To me this all speaks to the classes, probably growing and certainly swelled in this recession, who live off the grid of middle-class and consistent work-conditioned benefits. One type of fallout from the '96 welfare reform was the increase in "deep poverty" (those below 50% of the official rate, which is no great shakes itself), people who fell out of the already-inadequate welfare system whose fate was unknown.
On Mon, Sep 20, 2010 at 3:01 PM, Angelus Novus <fuerdenkommunismus at yahoo.com
> wrote:
>
> Max Sawicky wrote:
>
> > My numbers and cite were for social spending.
>
> Yes, but social spending is a very broad term, and much of what is
> statistically
> counted as social spending in Germany is not assistance for the poor.
>
> For example, so-called "Elterngeld" ("parental money"). This was created
> by the
> previous government (CDU-SPD) and was the pet project of then family
> minister,
> now labour minister Ursula von der Leyen. It replaced an older program
> called
> "Erziehungsgeld" ("child rearing money"). The innovation with "Elterngeld"
> was
> that it was specifically targeted to encourage upper class and upper
> middle-class women to have more babies, to counter the supposed demographic
> decline of ethnic Germans. It is supposed to encourage these women to take
> a
> period of pause from high powered careers in order to reproduce the higher
> social classes.
>
> Because it was replacing Erziehungsgeld, Elterngeld was also payed to poor
> people. If you were a Hartz IV recipient, you got 300 Euro Elterngeld not
> calculated against your Hartz IV.
>
> Now, as part of the austerity packet of the current government, Elterngeld
> for
> Hartz IV recipients is going to be abolished. With the justification, of
> course, that people who don't work shouldn't be offered extra financial
> incentive to have children. The original intent, you recall, was to
> encourage
> rich women to have more kids. The problem, of course, is that Elterngeld
> is not
> just paid to rich career women, but also to rich housewives who have also
> never
> worked a day in their lives.
>
> So in effect, a subsidy for rich women to bear more children is "social
> spending", statistically speaking.
>
> That should illustrate sufficiently, I think, how much caution to exercise
> when
> talking about "social spending" in Germany as a broad category.
>
>
>
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