Vox: All Posts by Jack Meservehttps://cdn.vox-cdn.com/community_logos/52517/voxv.png2023-09-20T10:30:00-04:00https://www.vox.com/authors/jack-meserve/rss2023-09-20T10:30:00-04:002023-09-20T10:30:00-04:00How states humiliate single parents who need government assistance
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<img alt="People walk past an EBT station, more commonly known as food stamps, in the GrowNYC Greenmarket in Union Square on September 18, 2013, in New York City." src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/gjhs0XmHQ1W_fHhumR11qu8_cHA=/171x0:2838x2000/1310x983/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_image/image/72668548/180963426.0.jpg" />
<figcaption>About half of states require single parents to cooperate on child support for key aid programs like food stamps, or EBT. | Andrew Burton/Getty Images</figcaption>
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<p>The invasive challenge faced by single parents seeking government assistance.</p> <p id="TybC4l">To receive government assistance in the US is to submit yourself to a whole host of requirements, some reasonable, some harsh. Each state, and each program within it, has their own requirements, which might be a test of income, of assets, or even of behavior. Some are reasonable — a millionaire probably doesn’t need food stamps; others are more punitive. A disabled single man wanting to get Medicaid in Maryland, for instance, has to <a href="https://health.maryland.gov/mmcp/docs/2023%20MONTHLY_INCOME_AND_ASSET_GUIDELINES%20-%20Monthly%20Income%20%26%20Asset%20Table.pdf">show he doesn’t have assets totaling over $2,500</a>. To receive unemployment benefits in Texas, <a href="https://www.twc.texas.gov/jobseekers/eligibility-benefit-amounts">quitting a job to take care of a child makes you ineligible</a>, unless that child has a medical illness.</p>
<p id="tp28Fh">One requirement is especially odious, and little-known and little-studied: In many states, for many aid programs, you must <a href="https://legalhearsay.com/the-impact-of-food-stamps-snap-on-child-support/#:~:text=The%20Government%20Will%20Gather%20Information,a%20condition%20of%20receiving%20SNAP">agree to cooperate with authorities on enforcing child support</a> against the parent of your child.</p>
<p id="Or7SUt">Depending on the state where they live, a single parent may have to agree to help the government recoup child support in order to receive child care assistance, food stamps, cash welfare, or Medicaid. They may have to establish parenthood of their child, provide <a href="https://www.kff.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/a-medicaid-perspective-on-medical-support-cooperation-a-study-of-procedures-in-five-states-report.pdf">estimated dates and locations of conception</a>, home or work addresses of the other parent, or even <a href="https://www.clasp.org/sites/default/files/public/resources-and-publications/files/0126.pdf">sign away</a> their right to child support payments to the state. </p>
<p id="tJOfSw">Given that around <a href="https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2022/americas-families-and-living-arrangements.html#:~:text=NOV.,were%20maintained%20by%20a%20mother">80 percent of custodial parents are women</a>, this is a welfare restriction with a disproportionate effect on one gender — and one that explicitly punishes you for being a single parent. </p>
<p id="2EKuwp">These requirements have rarely been at the forefront of public debates about aid programs, which often focus on work requirements and income thresholds, but their effect is significant. Temporary Assistance to Needy Families, the cash welfare program created by President Bill Clinton’s welfare reform in 1996, requires child support cooperation universally. About half of states also require it for key aid programs like food stamps, Medicaid, and even child care subsidies. It continues to be a priority for conservative state lawmakers: <a href="https://www.iowapublicradio.org/state-government-news/2023-06-01/iowa-governor-signs-law-putting-new-limits-on-public-assistance">Iowa recently passed a cooperation</a> requirement to receive Medicaid in the state. <a href="https://kansasreflector.com/2023/03/29/kansas-senate-defeats-bill-leveraging-food-stamp-access-to-generate-child-support-payments/">Kansas came within a single vote</a> of passing a similar measure for food stamps. Conservative think tanks <a href="https://www.aei.org/economics/child-support-cooperation-requirements-are-a-welcome-addition-to-snap/">have been</a> pushing these policies <a href="https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/politics-news/foundation-government-accountability-debt-ceiling-food-stamps-snap-rcna81369">nationwide</a>, arguing that if the government has to help a single parent, it’s only fair that they help extract something from the other parent.</p>
<p id="FXls9I">These requirements are more common in conservative states, but are by no means limited to them. They range in severity, but generally require single parents to assist the state to open child support cases against non-custodial parents. In practical terms that might be as simple as providing a father’s name and address. </p>
<p id="nInMOI">In other cases, like when the father isn’t known, a parent seeking an exemption from these requirements might be forced to provide intimate details to government aid workers or, in cases involving domestic abuse, justify why they fear for their child’s safety before learning whether they’ll get assistance to buy food or pay for their health care. </p>
<h3 id="s7Adio">Child-support cooperation requirements subject single parents to the state invading their privacy</h3>
<p id="0hicwX">These restrictions are invasive, and much of their impact on welfare recipients is predictable. </p>
<p id="SXcUYF">Their first function is to act as yet another <a href="https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/BurdenReductionStrategies.pdf">“administrative burden”</a> to people receiving benefits. For any government aid program, every additional form that must be filled out, piece of mail that must be answered, or documentation that must be submitted is a step that can be forgotten or failed. </p>
<p id="Cv9yLy">Too often, people who are eligible for assistance fail to receive it for these procedural reasons. <a href="https://www.vox.com/2023/5/19/23727159/medicaid-insurance-eligibility-florida-arkansas-unwinding">Medicaid unwinding</a> — the recent resumption of eligibility verifications that were waived during the Covid-19 pandemic’s huge drop in Medicaid enrollees — has been an example of this problem at an enormous scale. Millions of people are <a href="https://www.kff.org/medicaid/issue-brief/10-things-to-know-about-the-unwinding-of-the-medicaid-continuous-enrollment-provision/">losing Medicaid coverage</a> with the retightened rules, and yet many of them remain eligible for the program. They just aren’t responding to the government’s mailed notices on time, or they haven’t sent in the right forms. </p>
<p id="roYZcB">Politico <a href="https://www.politico.com/news/2023/06/13/medicaid-insurance-coverage-arkansas-00101744">followed</a> two women in Arkansas who both lost Medicaid because they didn’t submit paperwork — and, in both cases, it was related to child support cooperation. There’s no indication these women were unwilling to provide the necessary documentation, but as the bureaucratic requirements stack higher and higher, it becomes difficult to make sure every box is checked. (It also creates more places for the state to fail; in Florida, Spanish speakers <a href="https://health.wusf.usf.edu/health-news-florida/2023-08-17/study-spanish-speakers-reapplying-for-medicaid-have-longer-dcf-phone-waits">have to wait on average 2.5 hours on hold</a> to reach the Medicaid call center.)</p>
<p id="l19DIU">They can also act as a deterrent that stops people from seeking help in the first place. One of the difficulties with quantifying the harm of child support requirements is that states rarely measure the cause of a person losing benefits, like the two women from Arkansas. Another is that it’s impossible to know how many people simply decide not to apply because of some combination of fear, despair, or fatigue. </p>
<p id="qDzezO">Not surprisingly, there are <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/foodstamps/comments/yv6g5w/a_state_that_doesnt_require_child_support_to/">posts</a> on social media sites like Reddit from women looking for a “state that doesn’t require child support to receive food stamps,” because “my child’s father … is a very angry and hostile guy and I’m just trying to separate myself from him.” A 2005 KFF report <a href="https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/71348187.pdf">described</a> this perverse effect: “[A local caseworker] explained that when younger mothers found out about the cooperation requirement, they usually decided to forgo Medicaid. These mothers often have a bond to the father, she said, and are less likely to have serious medical problems. They choose to go without preventive health care.” </p>
<p id="UXXE6i">Administrative burdens and deterrent effects are bloodless terms that can mask the cold budgetary motivations for these policies: States can keep their spending down by coming up with hurdles that reduce people taking advantage of the benefits to which they should be entitled. </p>
<p id="d5XXlN">But child support cooperation requirements also seem to have a third, cruel purpose: to humiliate these parents before the state. </p>
<p id="YDDosg">A survey of state employee manuals, testimony before state legislatures, and social media posts makes it hard to avoid that conclusion. One woman explaining her experience in Oklahoma applying for TANF <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/oklahoma/comments/14w0rhn/soonercare_and_child_support_question/">writes</a> on Reddit, “When I said that my baby’s father was now permanently disabled and would not be involved or able to pay child support due to living in a medical facility, they said, ‘We cannot sign you up for these benefits, so if you change your mind, come back and see us.’” The Medicaid caseworker in that KFF study described the pit over which the state dangles people in need: “Older mothers — those in their 30s with diabetes and hypertension — often realize that their precarious health leaves them no choice but to cooperate.” </p>
