Day 7 – Monday – Mark Dunlea and the Welfare Challenge

The last day is another Just Say No day.

The big expense as always is transportation to my work assignment.

I decide to splurge 65 cents on a bag of Doritos to celebrate my son’s near straight As (email headline: Who Cares Anyway?) from his fall semester at college. He writes back to see if I will be saving his share. (Only if he brings back the spinach hummus.)

This is a work expense, but I am reminded of another household expense when the overhead lights don’t work in my office. The church is undergoing renovation, and the electricians who have been working on the lights won’t be back for a few days. Since I am working til 7:30 PM, I find an old lamp that I can plug into the wall socket but the church doesn’t have a supply of regular light bulbs. A four pack of a GE soft white goes for $2.99. (Waiting for a landlord to get around to fixing something unfortunately is an all too common experience for folks on public assistance. But to be clear, our church is a great landlord.)

I had also forget to mention that on Sunday a friend of ours who is moving to Albany this week for a new job called up and said that she had lost her apartment, her landlord hadn’t done the renovation work he promised. No problem, our son’s room is free, you can stay there until you find another apartment. For public assistance participants, this is often the first step towards a shelter or the street. You double up with another poor family when you lose your place. It works for awhile but there are too many people under the same roof, the landlord starts complaining, the hot water runs out, things begin to break, bills and expenses pile up, you have to move, now, you’re in a welfare office sitting on a bench trying to find a place to stay for the night, everything you own is on the ground around you.

While most who looked at this exercise threw up their hands saying it was impossible to live on what PA gives you, in many ways this has been an easy exercise. I have been sheltered from the real consequences of being poor and trying to live on welfare.

One, I am living in a comfortable middle class home, with more than enough clothing, household supplies, toiletries, fuel, food, etc. to offset any shortfall that I would experience from the PA budget.

Second, it was assumed that that the things that would be hardest to do without - housing, utility and food costs - were covered by public assistance; this is virtually never true in the real world. A better exercise would be to give you $450 and say that the utility company just pulled up to the curb to cut off your heat over a $200 past due bill, the landlord is at the back door seeking the $500 in past rent, and your kids are crying that they’re hungry because there is no food in the house. How do you keep everyone happy? You’ve got ten minutes to figure it out. Go.

Another exercise would be good during the challenge week – so you are limited on your transportation budget. See what type of apartment or housing you can find for what public assistance provides. In my home county of Rensselaer, the shelter allowance for a family of 3 is $296 a month. The HUD Fair Market Rent (FMR) for the county is $715. FMR is the amount that would be sufficient to cover rental charges for 40 percent of the housing units in an area. It would be interesting to see how many people would be willing to stay even a night in what PA would allow you to rent.

I also did this a single individual. The last time I saw a statistic on the average size of the family on welfare it was 3.3 – a little more than a mother and two kids. It was a real challenge for my wife and I – both employed with cars – to try to juggle work responsibilities with day care, after school activities, doctor visits, etc. It is far more difficult for a single parent, especially when you have to first take one child to day care on the bus after the other one has been picked up by the school bus and then get to your workfare assignment, then repeat the process at the end of the day, while also managing to feed and clothe your children and help them with their homework. And look for a “real” job.

It often seems that a major goal of welfare is to keep the family in a constant crisis. Give them so little money that there is no way they can pay all their bills and then watch the chaos that occurs, especially when something goes wrong requiring instant money to fix it. And while we force them into a crisis or two a week, we expect them to show up at their welfare work assignment for 25 to 35 hours, while also spending time to find a real paying job. Meanwhile, the mother is routinely publicly criticized as being lazy and a bad parent.

Welfare is often a brutal, stressful, humiliating experience for both parents and children.

A number of us had participated last fall in a food stamp exercise as part of the effort to increase funding as part of the reauthorization of the Farm Bill. It was also impossible to feed your family on $1.13 per person or meal. (It was still impossible if you added say 30 cents to reflect the contribution an individual was supposed to make from “other” income sources.) A number of people had to go to a soup kitchen or food pantry to get through (they made a donation to pay for it.)

So how did I do for my week? As a single person, my basic grant for the week is $25.85 – or $3.69 a day. (For a family of 2, it would be $41.31. For three, $46.20.)

I pretended that we disconnected the Internet and cable television, didn’t read a newspaper (e.g., help wanted ads) but still spent $7 a week for phone service.

