Glenn Grothman Asks Witness: Has Welfare ‘Changed Society’ By Promoting Government Dependence?

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During a House Oversight Committee hearing last week, Rep. Glenn Grothman (R-WI) questioned Ben Carson, the Former Secretary of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, about the impact of welfare benefits.

Transcript

00:00on myself first. I'll give you guys some more time. I want to point out what the goal of the

00:06committee is, and then I'll ask another couple questions. First of all, the benefits right now,

00:15the support benefits, be it housing, be it food, be it earned income tax credit, whatever,

00:21all discourage work and even more discourage marriage. Because if you marry somebody who is

00:30worth making 40, 50 grand a year, it takes all these benefits away from you. I think anybody who

00:38goes back home and talks to people, not lobbyists or other congressmen, will find examples of people

00:45who even out of the chute don't get married because they don't want to lose their benefits.

00:51But that's where we stand. And I wanted to focus a little bit on the LIHTC program,

00:57which the more you look at it, overwhelmingly the primary beneficiary is a bunch of well-off

01:03property developers, not the so-called poor that they claim to be helping. But in any event,

01:09I'll ask Mr. Carson one more time. Do you believe that these benefits collectively

01:15have changed society in which there are less children raised in marriage and

01:25over time, more people adapting? Like you said, they spend time looking how to get the government

01:32benefits instead of getting a job. Do you think that's true, Mr. Carson?

01:35It's true. I don't think it may have been done intentionally, but we have to be smart enough

01:42to look at the effect of what's happening and ask ourselves, what can we do to change this outcome?

01:48I don't think anybody disagrees with helping poor people and giving them a hand up.

01:55I think the issue here is do we perpetuate that situation? And I think some people actually do

02:03not realize that if we continue down the pathway we're going with waste, frost, and abuse,

02:10our whole country will go bankrupt and everybody will be in a terrible shape at that time.

02:15It's being able to look at the big picture that sometimes people aren't able to do.

02:19Okay. In your experience, and I know you came out of a tough background, but to your experience,

02:26can you see benefits not just to the children, but to the men as well, who frequently our society

02:34has set up programs designed to make sure the men aren't in the household? Benefits not only to the

02:39to the father of the children as well as benefits to the children if we had more of a society in which

02:50marriage was the goal? Well, marriage is an institution that was set up by our God,

02:57and it is a perfect environment for children to be raised in. There was a recent study done by the

03:04Brookings Institute and Princeton University looking at the effect of traditional nuclear families

03:11on the well-being of the state, and it was pretty dramatic that those states that had the largest

03:17number of traditional nuclear families did much better, provided a much better environment for the

03:23raising of their children. It's something we need to be concerned about as a nation.

03:26Okay. Thank you much. Mr. Edwards, I did want to focus a little bit more

03:33on the LIHTC stuff and the fact that lobbyists are always moving around this building. Do you believe

03:43one more time that this program primarily benefits the so-called low-income or working poor, or does it

03:51primarily benefit the property developers, the lawyers, the accountants? The statistical studies that have

03:59been done have shown that half or more of the benefits go to the investors and the developers

04:04and not to low-income tenants. You could see that, for example, but by the fact that the the the rent

04:11average rent payments in the LIHTC buildings are not much lower than nearby market housing. To build on

04:18something quickly with Dr. Carson touched on, there's a big difference between the intentions of

04:22programs. All these programs are well-meaning. The actual reality is often different. The SNAP program,

04:28the N is for nutrition. A quarter of the benefits go to junk food. So the results are actually different

04:34than the intention, and that's the same with the LIHTC program. The intention is to benefit tenants,

04:40but the reality of the program, it's been taken over, as you mentioned, by the corporate lobbyists,

04:45the banks, the investors, and most of the benefits go to them.

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