<p id="NOJAfn">Nobody claiming a tax write-off, a homeownership deduction, or a tax-preferenced savings account for their child’s college is subjected to the same indignities. </p>
<p id="Rhy5Mc">It’s true that for some applicants, these requirements won’t amount to much on top of the already onerous restrictions they face. If you’re already receiving child support, if you don’t mind sharing personal information with agency employees, and if you’re great at keeping track of deadlines and forms, the requirements will be just another box to check. But for many people, the complexity of these applications is extraordinary, and the different requirements for different programs can be daunting. Those using multiple forms of aid at once <a href="https://mathematica.org/publications/child-support-cooperation-requirements-in-child-care-subsidy-programs-and-snap-key-policy">may face</a> multiple cooperation requirements from multiple agencies.</p>
<p id="jYVfr8">Citizens who are lucky enough to never need these programs may not realize just how intrusive states can be. Every state with these restrictions has a version of a “good cause” waiver — a way that parents can get an exemption from the requirement for a reason the state deems valid. An <a href="http://www.wvdhhr.org/bcf/policy/imm/immanualchanges/667/red/ch16_1.pdf">internal document</a> intended for West Virginia state employees gives intricate instructions about how to determine whether to grant a waiver: Was “[t]he child ... conceived as the result of incest or forcible rape”? Could cooperation reasonably lead to “physical or emotional harm to the child for whom support is being sought?” </p>
<p id="L1oBOL">If someone in West Virginia does claim a good cause exemption, multiple government workers are responsible for determining the applicant’s credibility, including, somehow, evaluating things like “the intensity and probable duration of the emotional impairment.” If you are a single mother in West Virginia with two children and need to claim a waiver, going through this entire process — revealing past abuse or justifying a fear of future violence, having a slate of state employees assess your credibility about your own perceptions of your family’s safety — ultimately allows you to receive <a href="https://singlemotherguide.com/wv-works/">around $542 a month</a> in cash assistance and Medicaid benefits.</p>
<p id="8CrtgS">Michigan’s employee manual, outlining perhaps the most intrusive process of those reviewed for this story, instructs even more invasive lines of questioning. “Ask questions that elicit definite, non-evasive answers. For example … ask for the names of sexual partners during the conception period,” the <a href="https://dhhs.michigan.gov/ChildSupport/policy/Documents/2.15.pdf">manual</a> advises. If you tolerate these questions in order to receive SNAP benefits, you’ll end up receiving around <a href="https://www.michigan.gov/mdhhs/end-phe/food-assistance-program">$3.50 per person per day</a> for a family of three if the state finds your answers satisfactory.</p>
<p id="i2A6Iy">If this seems like an awful lot of work by many state employees and agencies for what is ultimately a trivial amount of money, it is. Iowa’s governor <a href="https://www.iowapublicradio.org/state-government-news/2023-06-01/iowa-governor-signs-law-putting-new-limits-on-public-assistance#">signed</a> into law new child-support cooperation requirements in June as part of a bevy of additional restrictions for SNAP, Medicaid, and other programs. Prior to passage, Iowa’s nonpartisan Legislative Services Agency, the legislature’s research arm, projected that ensuring custodial parents were cooperating with child support would require hiring more than 100 people, most earning over $50,000, and some earning over $120,000. The staffing costs for the state would top <a href="https://www.legis.iowa.gov/docs/publications/FN/1371161.pdf">$6 million</a> annually, with the projection that those costs will be offset as people lose their benefits.</p>
<p id="eqvha1">A <a href="https://ncchildcare.ncdhhs.gov/Portals/0/documents/pdf/S/SL_2017-57_Section_11B_7_a_Child_Care_Subsidy_Cooperation_Final.pdf?ver=2019-03-26-161758-447">pilot program</a> run in North Carolina found this to be a pointless exercise, and a useful example of what these sorts of requirements attached to welfare programs actually do versus what they’re purported to do. That state tested a cooperation requirement for single parents applying to receive child care subsidies across three counties. </p>
<p id="0BNxru">State employees had to be trained on the new requirements and were given additional documents to mail and track each year, “creat[ing] new work for staff who are already burdened with paperwork.” The pilot implemented this requirement for 1,857 applications, and a full 90 percent of applicants received good cause exemptions. Of the remaining 194 cases, 33 ended up withdrawing their application. After everything was said and done — a bill passed, a pilot program run, employees trained, families hassled — there were a grand total of 26 new child support orders, with “payments made on 12 of them … for a total of $7,356.93.” Implementing this statewide would have cost $2 million.</p>
<h3 id="V9TUAN">These burdensome government rules aren’t really accomplishing anything</h3>
<p id="pSLr7z">One way to understand the point of some of these restrictions, given their costs and benefits, is to see them as a tool of patriarchal control. Some of the jobs right-wing governors are creating seem almost a textbook definition of “make-work.” Kansas has had since 2015 a child support requirement to receive child care subsidies. It’s so punitive it violates federal regulations and <a href="https://kansasreflector.com/2023/03/15/kansas-statute-determining-access-to-child-care-subsidy-conflicts-with-federal-regulation/">the state is risking a $2.7 million fine</a>. The net effect of the policy has been to deny child care subsidies to an average of 22 children per month, or more than 250 in a year.</p>
<p id="lYT4FY">Conservatives tend to support cooperation requirements by invoking hypothetical deadbeat fathers not doing their part for their children or the mother. But the pattern found in North Carolina aligns closely with what welfare and child support experts say: Single mothers are already<em> </em>incentivized to seek child support if the father of their children has a well-paying job, health insurance their children could use, and so on. They don’t need state aid agencies to remind them. </p>
<p id="qLl5x6">And in cases where parents intentionally have not sought out child support payments, they typically have a good reason, whether that’s fear of violence, having an informal arrangement with the other parent to provide in-kind assistance like child care and transportation (which can sometimes be more useful than cash), or the other parent simply having no money. State and federal governments ought to trust that these parents know what they’re doing and give them the aid that they are otherwise entitled to.</p>
<p id="VKLdbY">TANF stands apart as the sole program with a strict, nationwide cooperation requirement. In the case of TANF, the state is not collecting money for<em> </em>the custodial parent; it is collecting it for the state. A parent signs their right to child support payments over to the state, and a 2021 report from the Urban Institute found that “<a href="https://www.urban.org/sites/default/files/publication/105227/promising-innovations-and-pilots-in-the-child-support-field.pdf">as of 2020, in 24 states families participating in TANF received none of the child support paid on their behalf</a>.” Twenty-six states pass through small amounts, usually between $50 and $100. It is the only welfare program that attempts to fund itself through a revenue stream the recipient would otherwise be entitled to. If the non-custodial parent doesn’t pay, they become in debt to the state, which can use extreme measures to attempt to collect, including by revoking drivers’ licenses and ordering jail time. This combination of debt and punishments for not paying the debt often profoundly disrupts their lives, making them less helpful partners in raising their children, according to <a href="https://www.urban.org/sites/default/files/2022-05/child_support_paper.pdf">2018 work by researchers Heather Hahn, Kathryn Edin, and Lauren Abrahams</a>.</p>
<p id="XtuScw">While some of these non-custodial parents may be unsympathetic or worse, research has found that most non-custodial parents who do not pay child support fail to do so because they don’t have the money. One <a href="https://www.urban.org/sites/default/files/2022-05/child_support_paper.pdf">study</a> by Hahn, Edin, and Abrahams found over half of past due child support was from just 11 percent of parents, most of whom had annual income of under $10,000. Taking their licenses away and giving them interest-accruing debt only hurts the ability of non-custodial parents to increase their income.</p>
<p id="caABg8">The backwardness of these policies is becoming obvious even in some states that have enthusiastically implemented them. Mississippi <a href="https://mississippitoday.org/2023/05/15/welfare-child-support-requirement/">in May removed</a> its cooperation requirement for child care subsidies after decades of advocacy work (though the requirement remains for SNAP). Efforts by conservative advocacy groups to add new requirements failed in <a href="http://www.kslegislature.org/li/b2023_24/measures/documents/supp_note_hb2141_02_0000.pdf">Kansas</a> in 2023 and <a href="https://legiscan.com/MT/bill/HB339/2021">Montana</a> in 2021, and a Trump-era <a href="https://www.usda.gov/media/press-releases/2019/05/01/usda-urges-states-require-child-support-cooperation-through-snap">memo</a> encouraging these requirements didn’t gain much traction.<strong> </strong></p>
<p id="cP4d04">But to really fix this, federal action is going to be required. These programs all use huge sums of federal money with few strings attached, allowing states to implement these kinds of invasive tests. </p>
<p id="0XbWP0">As a country, we’ve operated under a perverse version of the maxim that it’s better to let 10 guilty men go free than one suffer: that it’s better that 10 deserving people receive nothing than a single undeserving one get health care or food. Small-government conservatives create bureaucracies to try to prevent it, and states micromanage peoples’ lives watching for it. But the government doesn’t need to operate that way; it can start with a presumption that Americans are doing their best and deserve a baseline of dignity.</p>