I also spent $7 a week for my medicine. Many low-income folks often try to reduce the dose by half or more to try to save money, even though this often renders useless the medicine.

Transportation was a budget buster. We didn’t plow the road or driveway after the snowstorm to save the $40 to $65, and hiked out to the main road. I spent $35 a week just for gas for my car (ignoring the cost of insurance, repairs, oil change, etc.). If I had to travel for my 25 to 35 a week work assignment for welfare, perhaps $20 of that would have reimbursed by DSS (using Saratoga rules).

This brings my total to $34 for the week. I am over budget. This would mean for a day or two that I wouldn’t have been able to get to my work assignment. I get sanctioned and loss welfare for a few months. Maybe I become homeless if my landlord doesn’t want me living rent-free.

I spend $5 dollars for a few beers, a glass of wine and a bag of chips. I get by with only spending $1 for laundry. I am now $15 over budget. That is four days worth of meals I have to give up. Far more than a food pantry could give me. I spent another $3 to 5 dollars going to the store to buy food, visiting a friend, replacing a vacuum cleaner bag. I am going to be short on rent this month.

I avoid things all week long. I bring a sandwich each day to work and am in a panic when my son mistakenly takes my lunch. I walk long distances to avoid parking fees. I worry about cars being towed in snow emergencies. I don’t watch DVDs, I don’t go to movies, I don’t buy a pen when I need it, I don’t go to music shows, I don’t buy cans of soda, I don’t buy snacks, I don’t buy batteries. I don’t donate to worthy causes, I don’t buy shaving cream, I don’t dispose of the garbage, I don’t give gifts to my family for birthdays or holidays, I don’t buy a Christmas tree, I don’t turn on the heat when it is cold, I don’t go anywhere, I watch my plants begin to die. I pray that the car starts when it is zero out, that nothing breaks in the house, and that I don’t spill anything on my clothes. For some reason the blood pressure medicine doesn’t seem to be working.

Real welfare participants have it much worse. The PA challenge doesn’t end after a week.

After 18 years, it is time for a grant increase to at least cover the cost of inflation since 1990.

------------------------------------

Day 6 – Sunday, Jan. 7 – Mark Dunlea and the Welfare Challenge

Sunday is my day of denial.

I have busted my budget for the week, so the motto for the day is Just Say No. Go nowhere.

No to reading the morning newspapers. The Times Union and the NY Times comes to $7.50. We keep it to $5 by sharing the Times with a neighbor but way too much on PA.

Not that we would normally do all these events, but no to driving to church (or giving a donation. No to Sunday brunch, even at the bargain all-you-can-eat pancakes and eggs for $5 at the fire hall. No to a DVD or $8 to see Charlie Wilson’s War or Atonement at the Spectrum movie theatre (plus mileage). (We unfortunately don't make it to the movies much but do try to go a little more frequently during the Oscar season.)

No to making a campaign donation (or driving to New Hampshire) to support our favorite candidate as the Presidential political fires are blazing hot after the Iowa caucuses. The lack of campaign contribution by welfare participants and poor children is certainly a major factor in why our welfare program is so lousy. Last spring, when Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver addressed the annual gathering of good government groups in Albany, the first issue he cited to show the need for campaign finance reform was the failure to raise welfare benefits.

We had actually discussed seeing an old favorite, John Prine, who is performing at Troy Music Hall Sunday night. But at $48 a ticket, that is a shocked “no” even on a middle class budget.

I do read Kevin Danaher’s new book, Building the Green Economy: Success Stories from the Grassroots (PoliPointPress, $16.00, September 2007) but I bought this before the New Year.)
My houseplants are beginning to droop. I need to give them some food. I am tempted to ask my wife to pick up some at the store on her way back from work. I have been using the organic worm droppings being sold in the used soda bottles (TerraCycle) but at $8, at Home Depot my plants will have to wait a week. (During much of the year I feed them by making some compost tea  - you put some compost into a bucket of water for a few hours- but during the winter the compost is pretty frozen.)

I spend the afternoon putting together our new exercise machine while watching the Giants defeat Tampa Bay. (Thank goodness the playoffs are on network TV and not ESPN.) Another $1 for a winter ale from Sam Adams. The tools you need are pretty basic, so I don’t need to make any additional purchases. My adjustable wrench isn’t working but my socket wrench is an adequate substitute. I want to avoid putting the four “D” batteries into the machine, figuring I can wait until after my week is up, but you need them to adjust the resistance setting. I could walk the mile or so down to Bubie general store at the four way light in town; the batteries go for $2.99 (with sales tax, $3.24, my entire daily basic grant). But amazingly, four batteries that I find floating in the kitchen drawer work, so I can avoid this expense short-term.

