Mistermix’s post on Philosopher-King Gingrich’s latest GOP talking point about “food stamps” reminded me that some of you probably don’t remember back in 1994, when Newt was actually holding political office and talking up orphanages:
… Orphanages were not the subject of Gingrich’s speech, but they were not a throwaway either. The notion reappeared in the Republican welfare-reform bill (with the inflammatory word orphanages changed to “children’s homes”), which is a basis for Gingrich’s famous “Contract with America.”
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It was not a smart move. The news media were quick to note the orphanage proposal’s obvious incompatibility with “family values.” Hillary Clinton told a New York audience last week that the “idea of putting children into orphanages because their mothers couldn’t find jobs” was “unbelievable and absurd.” Eager to be seen as the way of the future, the Newtonians found themselves tarred with images of the distant, Dickensian past…
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Nearly everyone agrees that illegitimacy and teen pregnancy are key elements in poverty’s vicious cycle and that the government should try to reduce them. Gingrich’s orphanage proposal, however, seems punitive — not to mention odd, coming from a man who was born to a 16-year-old mother eight months after she left his abusive father. It would violate federal law, which mandates family- based care over institutions, and ignore the public policy consensus — first expressed by the Teddy Roosevelt White House — that “no child should be deprived of his family by reason of poverty alone.”
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It would also be a budget buster. According to an analysis done for TIME by the Child Welfare League of America, the annual welfare cost of one child living with his or her mother is $2,644. The same child living with a foster family costs the public $4,800 a year. The average cost for the child’s care in “residential group care,” today’s closest approximation of an orphanage, is $36,500. If even a quarter of an estimated 1 million children who would be cut loose under Gingrich’s plan ended up in orphanages, the additional cost to & the public would be more than $8 billion.
Of course, the “budget buster” problem only applies if we intend to treat those “orphans” as if they had potential social value. While googling these old stories, I was appalled to find a link to a much more recent WSJ story from January 2010:
Critics are right on one point: Orphanages are far too expensive. Unfortunately, too many orphanage proponents and directors are convinced that all such care has to be “high quality” (or better than family care), which means high cost and limited access. But make no mistake about it: Orphanages are returning slowly across this country and around the world because communities see the need is so great.
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The world needs a Sam Walton of child welfare who can show how to provide lots of kids with pretty good care at very good prices — comparable to the full cost, including administrative overhead and foster-parent payments, of foster care — as did orphanages of the past…
Roll back prices with high-volume, low-quality care! And remember, all you good Christianists… it’s a child, not a choice.
Joseph Nobles
Glenn Beck is attacking the food stamp program today as well. “Why are we trying to get all these people on the food stamp program?” he asks. Uh, maybe we want them to eat?
mclaren
No, no, no, no, no, no…child labor. That’s what we need. Repeal those pesky laws against child labor and send those seven-year-olds to work in a factory.
That’s America! Pull your own weight. That seven-year-old wants to eat, better get a job.
Mark S.
I really hope I’m dead before that ever comes to pass. Jesus, Huxley and Orwell never wrote such a dystopian sentence.
beltane
@Joseph Nobles: Glenn Beck should be more supportive of the food stamp program. After all, if someone’s hungry enough Beck himself would look kind of tasty. I already have the slogan for the nutritional assistance program of Gingrich’s dystopian future: Wingnut, the Other White Meat.
Fox viewers are old, fat, and well-marbled. They and their scooters would be no match for a mob of the young, the angry, and the hungry.
Zifnab
Perhaps we could just get rid of our current children and import children in bulk from China. I hear they’re a lot cheaper.
Dennis SGMM
As if it would cost a fortune to hire some wino to pull the kids’ teeth with a pair of pliers and provide him with a ’72 Econoline to drop them off at various truck stops to earn money as blow babies.
freelancer
Score 1 for Sully’s neologisms…
Maude
@mclaren:
The child labot law was passed in 1916 which is rather late in a way. Kids aged four did work in factories back in the day.
btw, you had, some time ago mentioned a heavy bomber used in WWII. Someone contradicted you and said the bomber wasn’t around then.
Doolittle’s autobiography mentioned that bomber as being in use before WWII. I know this is petty, but I wanted to tell you. You were right.
Joseph Nobles
@beltane: He was upset because New York was asking sugary drinks be excluded from being purchased by food stamps for two years to help fight obesity. “They’re telling you what to eat!”
The best part was the porcine Mr. Beck sipping from a can of Coke all show long today. Giving the finger to the man! I don’t know how Coke will take it – they are one of the almost 300 companies that have sworn off advertising on his show. And isn’t Beck Mormon? How could he in good conscience drink a caffeinated beverage on national television in violation of his religious precepts?