https://www.vox.com/2023/9/20/23880723/child-support-parents-government-assistance-requirementJack Meserve2023-03-16T08:00:00-04:002023-03-16T08:00:00-04:00America’s bad bet on expanding legal sports gambling
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<figcaption>Fans walk past a Fanduel sports betting location at Footprint Center before Game Five of the Western Conference First Round NBA Playoffs between the Phoenix Suns and the New Orleans Pelicans on April 26, 2022, in Phoenix, Arizona. | Christian Petersen/Getty Images</figcaption>
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<p>The unfortunate consequences of the huge growth of sports betting, explained.</p> <p id="4OTVxd">The United States is in the midst of a <a href="https://www.vox.com/the-goods/22945877/sports-betting-promos-odds-draftkings-caesars">sports gambling boom</a>, and it may be a generational policy mistake. </p>
<p id="PPFbtc">Anyone who has watched the Super Bowl, listened to a sports podcast, walked into an arena that has a gambling parlor, or, in my case, opened my mailbox to see direct mail from DraftKings offering “free bets” has seen the explosion in sports betting throughout the US. </p>
<p id="45sMgU">That’s a recent change, and a fairly big one. For most of the 20th and 21st centuries, betting on sports was mostly limited to black-market bookies and the state of Nevada. Intermittent scandals like the <a href="https://sabr.org/journal/article/the-black-sox-scandal/">1919 Black Sox</a> and <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/08/29/history-of-sports-gambling/">mid-century college basketball match fixing</a> and <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1978%E2%80%9379_Boston_College_basketball_point-shaving_scandal">point shaving</a> kept a stigma around sports gambling and convinced leagues it was better to keep the industry limited. </p>
<p id="ZHhcQ4">Laws were occasionally passed to keep sports gambling a gray- or black-market activity, including the <a href="https://www.stinson.com/newsroom-publications-Don_t_Bet_On_It_Interstate_Sports_Betting_Markets_Hampered_by_Federal_Wire_Act">1961 Federal Wire Act</a>, which banned the use of wire communications for “interstate or foreign commerce of bets or wagers … on any sporting event or contest,” and the <a href="https://www.si.com/more-sports/2018/05/14/professional-amateur-sports-protection-act-explained-supreme-court-decision">1992 Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act (PASPA),</a> which functionally banned sports gambling outside of Nevada and a few other states with more limited sports betting. </p>
<p id="HTmgoy">Multiple intersecting threads brought the end of this decades-long regime. First, in the 2010s, the companies DraftKings and FanDuel used a legal gray area around fantasy sports’ status as a purported game of skill to rapidly grow into cultural and financial behemoths. One couldn’t bet on an actual game, but the performance of a fantasy team composed of real players was a different matter. </p>
<p id="MQ4yr9">Second, in part due to lucrative partnerships with DraftKings and FanDuel, sports leagues’ longtime aversion to legal gambling gradually reversed as owners and commissioners saw the potential for a new revenue stream. (In 1991, NBA Commissioner David Stern <a href="http://www.espn.com/nba/s/2003/0209/1506501.html">testified</a> in front of Congress vehemently opposing legalized sports betting. Twenty-three years later, his successor, Adam Silver, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/14/opinion/nba-commissioner-adam-silver-legalize-sports-betting.html">wrote</a> a New York Times op-ed headlined “Legalize and Regulate Sports Betting.”) </p>
<p id="UTYows">Finally, the emergence of internet and offshore gaming companies allowed unregulated gambling to proliferate among Americans with the technical know-how to access the sites and skirt payment restrictions.</p>
<p id="XbZIe9">As all this was happening, New Jersey had been on a quest to challenge PASPA, the 1992 gambling ban, in federal court. When the Supreme Court finally heard the state’s challenge and <a href="https://www.vox.com/2018/5/5/17320088/sports-betting-legal-supreme-court-legalized-gambling">invalidated PASPA in 2018</a>, there were sports leagues, states, and a well-heeled industry ready to take advantage of the opening. Since then, more than 30 states have <a href="https://www.americangaming.org/research/state-gaming-map/">legalized sports betting</a> in some form, with over 20 allowing gambling by mobile phone. </p>
<p id="5Qsfjk">New Jersey, the state that brought the suit to the Court, has seen sports bets rise from <a href="https://www.app.com/story/news/local/2023/01/20/nj-bet-33b-on-sports-since-2018-gambling-addiction-soars/69791559007/">$1.2 billion in 2018 to $10.9 billion in 2022</a>; a forthcoming study by Rutgers estimates 13 percent of the state now qualifies for a gambling problem.</p>
<p id="904JWi">That increase is an indication of how sudden and consequential the legalization of gambling has been — and why it’s not a policy shift we should be celebrating. </p>
<h3 id="VQKp4n">The dire consequences of the sports gambling boom, explained</h3>
<p id="vamhNV">The common-sense argument for legalized sports gambling is on its face reasonable. If gambling is going to happen anyway, states should tax it and regulate it. Advocates also argue that it’s a matter of individual freedom: If I enjoy gambling and I’m not hurting anyone, why can’t I do this? Let people live a little. </p>
<p id="Y60WOR">But the choice to legalize sports gambling hasn’t been so simple. First, implicit in this argument is that the amount of sports gambling is fixed, and that it’s simply being moved from the untaxed, unregulated black market to the revenue-generating legal market. </p>
<p id="22QLuC">The entire point of the industry’s legalization push, though, is that it massively expands the pool of potential customers. Many casual sports fans aren’t going to learn the cumbersome methods needed to bet at an offshore sportsbook, but they will download an app being hawked on TV by <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mEFnutIUWok">Wayne Gretzky</a> or <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3C3DIlLrsKc">Barry Sanders</a> that’s in their phone’s app store.</p>
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<p id="3RlPVL">The result has been an explosion in gambling. And based on the research we have, the harm such widespread adoption has caused is not trivial. With the United States’s boom so recent and therefore data somewhat sparse, the United Kingdom is a useful comparison. It has had a legalized and regulated system <a href="https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/review-of-the-gambling-act-2005-terms-of-reference-and-call-for-evidence/review-of-the-gambling-act-2005-terms-of-reference-and-call-for-evidence">for over 15 years</a>, one that includes not just sports but casino gambling. </p>
<p id="c2CaGC">An extensive report <a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2022-gambling-addiction-stories-how-uk-got-hooked-on-online-casino-betting/#xj4y7vzkg">by Bloomberg</a> cataloged the harms since legalization: Sixty percent of industry profits come from the top 5 percent of users; the industry, supposedly regulated, has an estimated 36,000 children addicted to it; the government estimates 8 percent of suicides are gambling related. </p>
<p id="V4jO8o">In 2016, the situation was already so bad that the co-founder of Paddy Power, an industry leader, resigned from the company’s board while “fighting back tears” because he believed he was complicit in an immoral industry, Bloomberg reported.</p>
<p id="ZZno5b">Since then, the situation has only gotten worse, and amid a <a href="https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanpub/article/PIIS2468-2667(20)30232-2/fulltext">surge of suicides</a> linked to <a href="https://www.independent.co.uk/business/online-gambling-causing-surge-of-suicidal-young-men-in-a-e-nhs-clinic-says-b2231060.html">gamblers deep in debt</a>, the UK government has <a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-64510095">promised a policy plan</a> on the gambling industry paired with reforms and new regulations.</p>
<p id="xrA4lI">None of this would be a surprise to experts in addictive industries. <a href="https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2019/7/22/20703014/mark-kleiman-criminal-justice-drug-policy-expert-died">Mark Kleiman, the late public policy professor</a> who advised states legalizing marijuana, frequently brought up the “80/20 rule” — that 80 percent of most industries’ profits come from its top 20 percent of users. </p>
<p id="bnnGsl">In a 2013 Vice interview, Kleiman <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aG0Y-m5YwzI">said</a>: </p>
<blockquote><p id="lVMgbq">The public interest is in the provision of alcohol, cannabis, gambling services to people — adults — who use them responsibly and harmlessly. ... The commercial interest is in finding those people with problems and in making as many of them as possible. If you’re in the alcohol business, you’re in the alcoholism business. They all have these signs that say ‘drink responsibly’; that means ‘please put us out of business.’ It’s not responsible drinkers that build breweries.</p></blockquote>
<p id="MpMXZH">The same logic applies to sports betting. It’s not casual gamblers that will expand these companies’ profits, it’s the addicts. In New Jersey, “About 5% of all sports bettors placed nearly half of all bets and spent nearly 70% of the money,” wrote Lia Nower, the director of the Center for Gambling Studies at Rutgers, <a href="https://theconversation.com/data-from-new-jersey-is-a-warning-sign-for-young-sports-bettors-197865">in the Conversation</a>.</p>
<p id="Q5EVn9">Proponents of legalization would argue that these kinds of arguments could apply to drugs, whether marijuana or alcohol, and yet momentum has been toward destigmatizing those substances. </p>
<p id="852SJM">But there’s a key difference. The war on drugs has meant that millions of people have been convicted for drug-related crimes. Those people are imprisoned, gain lifelong felony convictions that scar their employability, and destroy families. </p>