I do use the phone a lot to call people to remind them about the People’s State of the State rally on Tuesday at the Capitol. Some people tried to save money by buying a phone service with a limited of calls. This makes such phone banking a budget buster for them.

I forget and say yes when my wife asks if I want a glass of wine with the fish dinner I cook.  Maybe 75 cents. (It is a small one.)

Thank goodness I don’t smoke. That would be another budget buster.

-----------------------

Day 5 – Saturday – Mark Dunlea and the welfare challenge

Saturday is household chore day.

My chores include cleaning and bringing in wood for the stove. The vacuum cleaner bag is full, so it has to be replaced. This costs slightly under a $1 a piece. However, unlike folks on public assistance, we have the resources to buy as many of these items whenever we want, so we tend to stockpile up on them, both to get the volume discount and to save on the costs of traveling to the store. (For instance, we have a cache of toilet paper that Johnny Carson would be envious of.) Folks on a more limited income usually only have enough money to buy whatever is needed right now, so when things run out, that becomes an expense to replace them.

My wife does the food shopping. The round trip is 15 miles. Since she drives a Prius hybrid, the out of pocket gas costs are only $1, though at 30 cents a mile the cost is $4.50. People on public assistance without a car often have to take a taxi – at least one way – to do food shopping. (Some will take a bus one way but it is pretty impossible to carry a full weeks worth of groceries back in a bus, especially if you have to take a young child or two with you.) There are seldom full-scale grocery stores in low-income neighborhoods. 

For instance, in Albany, there are no grocery stores in either Arbor Hill or the South End, with the Price Chopper on Delaware Ave. the closest for many low-income families. Grocery stores that do border low-income neighbors usually have higher prices than the same chain serving suburban communities, with lower grade quality of food (e.g., higher fat content in the meat or chicken cuts). Low-income neighborhoods have expensive corner stores without any fresh fruits or vegetable, along with fast food places selling fried food. In America, our food system is based on cheap calories and expensive nutrition, a major factor in the growing obesity problem for children.

The one-way taxi fare from the Delaware Price Chopper to Grand Street in Albany, about 1.5 miles, is $6. (Another option is to shop every few days, walking a few miles each way with a little pull cart to carry the groceries.)

Our food total for the week for two people is $110. This is about 2.5 times what people are allowed under the food stamp budget. (This does not include the three or four times a week where one of us may buy lunch at work.) On top of this $4 are for items not covered by food stamps but this week these are on my wife’s side of the budget. I need a new can of shaving cream (99 cents, Barbasol, 11 oz.) but decide to wait another week since I am on the PA budget. I don’t really care for David Letterman’s new look however, so I’ll just lather up the soap to shave. We don’t have to buy any shampoo, razor blades, toothpaste, soap, laundry detergent, household cleaning supplies, etc. this week.

One task is to take garbage to the transfer station in town. Like many communities especially outside of cities, in Poestenkill the town no longer handles garbage collection. Contracting with a private hauler costs $25 to $31 a month (Some of the companies charge by volume, a good idea to encourage waste reduction. So a single person might be able to get a cheaper price. The charges quoted are what two families we know pay.) This comes to around $7 a week – or two times the daily basic grant. We save money by taking our garbage to the transfer station in town of a private hauler, part of the “host community benefit agreement”. Regular garbage goes for $3 a “normal size” bag, plus $1 or $2 for recyclables depending upon how much you bring in. However, by composting our food waste in our backyard (we use the compost to enrich the soil in the spring for our vegetable and flower gardens), we only generate a garbage bag once every two or three weeks. So we pass today.

Another chore is to take down the Christmas tree. We buy our tree from the owner of the Pineridge Cross Country ski place in East Poestenkill, figuring it is good to help a local business. (See note below). You cut down your own tree. Our 7-foot tree goes for $40. Another budget buster – almost two weeks of my basic grant - but not for this week fortunately.

