Our View

Our View

No reason to oppose accountability for TANF recipients

[UPDATE: A proposal that would require the Arkansas Department of Workforce Services to seek a waiver from the federal government to restrict the use of financial assistance paid to Temporary Assistance for Needy Families recipients failed to clear the Legislature’s Joint Budget Committee] Now, we don’t know if this will actually make it through the legislative process but, what the Special Language Subcommittee of the Joint Budget Committee acted upon the other day by voting to adopt an amendment to put restrictions on Arkansans receiving tax-supported subsidies was certainly an excellent move towards making these people more accountable.

While we know the liberal Democrats in Little Rock who continuously give away our tax dollars on government hand-out programs that has led record numbers of people more dependent upon government to take care of them are crying foul, we are finally seeing a trend toward more individual accountability and a push toward demanding self-reliance.

This amendment will prohibit Arkansans who receive financial aid through the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program from using the aid for anything but food, clothing, housing, utilities, child care and incidentals such as transportation and medicine not covered by health insurance or government Medicaid.

The amendment also would prohibit TANF recipients from using these government issued subsidy cards to make cash withdrawals, which is something we certainly know is a common practice among many recipients.

Sen. Joyce Elliott, D-Little Rock, a vocal liberal, expectedly spoke out against the amendment saying, “Being poor does not preclude you from making good, sound decisions any more than one of us would. I think we have safeguards in place. The only thing I can see we are fixing is to say, ‘We don’t trust you because you are poor.’” Oh, come on Elliott, that is a worn out and typical response from a liberal politician accustom to throwing our tax dollars away on wasteful socialistic programs.

Let us remind Elliott and the other liberals who follow this socialistic philosophy that Gov. Asa Hutchinson’s recently passed Arkansas Works program that replaces the former Private Option, the state’s version of Obamacare, calls for participant accountability and able-bodied individuals receiving free or subsidized government health care subsidies to get a job.

Let us also remind our readers of the fact that there are just over two million Arkansas residents with over 260,000 of them taking full advantage of this government supported health care.

It is becoming very evident that while every effort should be made to help those people in need the numbers of people enrolling in government programs is growing to the point where it will be unable to sustain itself.

Arkansas’s politicians, such as Elliott, are spending billions of our tax dollars on taking care of people who aren’t taking care of themselves and that includes, men, women, children and the elderly.

This current Hutchinson administration has shown its generosity toward Arkansas’ poor but, by the same token has made it clear that those individuals capable of learning a skill or able to acquire a job move off government subsidies.

On another legislative matter, we know Sen. Keith Ingram, D-West Memphis, has got to be disappointed in the Joint Budget Committee’s rejection of his proposed amendment to a Department of Education appropriation bill to provide that if a school election is held on the day of a general election, the candidates and issues in both elections may be printed on the same ballot and the polling sites for the general election may be used for the school election.

You see, under the current law, school elections, and the general election would have to use separate ballots, separate poll workers and, in some cases, separate polling sites, so Ingram’s amendment would reduce costs by about half.

We have to say that is absolutely ridiculous and a waste of our tax dollars not to understand the logic in Ingram’s line of thinking. This is a typical example of politicians playing politics with our tax dollars and the election process.