<p id="7dLsRf">By contrast, there was no war on gambling. The harm involved in sports gambling’s illegality was mostly roadblocks to gamblers and lost tax revenue. According to the <a href="https://cde.ucr.cjis.gov/LATEST/webapp/#/pages/explorer/crime/crime-trend">National Incident-Based Reporting System used by the FBI</a>, there were 893,682 drug offenses reported in the United States in 2021. There were 504 betting/wagering offenses. Sports gambling was functionally already a decriminalized activity. </p>
<h3 id="U9nSLB">The relentless search for more and more consumers</h3>
<p id="yCmhCR">These sorts of arguments can sound conservative, even Puritan: “Gambling is an unvirtuous activity we ought to discourage.” But there’s a progressive, even leftist angle to this. </p>
<p id="RohafW">Science fiction author <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/30/podcasts/ezra-klein-podcast-ted-chiang-transcript.html">Ted Chiang told Ezra Klein</a> in 2021 that he believed “most fears about A.I. are best understood as fears about capitalism<strong>.</strong>”<strong> </strong>The same is true here, in that gambling isn’t per se the problem; someone making a bet with a friend over their rival teams isn’t immoral, and a fantasy league with a buy-in isn’t sinful. </p>
<p id="lHg1I2">But in today’s United States, every policy decision opening up sectors to the markets ends up a maximal one, and companies preying off what ought to be casual fun will now saturate every television market, every piece of stadium advertising real estate, in an attempt to turn non-gamblers into casual gamblers, casual gamblers into regulars, and regulars into addicts. (For its part, the gaming industry has repeatedly emphasized the harms of offshore gambling and pointed out its own industry-led initiatives toward <a href="https://www.americangaming.org/new/nba-joins-agas-have-a-game-plan-bet-responsibly-public-service-campaign/">responsible gaming</a>.)</p>
<p id="mrteej">Here’s the thing: A multinational profit-making industry and responsible gambling by customers are mutually exclusive. This is not hypothetical. The specific event that spurred Stewart Kenny, the Paddy Power co-founder, to resign from the board of directors was <a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2022-gambling-addiction-stories-how-uk-got-hooked-on-online-casino-betting/#xj4y7vzkg">learning that</a> “senior managers shelved a safer gambling campaign it was running in Australia because it had proved too effective and was costing them money.” This is exactly what Kleiman and other scholars would have predicted. </p>
<p id="tkQgNH">Every possible customer vein will be mined. The University of Colorado at Boulder in 2020 <a href="https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2020/11/18/cu-boulder-sports-betting-deal-goes-against-long-held-ncaa-stance">signed a $1.6 million partnership</a> with a gaming company that included $30 for every new bettor the University recruited, an obvious play at signing up college students even though the legal gambling age in Colorado is 21. (The $30 incentive was <a href="https://www.cpr.org/2023/02/28/cu-boulder-sports-betting-pointsbet/">discontinued</a> in 2023 after negative press.) </p>
<p id="zO8XEN">The Gaming Society, a “betting education platform,” markets itself to women by promoting the opportunity to “prope[l] women’s sports forward through sports betting.” Its tagline? “Bet on women.”</p>
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<blockquote class="twitter-tweet">
<p lang="en" dir="ltr">Big week for GS! <br><br>Our founders <a href="https://twitter.com/jmessler?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@jmessler</a> & <a href="https://twitter.com/KevinGarnett5KG?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@KevinGarnett5KG</a> hosted our first ✨ Betting Academy Experience to teach sports betting through real-life events<br><br>Our VP of Business <a href="https://twitter.com/MarissaC_25?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@MarissaC_25</a> followed up w/ a <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/BetOnWomen?src=hash&ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">#BetOnWomen</a> roundtable on the importance of investing in women's sports <a href="https://t.co/5ycNcGvegj">pic.twitter.com/5ycNcGvegj</a></p>— Gaming Society (@GamingSociety) <a href="https://twitter.com/GamingSociety/status/1580251221448761344?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">October 12, 2022</a>
</blockquote>
<script async="" src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
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<p id="NTMWJU">As anyone who watched the Super Bowl can tell you, there’s something unsavory about the direction this takes our society. </p>
<p id="3MfXpl">The United States is never going to be Vatican City, but it’s hard not to be a little queasy at public universities emailing students to “place your first bet (and earn your first bonus),” as the New York Times <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/20/business/caesars-sports-betting-universities-colleges.html">reported</a> Louisiana State University doing, or Texas Christian University <a href="https://gofrogs.com/news/2020/3/5/general-winstar-world-resort-named-presenting-sponsor-of-the-legends-club-and-suites">partnering</a> with a casino as a “presenting sponsor” for its stadium’s new collection of VIP suites. The speed and intensity with which the gaming industry has swung state governments and public universities illustrate how difficult it will be to trust local legislators to stand up to and rigorously regulate the industry.</p>
<p id="T3gjoF">Financialized industries under modern, liquid capitalism will never be happy with small-time brands earning modest profits. DraftKings has already gone through <a href="https://www.fool.com/investing/2021/05/27/why-draftkings-acquired-its-tech-provider/">a reverse merger</a> with a Bulgarian tech firm and a special-purpose acquisition company. Fanduel was acquired by Paddy Power, that European sports betting giant whose co-founder resigned. </p>
<p id="RTkKJy">And what about the tax argument? Maybe legalized sports gambling does have a negative side, but the benefits toward various worthy state initiatives are worth it. </p>
<p id="ur33jD">The first problem is that government revenue really doesn’t work this way. Revenue is fungible: As soon as legislators see a service being funded by one source, it’s a green light to <a href="https://www.publicschoolreview.com/blog/do-lotteries-really-benefit-public-schools-the-answer-is-hazy">cut its funding</a> from elsewhere. State lotteries, for instance, were widely created with claims that the revenue would bolster, say, education. But instead of that lottery money being added on top of existing education funding, it often <a href="https://thinkprogress.org/why-state-lotteries-never-live-up-to-their-promises-1f911fae58dc/">ended up replacing it</a>, as state revenue could be <a href="https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0160323X9702900104">diverted elsewhere</a>. Many states have worse education crises than before lotteries were instituted. </p>
<p id="YQC82c">To put it another way, states can raise revenue whenever they want, through whatever means they want. If more money is needed for a particular state service, it can be raised through any type of tax. </p>
<p id="FOob1m">It’s also a conceptually odd use of a <a href="https://www.thebalancemoney.com/sin-tax-definition-examples-4157476">sin tax</a>, considering that the entire point of one is to discourage<em> </em>activities that are damaging to public or societal health. Alcohol and tobacco taxes artificially raise the market price of those goods because higher prices curb <a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3794433/">alcohol</a> and <a href="https://www.who.int/activities/raising-taxes-on-tobacco">tobacco</a> use.</p>
<p id="ChxZlw">But here, the logic is reversed, and we are intentionally expanding the amount of gambling and gambling addiction in order to juice state revenue numbers.</p>
<h3 id="ZFwMaJ">Gaming out the future</h3>
<p id="sA2zw8">Unfortunately, the horse is likely very far out of the barn. These industries are already huge lobbying players, and there’s very little historical precedent for re-criminalizing liberalized industries. The United States’s expansive First Amendment rights will likely make advertising restrictions difficult to pass, <a href="https://www.ojp.gov/ncjrs/virtual-library/abstracts/first-amendment-and-regulation-pharmaceutical-marketing-challenges">as with prescription drugs</a>. </p>
<p id="RQlyIi">That said, some steps are available around the edges. Massachusetts <a href="https://www.legalsportsreport.com/105019/maryland-new-york-examine-college-sports-betting-partnerships/">banned</a> all college advertising of sports betting, for instance. To a cynic, though, there’s something farcical about this now out-in-the-open and legal industry being “regulated” with bills that would, for instance, require a <a href="https://sportshandle.com/illinois-rg-pop-up-message-advances/">pop-up message</a> about responsible gambling every 10 wagers.</p>
<p id="qiVnNx">A strange irony of all this is that sports gambling is not the most profitable, or addictive, industry in this sector. Oddsmaking is a skill; bookmakers can set the odds incorrectly or simply get unlucky and have to pay out considerable winnings. </p>
<p id="w4xiIz">Which is why, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/20/business/sports-betting-lobbying-kansas.html">as the Times<em> </em>reports</a>, the end goal is full “casino” gambling on your phone — slot machines, roulette, and so on. The industry has tried to rebrand this as iGaming, with the chief executive of DraftKings telling lawmakers at a conference: “It is time for your state to add iGaming … Not in the future, but now.” </p>
<p id="RPbhSi">One policy error has already been made across much of the United States. It’s not too late to prevent another one.</p>
<p id="mqYHt9"><em>Jack Meserve is the managing editor of </em><a href="https://democracyjournal.org/"><em>Democracy: A Journal of Ideas</em></a><em>.</em></p>
https://www.vox.com/23641580/draftkings-fanduel-sports-betting-gambling-problems-march-madnessJack Meserve2023-02-16T05:00:00-05:002023-02-16T05:00:00-05:00This Penn professor has been offending minorities for years. Will tenure save her?