In our younger days, before our son began to wonder why our tree looked so different than his friends, we used to cut down a pine tree from our property. But what we think of as Christmas trees do not grow naturally in the northeast. The trees that we cut down qualified as Charlie Brown specials. A few years we even wired a few extra branches to the tree so that it looked a little fuller. They would also have a hard time holding the collection of ornaments we have accumulated over the years. Of course most people, especially in urban areas, don’t have an option of cutting down a tree. My son did mention that one of his college professors goes dumpster diving for his tree. When the school lets out for the holiday break between semesters, some of the administrative offices have trees they discard.

Fortunately, we don’t have to pay to discard our tree at the transfer station. We can just carry it into the woods near our house. (See note 4 below)

Another chore is laundry. We actually own a washer and dryer with one of our neighbors, partly to conserve resources but also because our house has low-water volume. (We well have less than half the recommended 5 gallons a minute, yet another neighbors’ well 40 yards away gets 10 gallons a minute.) We put $1 a load into the jar for each load (both wash and dry) to pay for the various energy and supply costs associated with running the two machines. A typical commercial Laundromat charges about $1 for the washing machines and 25 cents every 10 minutes for the dryers. Laundry detergent is extra. We usually do a load a week.

We resolve our evening entertainment decisions by wrangling an invitation for dinner from some friends. Free food and drinks – though we do bring along dessert. However, it is 6.7 miles each way. (In rural areas, this is the equivalent to “around the corner” in a city.) Splitting the cost with my wife, this is $2. Still a bargain – though more than half my daily grant.

-------------------------------------------------

Note 3. A lot of folks in East Poestenkill are land rich and cash poor. East Poestenkill is part of the Rensselear Plateau, a rocky forest that extends into the mountain hollows of Berlin and Petersburg that is similar to Appalachia. Many families have lived up there for generations. It is not uncommon to find 3 dozen families with the same unusual last name. So some own fairly large parcels of land. But the rocks make the land unsuitable for farming. Jobs and services (stores) are scarce to nonexistent. Some get by through various timber related work (logging, fire wood), honey, maple syrup, goats. But they feel the pressure from property taxes and second home development. State funds are needed to help with open land preservation.
Note 4. Before we had our son, we used to use a live ficus tree as our Christmas tree. We should save money by planting our own Christmas tree seedlings. To avoid discarding old Christmas trees in landfills, where they consume much needed space, consider composting or mulching your tree. An old Christmas tree can be ground up and used as mulch in gardens, on trails, or in animal stalls; can be used as sand and erosion barriers on beaches, streambeds, and lakes; or can be sunk into private lakes and ponds, where it provides refuge for fish. When I was on our town Board, we started a Christmas tree mulching program at the closed town landfill.

----------------------

Day 4 (Friday) – Mark Dunlea and the Welfare Challenge

(Anti-hunger activists and faith representatives have pledged to live on the welfare basic grant for a week to see how difficult it is. For a single person, the basic grant for the week is $25.85 – or $3.69 a day. For a family of 2, it would be $41.31. For three, $46.20. The groups want Governor Spitzer to propose the first increase in the basic grant since 1990. Mark Dunlea of Hunger Action started his challenge on Jan. 1, 2008)

It was a very cold night, so the backup propane heater ran a number of times throughout the night, even though its thermostat was set at 50 degrees. Fortunately, since we have a cathedral ceiling in the living room where the wood stove is, the bedrooms on the second floor (basically a divided loft) are the warmest place in the house.

With the departure of my spinach hummus to Poughkeepsie, the big challenge in the morning is what to make for lunch. Friday is the one day where I might spend $5 to buy a sandwich at work – maybe a third of the time – before food shopping for the week on Saturday. You can't do that on a $3.50 a day PA budget. I decide to go with the old standby peanut butter and jelly. Hunger Action is starting a food processing business to help local farmers and promote better nutrition in low-income communities, so my wife suggests using one of the test samples we have left in the refrigerator. I decide to go with some homemade raspberry jam that Rudy our next door neighbor gave us for Christmas from his backyard bushes. We carpool into work.

Camped out in Hunger Action’s fourth floor office at Emmanuel Baptist Church, the work day passes pretty uneventfully – other than waiting for the heat to come on, which has been acting erratic during the Church’s year long renovation. Don’t spend anything on coffee, newspapers, soda, etc. The one drawback is that the Church’s only water fountain is on the first floor, and without an elevator, the trip is 48 stairs each way; at least good exercise.