That’s a rhetorical question…
WereBear
From what I hear, many states have just the WalMart approach WSJ is advocating. They don’t have support programs to help the mother get adequate nutrition, or off drugs and alcohol, or get prenatal care. When the baby is born they struggle at first and then give them up to social services. Because the baby has all kinds of problems.
One such person vented to my mother; they were eager to adopt this adorable little girl, and feel that the state agency minimized and masked her problems until the adoption was final.
Now, she’s eleven, and they are at their wit’s end; and looking at institutionalizing her.
Bokonon
I know! I know! We can create these things called “workhouses”, and we can have the orphans work to pay for their upkeep! It will all be very economically efficient! But we’ll have pivate corporations run them!
And then, for those orphans that aren’t productive and can’t work? Well, um … we’ll send them out to special camps located in the countryside or something.
You see, when privatization is involved, there can be no tyrranny.
sven
Well the previous story suggested that foster care costs ~ $5000 per year. Using the a little division (sorry DougJ) that works out to $13.70 per day for everything. Food, clothing, housing, electricity, travel expenses, heat, entertainment, and paid supervision for only $13.70 per day.
Unless step one is sending them out of the country, I say this can’t be done… anyone disagree?
sven
@Bokonon:
They’re skilled munitions workers. Their fingers polish the insides of shell metal casings. How else am I to polish the inside of a 45 millimeter shell casing? You tell me.
polyorchnid octopunch
@Mark S.: No, but Dickens did.
Trevor B
@Joseph Nobles: The LDS church has its fingers in the Coke franchise, so caffeine is OK now.
kth
I think it’s safe to say that the visionaries who brainstormed the orphanages idea had no intention of spending $36,500/year/kid. What would have been enacted would have been more like homeless shelters for kids. Or like juvenile detention centers. Warehouse them, basically.
TooManyJens
@Mark S.:
“Jesus, Huxley and Orwell” would make an awesome webcomic.
Snark aside, I really do not have words for the horror of this. Wal-Mart’s idea of “pretty good” quality is one thing when it comes to selling cheap plastic crap, but what kind of human being would want to see that standard applied to the care of children?
(I realize that’s kind of a self-answering question.)
BRB, need to go hug my kid.
Linda Featheringill
My grandmother was raised in an orphanage [yes, I know that was a long time ago]. It seems that great-grandmother was suddenly left alone with no money and 5 children, the youngest still in arms. So off to the orphanage with the kids.
The people who worked at the orphanage weren’t cruel to my grandma, but they weren’t affectionate either. She was cared for adequately, but rather coldly. And carried a lot of emotional scars from that experience.
She was a nice lady but really didn’t know how to give physical affection to family members. Which, of course, affected my mother who affected me, etc.
I vote No on cheap and efficient orphanages. Actually, I would like to say something obscene but can’t think of a phrase that adequately expresses how I feel.
Delia
@sven:
I’m too lazy to use the google right now, but a couple of years ago I read a story on international interracial adoptions that said that a few American babies of the wrong hue were being adopted by parents in radical countries like Canada and France, but nobody wanted to talk much about it because, you know, it means you can’t take care of your own and meanwhile you’ve got all these upper-middle class Americans moving heaven and earth to adopt Third World babies.
Windy City Traveler
This country literally has no gag reflex.
WereBear
@Linda Featheringill: Mmm. Mr WereBear’s grandmother was raised in a Catholic orphanage as a mixed race (Native American and Caucasian) person.
While this had predictable poor consequences, it got funny when she passed ninety and lost her mental censor. One day, she drew Mr WereBear (always a favorite) aside to declare: “I think those nuns lied to me!”
During the ensuing discussion, it turned out they had.
Jules
HA!
You libs are so lost.
The government will not be running these orphanages, they will be run by private corporations who have those kiddies working 13 hours a day….maybe like inmates making lisence plates for their keep.
S. cerevisiae
Seriously, WTF? Orphanages? The fucking Wal Mart model? Someone should retool A Modest Proposal and submit it to the WSJ.
These people are truly loathsome.
r€nato
cheap
orphanageschildrens’ homes which turn out sociopaths who end up voting Republican as adults due to their shitty childhood, devoid of love, compassion and bonding with a parent figure. Sounds like a win-win for right-wingers.r€nato
@S. cerevisiae: they would consider it a manual, like they do 1984.
WereBear
@r€nato: Except when they, you know, murdered people in crazed rages and had to be repudiated as lonenutswhatcanyado.
Omelettes, eggs.
Just Some Fuckhead
Maybe Walmart could have American children manufacturer their goods instead of asian children.