<figure>
<img alt="Amy Wax" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/fcQ9U6K0PQ7s_gaEj5pxzETqcp8=/600x0:4200x2700/1310x983/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_image/image/71982118/R2_AmyWax_V2.0.jpg" />
<figcaption>Paige Vickers/Vox; image from <a class="ql-link" href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t-r7D7OtkgY" target="_blank">“Amy Wax on ‘What Is Happening to the Family, and Why?’,” YouTube, 2017.</a></figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The University of Pennsylvania’s Amy Wax problem, explained.</p> <p id="UEvcoQ"></p>
<p id="bW5WYK">At the University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School, a rare academic event is taking place: The school is attempting to revoke tenure from an endowed professor. Rarer still is the reason. Cases of professors losing tenure are often due to sexual or financial misconduct, but Amy Wax is facing sanction for racist and sexist statements made publicly and privately. </p>
<p id="xehdxQ">Wax, a lawyer and neurologist who started her career at the solicitor general’s office under Presidents Reagan, H.W. Bush, and Clinton, has become something of a standard-bearer for the right’s war on wokeness — and a confounding case study in the pitched arguments over academic freedom, tenure, and higher education. </p>
<p id="ihtsNL">She<strong> </strong>started making national headlines in 2017, when, in <a href="https://archive.ph/gvFhm">a column</a> that now seems mild by standards she would later set, she and a co-author bemoaned the breakdown of “bourgeois culture.” Their claim that “all cultures are not equal” in reference to “inner-city blacks” and “some Hispanic immigrants” along with “some working-class whites” <a href="https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2017/08/25/professors%E2%80%99-op-ed-rails-against-modern-culture-%E2%80%98inner-city-blacks%E2%80%99">sparked a flurry</a> of open letters, responses, and condemnation. But the controversy died down fairly quickly.</p>
<p id="X88LHa">Less so with the next case, when comments <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lgIHNV_7rm0">Wax also made in 2017</a> were resurfaced, in which she said, “I don’t think I’ve ever seen a black student graduate in the top quarter of the class, and rarely, rarely, in the top half. I can think of one or two students who scored in the top half of my required first-year course.” This apparently violated Penn’s policies on the confidentiality of student grades, and Ted Ruger, the dean of Penn Law, <a href="https://www.thedp.com/article/2018/03/penn-law-dean-ted-ruger-professor-amy-wax-removed-racial-conservative-graduate-upenn-philadelphia">stripped Wax of her mandatory first-year course</a>. (Ruger also stated her claims were false.) Ruger pointedly endorsed Wax’s academic freedom and explicitly stated the punishment was for breach of student confidentiality.</p>
<p id="dgAAG4">In 2019, at the inaugural National Conservatism Conference, Wax argued for what she called <a href="https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/7/23/20679172/amy-wax-white-national-conservatism-yoram-hazony-racism">“cultural distance nationalism”</a> when it came to immigration policy. She argued that “embracing cultural distance, cultural distance nationalism, means in effect taking the position that our country will be better off with more whites and fewer non-whites.” There was again a furor, which again died down with no further punishment.</p>
<p id="5UqBkb">Finally, in <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h1vQFMxPk54%2011:00">late 2021</a> and <a href="https://glennloury.substack.com/p/amy-wax-redux">early 2022</a>, Wax made a series of comments about Asians, including that we ought to accept fewer as immigrants because they vote Democratic. She summed up her <a href="https://glennloury.substack.com/p/amy-wax-redux">own views</a>: </p>
<blockquote><p id="7yhcwH">We can speculate (and, yes, generalize) about Asians’ desire to please the elite, single-minded focus on self-advancement, conformity and obsequiousness, lack of deep post-Enlightenment conviction, timidity toward centralized authority (however unreasoned), indifference to liberty, lack of thoughtful and audacious individualism, and excessive tolerance for bossy, mindless social engineering.</p></blockquote>
<p id="6m390n">That final series of remarks seems to have been what pushed Ruger toward the extremely rare step of seeking major sanctions against a tenured professor, an onerous process that requires the faculty senate — a governing body made up of full-time faculty — to convene a five-member board to review charges against Wax that could end with suspension or termination. </p>
<p id="AKVQF7">The law school also hired a law firm, which <a href="https://www.thefire.org/university-of-pennsylvania-law-deans-report-regarding-amy-wax-june-23-2022/">investigated Wax</a> and interviewed past students and co-workers. That process unearthed complaints about in-classroom and workplace conduct. Some of <a href="https://d28htnjz2elwuj.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2022/07/13145401/University-of-Pennsylvania-Law-Deans-Report-Regarding-Amy-Wax-June-23-2022.pdf">these include</a>:</p>
<ul>
<li id="xkAh8n">Telling a Black student “that she had only become a double Ivy ‘because of affirmative action.’” </li>
<li id="b5Ykhw">“Stating in class that Mexican men are more likely to assault women and remarking such a stereotype was accurate in the same way as ‘Germans are punctual.’”</li>
<li id="R1ypgI">Telling a student “invited to her home, that ‘Hispanic people don’t seem to mind…liv[ing] somewhere where people are loud.’”</li>
<li id="XaMg9t">“Stating in class that people of color needed to stop acting entitled to remedies, to stop getting pregnant, to get better jobs, and to be more focused on reciprocity.”</li>
<li id="hzBBGy">“Commenting after a series of students with foreign-sounding names introduced themselves that one student was ‘finally, an American’ adding, ‘it’s a good thing, trust me.’”</li>
</ul>
<p id="cVZ53V">Wax has broadly denied the allegations of students and co-workers, and specifically denied a handful, including the “double Ivy” remark. (When reached by phone, Wax declined to comment for this article.) At least five students made allegations on the record, and others gave their names in an earlier internal report. Wax, who has been receiving treatments for cancer, has sought a delay in her board hearing.</p>
<p id="eWx8cq">Her case has become a cause célèbre among conservatives, who view her as a victim of hypocritical “woke” administrators. A recent <a href="https://freebeacon.com/campus/inside-the-university-of-pennsylvanias-precedent-setting-effort-to-revoke-tenure-from-its-most-controversial-professor/">Washington Free Beacon<em> </em>story </a>concedes Wax is an “intellectual bomb-thrower,” but warns that similar tactics, “if successful, are likely to be employed against other tenured dissidents.” Many outlets have similarly framed Wax’s case as a preview of an oncoming suppression of conservative dissidents at universities.</p>
<p id="OQuNNz">Wax is one professor at one law school, but her case is a bizarre and frustrating subplot in the larger story of higher education and free speech — a narrative where, on the one hand, broad protections for teachers and professors are<a href="https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/23550366/ron-desantis-first-amendment-free-speech-woke-academic-freedom-new-college-florida"> gutted in conservative states</a>, but where, on the other, those same free speech principles being targeted are invoked to shield one of the right’s more distinguished, and offensive, voices. </p>
<h3 id="EtUfdX">What tenure protects</h3>
<p id="ukSyXU">Where it is still in full force, tenure grants extraordinarily wide latitude to professors for political views and extramural speech. </p>
<p id="psDHgh">One <a href="https://nypost.com/2018/10/05/georgetown-professor-no-longer-teaching-after-profane-tweet-about-kavanaugh-supporters/">tenured Georgetown professor</a> who said Republican senators deserved “miserable deaths,” and suggested “we castrate their corpses and feed them to swine,” only received a temporary and mutually agreed-upon research leave. </p>
<p id="qUTLtj">A Portland State professor suggested <a href="https://web.pdx.edu/~gilleyb/2_The%20case%20for%20colonialism_at2Oct2017.pdf">re-instituting colonial rule</a>, and said that <a href="https://twitter.com/BruceDGilley/status/1278163382978240512?s=20&amp;t=OH5EXSksRlAH8gkZK_EUUg">Belgium should apologize</a> to the Congo for “not colonizing the King’s estates sooner,” “ending colonial rule,” and “not arresting or killing Patrice Lumumba sooner.” He was investigated but faced no punishment.</p>
<p id="Xdfpfc">Arthur Butz, a tenured professor at Northwestern University, has <a href="https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2006/02/08/holocaust-denier-resurfaces">repeatedly denied the Holocaust took place</a>.<strong> </strong>Tenured professors have made incendiary comments on <a href="https://slate.com/human-interest/2013/04/steven-landsburg-rochester-professor-is-it-really-rape-if-the-victim-doesn-t-know-about-it.html">rape</a> and <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/02/opinion/incels-sex-robots-redistribution.html">sex</a> and faced no professional repercussions. </p>
<p id="QWI3RR">Wax’s case notwithstanding, a broad weakening of tenure protections would almost certainly harm more left-wing professors than right, given the political makeup of university faculty and the number of universities in Republican-led states. </p>
