Cheating the welfare system

As the five-year clock runs down on welfare in California (and elsewhere), welfare rights groups are advising recipients on the loopholes that they can exploit to collect benefits instead of working. The best of these is to cry “domestic abuse”; you’re automatically taken seriously, and the checks keep coming.

Carla Rivera reports on this program in the LA Times: (Recipients Scramble to Retain Welfare Benefits)

“Each month a victim suffered domestic abuse potentially means an extra month of aid,” said Quinn, who added that the county will try to verify such claims but mostly will rely on the word of victims. “We will also try to find counseling services for them after the fact. Domestic violence is not the only clock-stopper, but it’s one we’re extremely sensitive to and we want to bend over backward and take people at their word.”

There’s a long history of abusing the abuse exception to keep welfare coming, going back at least to the arguments welfare rights groups made against the reform back in 1996. One of their tools was a collection of studies, published by the Taylor Institute (now called the Project for Research on Welfare, Work, and Domestic Violence), in which welfare recipients were push-polled into crying abuse after they were told about the loophole.

With so much deliberate distortion going on, we’re unlikely ever to know what the overlap between domestic violence, child abuse, and welfare really is.