Roger Moore
@r€nato:
I think it’s more of “cheap orphanages that provide child rape opportunities for Republican sociopaths”. Anyone who doesn’t believe that plenty of the children would be sexually abused simply hasn’t been paying attention.
Suffern ace
Hmmm. Doesn’t pallandino want to round up the poor and put them in retraining camps run by former prison guards or something like that? I guess they could bring their children along rather than having the state take them away. More humane in it’s own way and no need for foodstamps probably since most food will be provided by the institution most days.
Mnemosyne
@WereBear:
Social service agencies are notorious for not giving adoptive parents medical information about things that could be mitigated with early intervention, like mental illness. For a lot of people, if they had known up front that the kid was at high risk of bipolar disorder or schizophrenia or severe ADHD, there was a lot they could have done to help the child early on.
But many people don’t want to take on a disabled child, so the social services people conceal that history and make things 10 times worse than they would have been for everyone if the parents had known up front what they were getting into.
S. cerevisiae
@Just Some Fuckhead: Why should we outsource your children’s jobs to Asia? Let’s keep those jobs here in America! /next republican TV ad
jwb
@Joseph Nobles: They can always eat dog food.
We’ve been through this one before. The Austin Lounge Lizards even have a great song about it. It’s looking like it may well soon be back in heavy rotation.
jwb
@mclaren: Indentured servitude would be much better.
WereBear
@Mnemosyne: Gosh, yes. I just recently sent a set of foster parents some links regarding the child’s oversized tongue. Early intervention can make a huge difference if it’s a hormone issue.
Corner Stone
@sven:
Well shit. When you put it that way…
jwb
@Jules: “It’s a hard knock life.”
Corner Stone
@Dennis SGMM: Why do I have the sneaky suspicion you, in fact, own a ’72 Econoline?
cs
@Joseph Nobles:
Coke isn’t really forbidden. What is forbidden is “hot drinks” which the church later clarified to be coffee and tea. Some Mormons eschew caffeine but they aren’t required to.
With my Mormon friends, I once posed a rather deep theological question: “Would you eat coffee ice cream? It’s neither hot nor a drink!” and this resulted in a debate between them that lasted for a few weeks.
WereBear
@cs: So you can have iced coffee?
And, BTW, that makes no sense at all.
sven
@jwb: Would anyone here really be shocked if indentured servitude came up this election? There has to be a state representative in Mississippi or a Dakota who is pro indentured servitude; local journalists get on this potential story.
Why should government be able to say which contracts I am allowed to enter into?
Man, this would make a great topic over at Human Events or Reason.
erlking
@Linda Featheringill: My dad was put in a Catholic orphanage after his mother died of septicemia–his father was dead from silicosis, the move from Poland to Johnstown being a wash job-wise–and that pesky Great Depression still going on. After watching his brother be molested by a priest, my dad threw the head nun’s cat into the furnace (Okay, I know. Bad.) and joined the merchant marine, figuring that u-boats had to be better odds than staying.
So, yeah, fuck Newt Gingrich, Man of Ideas.
Tehanu
They could follow the precepts of Sir Eustace Dismal, founder of “the dismal science, economics,” per John Hodgman. Sir Eustace believed that factory chimneys should be made from children, although that led to Dismal’s Paradox: if the chimneys are made of children, who can you force to climb up and sweep them?
hilzoy
I always thought that Gingrich’s proposal was, in its own way, honest. For those of you who don’t recall the Welfare Wars:
The crucial issue was always kids. If we reproduced in some other way — maybe by fissioning into two fully mature adults — everything about the welfare issue would have been much simpler. In that case, I know a lot of Democrats who would have been fine with time-limiting welfare, insisting on full personal responsibility, etc.
But we have kids. And the question was always: how on earth do you, say, enforce a five-year lifetime cap on welfare without harming the kids, who are surely not responsible for their parents’ choices? On the other hand, how do you say “we won’t do this if there are kids” without creating perverse incentives?
Republicans generally didn’t face up to this problem. As far as their rhetoric was concerned, it was as though there were no kids in the picture, just adults who should be held responsible for their choices, etc., etc. Orphanages were the obvious consequence of their views, at least for those who don’t fancy letting kids starve. But only Gingrich actually said so.
Batocchio
Ah, yes, back when Newt kept on talking about the film Boys Town, and wound up hosting an airing on TNT.
http://articles.baltimoresun.com/1994-12-29/features/1994363203_1_lassie-seinfeld-cyborg
ET
Isn’t this just about putting them away, out of sight so suburbanites don’t have to look at that them and be confronted with the harsh side of reality?
I do assume they don’t future the State would run these. If so then based on their current attitudes towards how government function then what they really mean is the want to to be out of sight permanently.