<p id="GgxqDx">As it happens, the assault on academic freedom in higher ed is proceeding apace, spearheaded by Republican governments in red states. Florida’s <a href="https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/23593369/ron-desantis-florida-schools-higher-education-woke">Stop WOKE Act</a>, which is already limiting the speech of public school teachers, has a provision banning professors from teaching certain topics, which has only been blocked by court injunction. Texas’s lieutenant governor said ending tenure would be a top priority of the 2023 legislative session. Georgia’s Board of Regents substantially weakened tenure protections for every public university in 2021.</p>
<p id="sQ8o6A">For all the talk on the right of Wax’s persecution by woke administrators, she’s in fact entering year six of bureaucratic due process. The tenure that right-wingers have been so eager to tear down is protecting one of their own. </p>
<p id="yiewpi">That said, those protections may only last so long given the weight of the evidence. Even some of Wax’s supporters have wavered in the face of the new findings. Jonathan Zimmerman, <a href="https://www.insidehighered.com/views/2022/07/26/amy-wax-can-speak-her-mind-not-demean-students-opinion">a longtime and staunch academic freedom advocate</a> who has written multiple columns defending Wax, <a href="https://www.insidehighered.com/views/2022/07/26/amy-wax-can-speak-her-mind-not-demean-students-opinion">wrote</a> last July: “[She] has no right — none — to demean or abuse specific individuals in her professional orbit. Saying affirmative action leads to the admission of unqualified students is one thing; telling a specific student that she was unqualified is another.” (Wax has broadly denied the in-classroom charges, while not responding to each charge specifically.)</p>
<p id="3Svpz1">The distinction here is key, and may end up obviating the thornier questions of academic freedom, as insulting individual students or co-workers could be deemed an act of workplace misconduct closer to harassment. But some institutions like the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) — a group dedicated to an expansive definition of free speech that has defended everyone from <a href="https://www.thefire.org/research-learn/fire-letter-massachusetts-institute-technology-january-27-2023">Mike Pompeo</a> to <a href="https://www.thefire.org/news/fire-new-yorks-highest-court-hold-fordham-its-promises-students-justice-palestine-case">student groups advocating</a> for Palestinians — have stuck to defending Wax, arguing that because the dean has complained about so many public statements, the classroom conduct complaints are a pretext for her punishment. </p>
<p id="nUzeG4">This logic seems to lead to unappealing conclusions, though: If a professor who made sexist public statements later sexually harassed a student, would administrator criticism of the former mean he couldn’t be punished for the latter? </p>
<p id="UvPoVk">As Zimmerman notes, the 1915 <a href="https://www.aaup.org/NR/rdonlyres/A6520A9D-0A9A-47B3-B550-C006B5B224E7/0/1915Declaration.pdf">Declaration of Principles</a> of the American Association of University Professors specifically states that “in no sense” does “academic freedom impl[y] that individual teachers should be exempt from all restraints as to the matter or manner of their utterances, either within or without the university.” That declaration, considered a foundational document of the modern concept of academic freedom, argued sanctions should be for extraordinary cases and be decided through internal bodies of professors, which is exactly what Wax is facing.</p>
<p id="rHtb5K">Wax has had friendly appearances on a wide variety of right-wing media, from big names like Tucker Carlson and Charlie Kirk to higher-brow appearances with the <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fsoLFnLbi-4&t=4s">Claremont Institute</a>, and her case illustrates a few trends in the conservative movement.</p>
<p id="VxZAwz">First, the cancel culture script we’ve all become accustomed to has branched out to cover virtually anything. Concepts creep quickly, and now a still-employed professor being criticized for endorsing vast racial stereotypes and allegedly demeaning students in her class is a <a href="https://www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2022/01/the-rise-of-wildean-wokeism">victim of “woke cancel mobs.”</a> </p>
<p id="QBR2mV">Wax is also indicative of a widening Overton window on the right toward allowing explicit <a href="https://www.vox.com/the-big-idea/2017/3/28/15078400/scientific-racism-murray-alt-right-black-muslim-culture-trump">scientific racism</a>. For however long dog whistles have existed, people like John Derbyshire and Jason Richwine used to be drummed out of National Review and the Heritage Foundation for explicitly bigoted writings. (Richwine, a frequent past co-author of Wax, is now a National Review<em> </em>writer and briefly held a post in the Trump administration. Derbyshire, who appeared with Wax at her recommendation in a university debate, has remained confined to openly racist websites like VDare and Taki Magazine.) This is perhaps the natural highbrow partner to Donald Trump’s lowbrow conservative expansion of acceptable slurs against immigrants. </p>
<h3 id="gMWYDh">What Wax has said</h3>
<p id="Z9nP8O">Wax frequently pits her opponents’ <a href="https://richardhanania.substack.com/p/does-immigration-threaten-western">“hyper-emotional, contradictory, illogical”</a> ideas against her supposed “rationality, evidence, reason, [and] logic.” Given this, it’s remarkable how flimsy and even self-contradicting her arguments are. As the years have gone on, she has deployed increasingly strange and microtargeted anecdotes supporting her thinly sliced racial stereotypes. </p>
<p id="nb4MfW">She tells us: “If you go into medical schools… these diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives which are poisoning the scientific establishment and the medical establishment, who are the people on the front lines? South Asian women doctors.” </p>
<p id="7wp0dA">After reading an article about failures in the investigation of the disappearance of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370, <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/news/q-and-a/a-penn-law-professor-wants-to-make-america-white-again">Wax</a> said, “I don’t think you would want a team from Malaysia, their investigative team, coming over and taking charge of an accident in which a dear one, a loved one, died of yours.”</p>
<p id="Ns7Dwp">Her stereotypes are completely slapdash. While arguing that a propensity for low corruption was a <a href="https://richardhanania.substack.com/p/does-immigration-threaten-western">“Northern European and Anglo phenomenon,” </a>she backtracked and added it was also <a href="https://richardhanania.substack.com/p/does-immigration-threaten-western">“kind of Teutonic.”</a> She says her travels in the United States are enough evidence for her that immigrants <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/news/q-and-a/a-penn-law-professor-wants-to-make-america-white-again">litter more</a>. </p>
<p id="GbmRbc">After <em>years</em> of assigning staggering importance to whites’ <a href="https://chroniclesmagazine.org/web/affirmative-actions-destructive-force-an-interview-with-amy-wax/">superiority</a> on <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB108181651872980934">test scores</a>, Wax recently unveiled the exact opposite complaint about Asians in <a href="https://richardhanania.substack.com/p/does-immigration-threaten-western">an interview</a> with Richard Hanania: </p>
<blockquote><p id="A7uP1O">I can tell you one thing, a huge influx of Asians into a particular school changes the educational culture. It results in a laser focus on test scores. And I’m all for tests, and I think tests are significant, but a laser focus on test scores, and gaming tests, and doing well on tests, that does shift the culture of a school.</p></blockquote>
<p id="uZXz6e">And she doesn’t stop there. She wonders about Asians: “Does the spirit of liberty beat in their breast?” She worries that they lack a “don’t tread on me attitude” and aren’t “non-conformist, in a good way.” </p>
<p id="2aLqHc">With every new complaint about this or that group, each with its own idiosyncratic justification, Wax seems less like someone with objective standards that might be problematic and closer to a self-appointed racial Goldilocks, deciding this group isn’t respectful enough to authority but that group is overly respectful to authority, that that group’s test scores are too high but this one’s are too low.</p>
<p id="ALyhbl">This will sound odd given the above quotes, but there’s also a strange cowardice in many of Wax’s appearances. In a<strong> </strong>recent podcast conversation, Wax and economist Glenn<strong> </strong>Loury got to talking about Jared Taylor, a prominent white nationalist whom Wax invited to speak to her class on conservative political and legal thought. </p>
<p id="6D1o9e">When Loury asked, “You do, don’t you, agree to a great extent with Jared Taylor — many of his concerns?” Wax responded, “I am still trying to figure out what Jared Taylor is actually saying. Jared Taylor is someone I know. I socialize with him, I talk with him, and I am trying to nail down what his belief system is.” She mused “whether we even know what Jared Taylor really thinks.” Jared Taylor is a 71-year-old man who has published a <a href="https://www.amren.com/about/">self-described “white advocacy” magazine for over 30 years</a>. </p>
<p id="FRukRW">Wax hems and haws to Isaac Chotiner in the New Yorker <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/news/q-and-a/a-penn-law-professor-wants-to-make-america-white-again">about whether differences are innate</a> — but on a small YouTube channel says, “I would bet there is a genetic component to group differences in cognitive ability.”</p>