The budget buster for the day is going to pick up my wife’s Christmas present. Fortunately, the present is already paid for (I’ve just been waiting for it to arrive at the store), so it doesn't count against my weekly budget allotment, but this requires a 19 mile round trip to pick it up ($5.70 at my discounted travel rate, close to $3 in terms of actual gas expenditure). I could wait until after my public assistance challenge is up, but my wife is a traditionalist who believes it is usually better for such presents to show up under the tree on Christmas morning, so it is time to close this deal.

Public assistance recipients know of course that prices are often cut right after the holiday, so they often postpone a purchase til then to get a cheaper price, celebrating a few days late. (However, one problem is that stores are often out of stock then on popular items.) One of the reasons that the use of emergency food programs skyrockets during November and December is that many people will try to save up an extra $20 or $30 dollars for the holiday by getting a bag of food from their local pantry.

I also exchange a pair of pants that I bought recently that I had misread the size on. The sale price has changed however, so I have to step down in quality for the replacement to keep the same price. One way to try to keep on budget of course is to try to buy clothes at yard sales (less prevalent during winter months) or second hand stores. This is easier however for children than adults. (Note. My son is a big fan of this, partially out of the contention that buying used clothes means that your not supporting sweatshops. He draws the line however at buying second hand undergarments. It however is very difficult to buy nonsweatshop undergarments at stores; he finally found a source on the internet.)

The cost of the elliptic exercise machine is greater than the entire basic grant of $291 a month for a family of 3. Going to the gym or using exercise equipment is just something that is beyond the financial resources of welfare families. Nor is the second hard market particularly good. We have tried using old equipment over the years that our friends have relegated to their basements but we quickly discover that there is a reason why the older machines have been collecting dust. Weight equipment is the one piece of exercise equipment that you can reliably pick up at yard sales but I already have a set.

Many of us in the neighborhood do routinely walk on the road up and down our 800-foot high hill, which at parts has close to a 45-degree incline. This is a good heart pumping exercise, but during the winter this means on workdays usually doing it in the dark in the cold on often icy unlit conditions. So alternative exercises are sought during these months.

Since I don’t leave work for the store until 7 PM, my stomach is urging me to provide it some relief. I am tempted to buy a $1 mini apple pie or maybe a slightly more expensive muffin from a convenience store to tide me over, but I push on. I am already over budget. Of course, eating junk food like that isn’t good for your health.

We have actually avoided the budget breaking snow plowing in recent days since the snow hovered around the 3 to 4 inch mark that triggers the plow guy. But these means that I have to use my son’s sled to transport the 80 pound box down the driveway. Afterward I shovel the 100 foot driveway by hand to make it passable for a car.

At the end of a long week, I decide to grab a beer from the fridge ($1). My doctor, visionary that he is, has recommended that I have one or two drinks of alcohol a day in order to try to boost my “good” cholesterol levels. However, my HMO doesn’t yet treat beer or wine as being part of my prescription drug coverage.

When my wife gets home, she eyes the newly arrived Netflix on the table. I remind her that at a cost about $2.25 or so per DVD, we should wait until the challenge is over to view it. I suggest that we see if we can borrow one from a neighbor for the weekend. Since the DVD (La Vie en Rose, about Parisian singer Edith Paif) is one of my selections, hopefully I can convince her to wait.

Day 2 – Mark Dunlea, Living on Welfare Challenge

The first task for day 2 is transportation.

Many if not most welfare participants work. Welfare participants who work – whether as a paid job or as a condition of receiving benefits (e.g., workfare) are supposed to get some help with work related transportation costs but that varies greatly by county. (See more info below at note 1)

There is no public transportation that runs to Poestenkill. My home is 12 miles to downtown Albany where I work.

Owning a car is expensive. (However, welfare participants with a car earn an average of $2 more per hour when they get a job.) The federal mileage deduction is now 48.5 cents a mile. Just to fill up the tank of my car (12 gallons) which I do usually once a week is close to $40, far more than my entire basic grant for the week.

For the public assistance challenge I had planned to carpool with my various neighbors, most of who work in Albany. While I try to carpool once or twice a week, our work schedules often vary by several hours and none of us want to wait two hours for a ride home. Time is money. But when you are on public assistance, time is expendable while money is hard to come by.

While I do car pool into work this morning, I do a weekly public affairs radio show at WRPI in Troy. Reszin Adams is a long time announcer who was famous for spending an hour each way taking the bus back and forth from RPI to Troy, and then walking up the hill, to get to the station. But there is no bus from Troy to Poestenkill, so I drive my car. This is 15 miles. Even taking a discounted mileage rate of 30 cents per mile, this is $4.50 – more than the daily allotment. I also avoid putting any money in the parking meter at school, assuming no is going to ticket this late in the afternoon.

