Back around twenty-five years ago in Germany, a long discussion started up and the talk centered on the escalating cost of welfare, and the anticipation that old welfare system of Germany would create a massive problem in the future which the country (and it's politicians) could not afford. So this Frankenstein-creation came to be written up as a solution (Hartz IV is the program name).
What it basically did was take those unemployed or under-employed (on part-time jobs), and slide them into a group which the local town Job-Center would handle. Through their encouragement, training programs, and 'help'....things would be on a level path. The welfare payments? Well...they turned into a minimum survival program. In some ways, the German idea was to strongly encourage people to get aggressive and motivated to find jobs.....to climb out of poverty.
Twenty years have gone by with the results of Hartz IV. You could sit down in a pub with a dozen Germans, and you'd get a dozen opinions. Some are pro-Hartz IV....some are bitterly negative about the program. Some will say it's created a new class of super-poverty in Germany. Some will suggest that the Job-Center folks need to be gutted out and recreated.
We have a number of reality shows over the past couple of years which have focused on the poverty folks and their path down Hartz IV. I can basically make five observations over the people in the reality shows and their results with poverty:
1. A heck of a lot of these individuals on the welfare program smoke excessively or drink in a habitual way (if not an alcoholic, then progressing to that level). You consider that a pack of smokes typically run 5.0 to 6.0 Euro (for twenty smokes) and you do one pack a day.....you can figure 150 Euro is spent (that's 190 US dollars). Even if you buy the raw tobacco and pack the smokes yourself....it's still two-third's of the 150 Euro. I sat and watched some documentary piece where a guy was purchasing a dozen cheap beers per day (it amounts to 4 Euro or 5 US dollars). Go take the 416 Euro which you get per adult, and deduct out the beer and smokes.....with your housing already covered via another program, and there's really not much left for food or anything else.
If you didn't smoke or drink? That's the point where the money would be sufficient.
2. For people without job training or a certification in some skill? There's no real job potential if you get unemployed by age forty. You will end up making the same amount of pay related to Hartz IV....so why work? You see this argument presented a great deal by those who've been unemployed for more than five years.
3. While some of these individuals on the German poverty program seem to be bright or potentially 'capable'.....I would suggest that more than a third of them (at least 33-percent)....are intelligence-challenged. These are the people that you could ask what's one-third of an hour, and even after two minutes....they are still doing the math or shaking their head.
4. Some of these people often featured on the welfare-poverty shows demonstrate a continual lack of economic knowledge or poor purchasing habits. You can present three 'deals', of which two are obvious as being poor purchases or bad-judgement situations.....and you see a number of poverty-players not able to grasp the deals or how they are making poor decisions.
5. Finally, while not the norm....you often see adults in this poverty-class who've gone to low-motivation in life and being in a poverty class isn't that big of a deal. So this make you question how you can write or draft up logical measurements for measuring if people are in poverty, or if they desire to get out or leave it.
I come to this end-point....that present measurements that you make (at least in Germany).....aren't capable of measuring poverty or its consequences. In some ways, we are working with a method that probably came out of the 1960s, and simply avoid recognizing the general manner or sequence to how the guy or gal reached this level, their present way of living in the manner, or the way of getting them out of the situation.
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