<p id="7HU85D">Wax vehemently denies being racist, and takes umbrage at that word being used. What’s unclear is what beliefs or attitudes the word “racist” denotes to Wax that she doesn’t hold. If one believes, as she has said she does, that Black people are cognitively deficient to other groups for likely genetic reasons, that Northern European people have an objectively better culture than any other group, that America is better off with fewer Asians, what word <em>ought</em> we use? </p>
<p id="UxLNeR">She has since said, “I am a race realist.” Race realism is one of a few terms used by those who believe that the broad social categories of race are biologically grounded and can be used to explain differences in individual and even country-level outcome. That is, they are the intellectual descendants of race scientists who would use skull-measuring devices or other pseudoscience to justify policies or outcomes. The ostensible difference from racism is that race realists claim they hold no personal animus to those they view as beneath them.</p>
<p id="vz6Am8">Maybe the best description of the problems with Wax’s belief system inadvertently comes from her. Describing her problems with “wokeness,” she called it an “an all-encompassing, self-affirming, self-enclosed worldview that has an answer to absolutely everything.” </p>
<p id="9Hk1zm">But listening to two dozen hours of interviews with Wax, this is exactly the mental architecture she has erected. She uses a shifting combination of race, gender, and nationality to explain every nook and cranny of human life, from the litter she sees on the sidewalk to the inadequacy of Malaysian plane crash investigations. </p>
<h3 id="CQQ2qQ">Where this might be headed</h3>
<p id="1sUxCo">Christopher Rufo, the doyen of conservative academic reform and one of Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis’s appointees to the board of New College of Florida, recently <a href="https://docs.google.com/document/d/12ZMrNzdOWjFMZO1rs-UFLxNpFezYIq0tVCMgO3YJqRs/edit">published a Google doc</a> of his proposals. They include “Consolidate and restructure the academic departments,” “Require board approval for any new faculty hiring or tenure decisions,” and “Conduct a mandatory board review of all course offerings and require board approval for existing and future courses.” </p>
<p id="xpkKcJ">DeSantis himself is <a href="https://twitter.com/GovRonDeSantis/status/1620468515332587521/photo/1">proposing</a> legislation that would give “university Boards of Trustees and presidents the power to call a post-tenure review at any time.” These would all add up to a significant weakening of professors’ ability to teach without fear of being consolidated and restructured out of a job. </p>
<p id="2xYY73">Wax, for all of her perceived victimhood, is still safely under those protections, and it’s unclear where her case with Penn Law is headed. She <a href="https://www.gofundme.com/f/amy-wax-legal-defense-fund">has raised</a> $190,000 via a GoFundMe, and her team of lawyers <a href="https://drive.google.com/file/d/15qnh96bp0Umy-2uVqr_J2Xe1Xf0AmMQf/view">submitted a memo</a> outlining various objections and seeking a delay in the hearing to accommodate Wax’s ongoing cancer treatment. Dean Ruger <a href="https://www.thedp.com/article/2022/10/penn-law-dean-search-committee">has announced he’s stepping down in 2023</a>. Meanwhile, Wax appeared at a <a href="https://cli.stanford.edu/events/conference-symposium/academic-freedom-conference">private conference</a> at Stanford in November with prominent academics like Tyler Cowen, Steven Pinker, and Jonathan Haidt. Recently, Penn’s <a href="https://www.thedp.com/article/2022/12/penn-law-amy-wax-course-popularity">student newspaper reported</a> her classes had faced extremely low sign-up rates by students. </p>
<p id="p8zbTt">The formal process of potentially firing a tenured professor is a difficult and risky process for a university. Marquette University, in one of the only publicly known cases similar to Wax, attempted to revoke tenure from a professor for blog posts that it said violated university guidelines. That professor, John McAdams, <a href="https://www.jsonline.com/story/news/education/2018/07/06/marquette-professor-john-mcadams-prevails-academic-freedom-case/759800002/">sued for breach of contract</a> and eventually won his position back with damages at the Wisconsin Supreme Court. </p>
<p id="tLnh5x">Wax recently stated on a podcast that if she faced any sanctions from the disciplinary process, she would pursue legal action against the university for breach of contract. She has already <a href="https://www.thedp.com/article/2023/01/penn-carey-law-amy-wax-grievance-dean-ruger">counter-filed a grievance</a> against Ruger, which will likely add months to her case.</p>
<p id="GBnjqo">As her case waits for a resolution, Wax might perhaps use that time to reflect on how things got here. If you rewind to 2017, to that column advising “inner-city blacks” and “Hispanic immigrants” on bourgeois values, Wax told readers: “Go the extra mile for your employer,” “be neighborly,” and “avoid coarse language in public.” </p>
<p id="M96lV9">Since then, she’s been in a five-year dispute with her employer, insulted group after group of Americans, and said about Indian immigrants on national television that “their country is a shithole.” Maybe other groups were never the problem.</p>
<p id="mqYHt9"><em>Jack Meserve is the managing editor of </em><a href="https://democracyjournal.org/"><strong>Democracy: A Journal of Ideas</strong></a><em>.</em></p>
<p id="wuYS8O"></p>
https://www.vox.com/23592864/amy-wax-university-of-pennsylvania-racism-tenure-academic-freedomJack Meserve2022-09-24T08:00:00-04:002022-09-24T08:00:00-04:00The Mississippi welfare fraud involving Brett Favre, explained
<figure>
<img alt="" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/A6NEVdbNoCHG9Tr7DkWyto2Z1RU=/501x0:4509x3006/1310x983/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_image/image/71409416/1402371449.0.jpg" />
<figcaption>Former NFL player Brett Favre at University Ridge Golf Club on June 11, 2022, in Madison, Wisconsin. | Patrick McDermott/Getty Images</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>How a WWE wrestler, corrupt Mississippi officials, and Brett Favre allegedly siphoned money away from poor people.</p> <p id="YFwty7">We live in an age of brazen, ham-handed grift. Have you heard the one involving the retired NFL star, a WWE wrestler, corrupt Southern officials, and the millions in welfare money that they benefited from? </p>
<p id="SIsQCe">If you’ve heard about this scandal, it’s likely because of the involvement of former Green Bay Packer Brett Favre, specifically <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2022/sep/14/brett-favre-welfare-scandal-mississippi-governor">the $1 million in federal welfare money he received for talks he apparently did not give</a> and the $5 million he was involved in directing toward construction of a volleyball stadium at the college his daughter attended. Favre’s name is what pushed this from dry newspaper stories in 2020 announcing arrests of local bureaucrats to <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ps_LU3tujVM">Stephen A. Smith yelling on ESPN</a> about poverty in Mississippi. </p>
<p id="SV6WML">But while Favre’s involvement has brought more attention to the story, it’s unfortunately narrowed the focus to a single ex-athlete, instead of taking in the extraordinarily sprawling web of corruption enveloping the state.</p>
<p id="AovjoH">This scandal takes different shapes depending on the vantage from which one looks at it. Close up, it’s a sleazy, almost comically corrupt scheme by a few bureaucrats and nonprofit officials; zoom out and it looks more like an entire state government has become something closer to organized crime; pull back even further and the whole country’s welfare system is implicated, its very structure encouraging heinous misuse and waste even as poor people receive a fraction of what they need. </p>
<p id="e490Mv">To understand how the fraud was perpetrated, it’s helpful to have some basic knowledge of how the United States’ alphabet soup of welfare programs works. </p>
<p id="CEoP8L">TANF (Temporary Assistance to Needy Families) is the program that replaced AFDC — Aid to Families with Dependent Children — in the <a href="https://www.vox.com/2016/6/20/11789988/clintons-welfare-reform">welfare reform of 1996</a>. With the aim of “ending welfare as we know it,” TANF ended direct entitlement cash payments to poor families with children and created a block grant to states that they could use toward <a href="https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/IF/IF10036">four statutorily dictated goals</a>: </p>
<blockquote>
<p id="R4NoWP">(1) provide assistance to needy families so that children may be cared for in their own homes or in the homes of relatives;</p>
<p id="xdcB7Y">(2) end the dependence of needy parents on government benefits by promoting job preparation, work, and marriage;</p>
<p id="hCYWRu">(3) prevent and reduce the incidence of out-of-wedlock pregnancies and establish annual numerical goals for preventing and reducing the incidence of these pregnancies; and </p>
<p id="9rlkyG">(4) encourage the formation and maintenance of two-parent families.</p>
</blockquote>
<p id="bDEdFe">In 2022, it’s easy to see the assumptions embedded in the law about poor people, especially poor Black women. </p>
