Great Society architects forgot to craft an end date... and now we are hopelessly overrun with people who vote only for those who will continue to keep them on the dole.... No wonder our country is broke! Worse, the Muslims have been paying attention, and by mandating that each Muslim family have eleven children, they will soon replace the voting bloc above and can be running this country within 25 years. Read the above again, until it sinks in, and then ask yourself if your Children, Grandchildren, and Great Grandchildren will survive these severe changes to America!!! Are YOU alarmed yet? Is anybody listening? Is this a GREAT COUNTRY or what...? Don't forget to pay your taxes! There are a lot of "breadwinners" depending on you!
Unfortunately killjoyklown, what the chain email is describing is all too often the case. I have seen it firsthand in my career as a registered nurse. Especially within inner city hospitals that I have worked in, this describes a significant percentage of my patients. They sit around all day and ask when their pain meds are due. Their children visit, run wild in the unit, and roll around on the filthy, germ-ridden floor. I have even known people of low socioeconomic status in nursing school who graduated with me but never became licensed because working didn't make as much financial sense as producing another child. Someone else I know worked two part time jobs as a nurse but quit one of them because it caused her to earn too much money to qualify for her disability payments. The social programs are abused terribly in this country. You can hate the republicans all you want, but the system is in serious need of an overhaul, and I say that as a long time liberal.
But this email was built to inflame emotions in an election year. In my book if a program is broke you fix it. You don't point the blame at the other guy. The republicans have been in power lots of years sense this law went into effect and they did nothing to correct any of the problems you mentioned.
Well if the idea is to profit from foster children as represented, they don't need a daughter producing children to do that. There are plenty of foster children already available for placement. What they need is more money from the state because the state does not pay anywhere near what the ad claims. In Illinois the rate is a little over 400 dollars per month per child not anywhere near the $1,500 rate claimed in the ad. And that $400 must cover food, clothing and incidental expenses. And Medicaid only benefits the child and not the foster parent, and the foster parents cannot benefit from other social support programs (e.g. food stamps) for the kids if they are being reimbursed as a foster parent - no double dipping. So the ad is grossly and intentionally in error on several fronts. Unfortunately this kind of right wing/Republican/Tea Party misinformation is ubiquitous and crucial to the movements deceptions. I have a childhood friend who has received (documented) more than 100K dollars for not planting crops. Why don't you see the right wingers/Republican/Tea Partiers send out emails protesting that FACT instead of this false garbage? My guess is because most of those folks receiving agricultural price supports are card carrying members of the Republican Party - all those Red State folks. The difference is you don't have to lie about the Red State federal supports for them to be true.
This is clearly nothing but racist dog whistles. Republicans won't cut the military budget but complain about giving any money to poor people, money that amounts to a miniscule percentage of the total. For some reason it's OK to give money in the form of tax cuts to the rich (it does generally go to white people after all), but God forbid we give any money to the blacks.
That does sound a lot different. It would be a real disaster if people could make over a $100,000 per year just because they can't care for a dozen kids they have just to get federal aid. Excuse me but I just know it can't be that easy to get money from our government.
Killjoy, we know the ad is is flawed. However, the sad part about it isn't that it demonizes dems, blacks, latinos, or welfare mothers, or whatever. Instead, the sad part about the email is that its racial undertones and ridiculousness veil the underlying, legitimate problem of social program abuse, by distracting people exactly like you, making you zero in on those things, which just helps to further undermine efforts at fixing the system. I am sure that you mean well, but reactions like yours help to empower the makers of these chain emails by granting them the attention that they are clearly designed to garner. And now here you are, spreading this garbage out on sciforums, circulating it even further. Makes you think twice about who you're really helping, doesn't it?
Actually I think the people on this science forum will critique it for what it is which may be a big help to everyone reading it who has received this email. In any event that was my intent. If others think my posting here was the wrong thing to do, please speak up.
This is about Illinois laws, and I believe they've been mainly run by Dems for a long time (last time they voted for a Republican President was in 1988) As to the veracity of the numbers, thankfully they are wrong. But not that wrong: Guardians of children under DFCS care (foster kids) get between $384 and $471 per child depending on age. For 8 kids, 3>12, 2 >8, 1 >4, 1 >1 and 1 newborn, the state of Illinois would provide $3,468. They would also provide under the SNAP program, $1,502 (family of 10) for food stamps. They would also provide free medical care, which at an average value of ~$200 per kid per month is $1,600 A free cell phone is available via SafeLink, but it's not funded by the State. That comes to a total of $6,560 per month, or $78,720 tax free income. Which would make the Email's contention about the fertile mom being the Breadwinner of the family correct. For a while. Because it takes a while to have that many kids and kids grow up and that money then goes away, so over a period of twenty or so years this sort of thing might be possible, but it's not really something that I think that many people do to scam the system either.
So some states could be more of a problem than others. From reading that email I got the feeling he was talking about the U.S. as in a federal law. I suspect you might be right that it's not much of a problem as the writer is trying to make it. However, it's obviously a right wing dirty tricks propaganda. Maybe the Dems are just as bad, but I sure haven't seen it. I've seen many other emails that are even worse. I never pass them on and I mostly delete the worst ones.
But not that wrong? LOL Please do show where Democrats publish this kind of crap and in equal numbers.
I think there are people who want to foster extreme views on either side of the aisle. I lean Repbulican, but I don't agree with this email as being a realistic view of an actual serious problem. Sure, as I pointed out, you could milk the system for quite a bit of money, if you want to keep having kids after kids after kids. So? Do we design these programs to deal with the extremes or with the norm? Could we design a system that makes this practice not pay, and if we came up with one, and someone did have this many kids anyway, aren't we just hurting the kids? "Sorry, your mom went over the kid allotment with your other siblings, no pudding for you."
Why do people not check snopes.com on things like this? By its own terms, it's at least triple hearsay by the time you read it, which means its credibility should hover right around zero. In this case, the email is almost certainly a paranoid fantasy, and 100% certainly wrong in its details. (I can't post links, but go to snopes.com/politics/taxes/breadwinner.asp). Even if there were states where this sort of abuse were possible on the scale mentioned, those States would change those laws lickety-split as soon as it became public knowledge.
Yes, because apparently one can make nearly 80k a year, without working, just by having kids in Illinois and having your Grandmother raise them as Foster parents. What the email doesn't make clear, and I think this is true, is I don't think the Mother could legally live with her children to have them treated as Foster children. And so yes, a mother could do this, but would they? I don't think many would. Which is why I said: I don't agree with this email as being a realistic view of an actual serious problem.
Uh, no - it would be the grandmother that would get the money. And do the work of raising them. I'm frankly just kinda baffled that this email tries to ignore the expenses and work associated with raising a child - especially, right on the heels of the GOP making a big stink about how being a housewife is "real work" and all. Does anybody here really think that they'd end up with more disposable income if they added both a kid and $1500 a month to their balance sheets? I sure as hell don't. But then, I live in an extremely expensive area (and expect to pay for my children's college educations) so maybe I'm biased...
Good find: http://www.snopes.com/politics/taxes/breadwinner.asp I plan to forward that link to the email source. Thank you.Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!