One of the benefits of WRPI is that it has a soda machine for 50 cents, a bargain that comes in quite handy in trying to keep those vocal muscles at high performance during 2 hours of interview. 50 cents is beyond my budget today, so I settle for a quick sip from the barely functioning public water fountain (unfortunately, one can't leave the studio once you're on the air.)

I make my own sandwich for lunch, since I can’t afford the $4 to $6 to buy it a sandwich shop. I had picked up a $4 container of spinach hummus at the winter Troy Farmer’s Market on Saturday (fortunately it is one of the handful of markets able to handle food stamps with the new swipe card system.) I add some mushroom slices and spinach in pita bread. Hopefully I will be able to get 2 to 3 sandwiches out of it. And of course I don’t buy any beverage for lunch, though I do bring in some fruit from home.

My next door neighbor is kind enough to pick up our newspaper at our delivery box when he is out for his morning walk but I have to wave him off when he stops by, telling him that only my wife can read the paper this week. Not in my PA budget.

Upon arriving home, I park the car at the top of hill on the town road to avoid the snowplowing expenditure. Our house is relatively cold as the temperature is dropping rapidly outside. It will be coldest night of the year so far, expected in single digits. Apparently our son had failed to make a big enough fire in the stove before leaving (he is returning early today to college for a job over winter break.) While we had installed a back up propane heating system about 10 years ago, we try to avoid using it as much as possible (partially due to concerns over global warming), leaving the thermostat low (about 55 degrees) primarily to avoid freezing the water pipes. This year we have been trying to re-ignite the fire in the wood stove each morning to keep the house warmer. This will probably increase our wood consumption from 2.5 to 3.5 cords. A cord is running about $170 this year, so we are looking at spending at extra $35 a month to keep the temperature at say 60 degrees when we’re not home.

On a cold night like this, we’d normally spend a few bucks to run the propane heater for 25 minutes while the wood stoves gets up to speed. But in my frugal welfare mood, I put on some extra sweaters while I wait for the fire to warm up the house.

On our dining room table I spy a DVD, “Birth”, a movie staring Nicole Kidman and Lauren Bacall (good acting, bad plot). My wife and I had watched this the night before. This would have been another $2 or 3 expenditure (i.e., my daily cash grant). Fortunately, we had borrowed it from our new neighbors who had just moved into the community along with their 300 DVD movie collection. Of course, there is still our $2.50 a week charge for Netflicks but I will see if I can convince my wife not to watch their DVD this week. (Though I had a hard time trying to stop her from watching the CNN special yesterday – and the resultant cable charge for the PA challenge - covering a speech from each of the Presidential candidates.)

We had experienced a ”budget busting” episode the night before around the dining table that was so beyond any rational discussion about living on welfare that it was laughable (sadly). Since my son was going back to college today, the three of us had sat down to figure out how big a check we would have to be paying for tuition and room and board. Just the tuition check (after scholarships and loans) for a semester is larger than the entire welfare check for a year. My son is moving off campus this semester to save money. But even his one-fifth share of the rent for the apartment is the equivalent of the entire shelter allowance for a family of three in Dutchess County. We also agreed to give him a food budget that was three times larger than what USDA allows a food stamp recipient.

---------------------------------

Note: A significant number of welfare participants have paid jobs that pay so little that they are still eligible for welfare. Unclear what transportation allowance they actually get. I couldn’t find any hard information after searching through the 600 plus pages of the welfare manual online at the state OTDA website (Office of Temporary and Disability Assistance; www.otda.state.ny.us). Nor could I get any definitive answers from our state transportation advocate, other than it varies by county; I am still waiting for info from our legal aid expert.)

Welfare participants who work are among the highest taxed taxpayers in the state – losing both benefits and paying various taxes on top (e.g., payroll tax). Governor Pataki did modify the Earned Income Disregard so that welfare participants basically would only lose half of their benefits until they get up to the poverty level; before it used to be $1 cut in benefits for every $1 in pay, not a great work incentive. Unfortunately, since the poverty level increases annually but welfare benefits have not, welfare participants who work now fall quite a bit short of poverty before they lose all benefits.
------------------------------

Day 1 of Mark Dunlea’s Welfare Challenge

Note: I am only counting myself in the welfare challenge, not my wife or college age son who is spending a few moments of his holiday break with us. They haven’t agreed to participate (e.g., make the changes needed to keep under budget). As a single person, my basic grant for the week is $25.85 – or $3.69 a day. For a family of 2, it would be $41.31. For three, $46.20.

For January 1, I am just going to stay home for the day, read a book, maybe watch a little football on TV and watch the snowfall. So at least the first day should be easy.

Wrong.

As I begin my normal routine of checking my email, I realize that the monthly bill for our combined Internet, basic cable and phone is about $100 or a little over $3 a day. There goes my basic grant right there. OK, I can pretend that I don’t have internet service (though it is a requirement for work) and I will only watch the network TV channels that I would get without cable, that that still leaves say $1 a day for phone service. That is 1/3 of my daily allowance. (While both my wife and son have cell phones, an additional expense, I do not.)

I also have a daily newspaper subscription with the Times Union. 50 cents daily, a few bucks on the weekend. OK, no reading the newspaper this week – except ones I pick up that others have discarded.

I actually start the morning replacing the one dimmer switch we have in the house that broke yesterday after 15 years. I had bought the $6 part (two days worth of the basic grant) on my way home the previous night, so technically this won’t count towards my basic grant for the week. Having supplied much of the muscle power in building my own home (fortunately I had several friends who supplied the brains), I feel pretty confident in doing household repair jobs. I just forget that the skills I developed from doing daily construction work for 3 months twenty years ago are pretty eroded in 2008. Hoping that I have managed to turn off the correct circuit breaker, I am aghast when the new dimmer box has four wires coming out of it in back while the old one has only two – and the colors don’t match up. As a PA participant, I would not have much choice in calling a handyman to come over to do such a basic job (forget about paying for an electrician). After reading the instructions written in small type English and Spanish, I think I have it figured out, and breathe a sigh of triumph when the lights turn on (and when I am not electrocuted in touching the wires).

Shortly after 9 AM, the snow begins to fall. Uh oh, another budget buster. I live at the top of a hill overlooking the Hudson Valley on a dirt road with five other households as part of a neighborhood association. We collectively hire someone to plow the six driveways (several of which are a hundred feet up the hill side) and the privately owned dirt road (which three of the houses, including mine, are on) whenever there is more than 3 inches of snow. My share comes to around $40. Recently we have discussing whether to pay another $150 to have the driveways and road sanded whenever there is the possibility of the storm turning into ice – that would be another $25 for me (my entire grant for the week).

So the storm alone will blow my basic grant for the week. However, I normally park my car 100 yards uphill on a pull off on the town road whenever there is the threat of snow. Like my rural towns, Poestenkill does a great job of plowing and I know that I will be able to get into work in the morning. So since I personally could survive without snowplowing, we’ll pretend that bill doesn’t exist.

Now I am understanding why so many people who looked at this exercise said it was impossible. One has to cheat to pretend to live on welfare.

I will note that my wife and I spent New Year’s Eve at some friends’ house. We brought a bottle of wine, a store-bought chicken dish, and some cookies to share. This of course would not have been possible under the basic grant – except for the cookies, which other friends had given to us over the holidays. Gift recycling is possible under the basic grant. The 5 miles each way to their house would also have been a budget buster but fortunately we were home by 10:30 PM, so we avoid the travel expense.

The big choice of the day will be whether to have a bottle of beer or glass of wine while having dinner or watching football. At $1 or so a drink, these are also budget busters. Let’s just hope that none of the neighbors or friends drop in unexpectedly to socialize. Or if they do, they bring their own.

I had also been meaning to buy a few new fans to improve the air circulation around the wood stove in our home. This is our prime source of heat, burning about 2.5 chords of wood a season. I am always trying to figure out how to better move the hot air around to reach the far ends of the house. We had visited a friend on Sunday who had the fans I wanted and she had given me the name of the Internet store where she had bought them. They would be impossible to buy under the basic grant – even though you would save money in the long run. Ok, since they wouldn’t be delivered until after the week is up, I can pretend it didn’t happen. I had also just recently gotten around to finding someone to come in to do an energy audit. Even though we had built an super energy insulated house 20 years ago, insulation technology has so changed that I want to see what we can do to take it to the next level. Since the energy consultant hasn’t called back yet, I’ll just schedule a date after the 8th. This of course would be another basic grant budget buster – though you would save money in the long run. (Though a low-income person might be able to get a bigger discount through the various state incentives.)