<p id="KomRZh">The combined effect of relaxing rules on where money went, adding work requirements, and allowing states to define who qualified as “needy” had an effect that has only accelerated since 1996: fewer poor families receiving benefits. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities releases a <a href="https://www.cbpp.org/research/family-income-support/cash-assistance-should-reach-millions-more-families-to-lessen#:~:text=In%202020%2C%20for%20every%20100,lowest%20in%20the%20program's%20history.">“TANF-to-poverty ratio,”</a> which tells you how many families are receiving TANF benefits for every 100 in poverty. The national number in 1996 was 68; it’s currently 21, the lowest ever. This average masks enormous interstate differences: In Texas, Mississippi, and Arkansas, just four out of 100 families in poverty receive TANF cash assistance. </p>
<p id="qPA6wX">As the nonpartisan <a href="https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/IF/IF10036">Congressional Research Service notes</a>, this has not been because of an overall reduction in poverty: “Most of the post-1994 decline in the cash assistance caseload resulted from a reduction in the share of eligible families receiving benefits, rather than a reduction in the number of families meeting states’ definitions of being a needy family.”</p>
<p id="aYEgoN">The Mississippi welfare scandal has been burbling in the news for a while now, but its true import has never really sunk in beyond policy wonk circles. It’s a vivid illustration of how the welfare reform of 1996 has played out. What happened in Mississippi is less a case of criminal masterminds perpetrating a heist, and closer to walking into a vault that welfare reform left open and unguarded, all while purporting to protect the government from mooching citizens.</p>
<h3 id="8ipHCR">The Mississippi welfare fraud up close</h3>
<p id="fuAnF7">At its core, the fraud for which six people so far have <a href="https://mississippitoday.org/2021/12/23/anna-wolfe-mississippi-welfare-fraud-case/">faced criminal charges</a> was fairly simple. </p>
<p id="M3qhSU">John Davis, the director of the Mississippi Department of Human Services (MDHS), funneled tens of millions of dollars in block-granted TANF money to a nonprofit, Mississippi Community Education Center, under the guise that the nonprofit was performing and subcontracting TANF-allowable activities. To be clear, the act of directing TANF funds to a nonprofit is legal so long as the nonprofit is actually performing tasks that go toward the goals outlined above. </p>
<p id="DLIGlr">That is not what was happening in Mississippi. Nancy New, head of the Mississippi Community Education Center, was instead kicking back money to Davis, his friends, and his family while enriching herself and her family as well. (A second nonprofit, the Family Resource Center, was also involved, but none of its personnel have been criminally charged.) On Thursday, Davis <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2022/09/22/us/mississippi-john-davis-welfare-fraud-guilty-plea">pleaded guilty</a> to federal and local charges; New herself <a href="https://www.clarionledger.com/story/news/2022/04/27/nancy-new-zach-new-plead-guilty-mississippi-welfare-misspending/9551152002/">pleaded guilty</a> in April.</p>
<p id="xT5D5N">The civil lawsuit the state filed to try to claw back some of the funds has <a href="https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/21952751/msdh-civil-lawsuit-5922.pdf">38 defendants</a>, each its own lurid mess. It’s impossible to cover even a fraction of the cases here, but a few details alleged in the suit<strong> </strong>give a good sense of what was going on: </p>
<ul>
<li id="O9IZN6">John Davis’s nephew was paid $400,000 to create “coding academies” for the two nonprofits. He had no experience as a computer programmer and produced nothing. </li>
<li id="DFGAcR">Davis’s brother-in-law was paid over $600,000 for a nonexistent job and a lease on a nonexistent building. </li>
<li id="uZxcBp">Marcus Dupree, a former college football phenom, was paid $371,000 to buy a 4,000-square-foot house, with a swimming pool, pavilion, and “adjoining acreage on which Mr. Dupree was to maintain horses.” Dupree claimed in charity filings it <a href="https://mississippitoday.org/2020/03/18/sports-legends-madison-county-horse-ranch-being-paid-for-by-nonprofit-at-center-of-welfare-embezzlement-firestorm/">would</a> be for “equestrian activities for underprivileged children.”</li>
<li id="MxC2ED">To capture the full range here: “Illegal Diversions of TANF Funds To Enrich Sports Celebrities” needed its own subheading in the suit. </li>
</ul>
<p id="ljgRBS">Many instances of misuse didn’t even end up in the suit. For instance, <a href="https://www.clarionledger.com/story/news/politics/2020/03/27/mississippi-welfare-scandal-650-k-spent-religious-grammar-books/2907961001/">the Clarion Ledger</a> found <a href="https://mobile.twitter.com/ayewolfe/status/1553135667424755712">$43,000 spent</a> on Bible-inspired children’s books by a Christian singer named Jason Crabb. Auditors later determined this was <a href="https://www.mdhs.ms.gov/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/MDHS-Report-of-Fraud-Waste-Abuse-FINAL.pdf">“indicative of abuse and waste.”</a> </p>
<p id="NsIsSN">Apart from these cases, Davis, the MDHS director, became very close acquaintances with the DiBiases; sons Ted Jr. and Brett, and father Ted Sr. All are wrestlers, and Ted Sr. in particular was a prominent WWE wrestler. </p>
<p id="drYCTC">According to the suit, starting in 2017, huge sums of TANF money began flowing from the two nonprofits. Ted Jr. set up dummy companies “Priceless Ventures” and “Familiae Orientem,” which were paid around<strong> </strong>$3 million. These payments were marked as “leadership training” and supporting inner city youth for purposes of TANF eligibility. Brett DiBiase’s $160,000 tab for a four-month stay at a luxury drug rehab in California called Rise in Malibu was covered, and TANF money paid for Davis’s first-class flights and accommodations to visit him — all for the ostensible purpose of examining top-notch models in drug treatment to mimic in their own state. Brett also accepted contracts and money for work he was supposedly performing during his rehab stay. Ted Sr., whose nickname as a performer was “The Million Dollar Man,” received $1.7 million in support of his wrestling ministry. </p>
<p id="3dfqSj">These individual cases, as ridiculous as they sound, add up to staggering sums. In all, the state auditor found at least <a href="https://www2.osa.ms.gov/news/auditor-demands-repayment-of-misspent-welfare-money/">$77 million</a> misused from 2017 to 2020. Mississippi’s yearly TANF spending has ranged anywhere from $55 million to $104 million in federal TANF funds in recent years. </p>
<h3 id="EluKLG">Zooming out: The Mississippi government’s role</h3>
<p id="OxmqVX">Reporting from Anna Wolfe — the Mississippi Today reporter whose <a href="https://mississippitoday.org/2021/12/23/anna-wolfe-mississippi-welfare-fraud-case/">years-long investigation</a> has formed the backbone of the entire story — and others has continued finding strands leading well past Davis. </p>
<p id="Ytppq2">Then-Gov. Phil Bryant (R) <a href="https://mississippitoday.org/2022/09/13/phil-bryant-brett-favre-welfare/">personally texting</a> Brett Favre reassurances is one. Another was the fact that one of those defendants under the “Sports Celebrities” subheading was a college linebacker who is current Republican Gov. Tate Reeves’s “longtime personal trainer and buddy.” He received more than $1 million in TANF money to host three fitness boot camps. Bryant personally intervened to have MDHS help his great-nephew, who allegedly ended up receiving state-funded drug rehabilitation. Nancy New, the nonprofit head, is friends with Bryant’s wife.</p>
<p id="AkRG2C">And the investigation itself has been less vigorous than the criminal arrests might suggest. The state auditor, Shad White, who had ties to Bryant, had in the <a href="https://mississippitoday.org/2022/05/12/shad-white-phil-bryant-welfare-investigation/">view of close observers</a><strong> </strong>waited a strangely long time to report findings to the federal government, which would have an obvious interest in federal money being stolen. An original forensic audit by MDHS in 2021 was <a href="https://mississippitoday.org/2022/08/10/mississippi-welfare-scandal-probe-limit/">clearly hamstrung by someone</a>, with the accounting firm denied access to documents and limited in scope, according to reporting by Mississippi Today. The original lawyer leading the civil suit was <a href="https://www.axios.com/2022/07/24/mississippi-lawyer-fired-subpoena-welfare">fired by the state</a> earlier this year. The depositions of the defendants in that case have been postponed. </p>
<p id="h6mtVz">Wolfe says <a href="https://mississippitoday.org/2022/08/23/anna-wolfe-welfare-scandal-mpb/">there was</a> “a concerted effort by people in charge of this investigation at the beginning to steer the direction away from the governor, to take it as high up as John Davis and Nancy New and stop there.” She goes on to say that “the way that state government is run in Mississippi, people are totally afraid to say anything at any time for fear of losing their jobs.” </p>
<p id="MqQjV0">But if low-level employees were in a state of fear, elites in the state were not. Text and email communications between these governors, professional athletes, and businessmen show virtually no concern that they could be documenting ongoing crimes. </p>
<p id="SWvj2R">In addition to the volleyball and speaking money, <a href="https://mississippitoday.org/2022/04/04/phil-bryant-brett-favre-welfare-scandal-payout/">Brett Favre</a> had around <a href="https://www.osa.ms.gov/documents/single-audit/19sar.pdf">$2 million of TANF dollars routed to Prevacus</a>, a pharmaceutical company he invested in, according to Wolfe’s reporting. Prevacus’s founder and president, Jake VanLandingham, texted Bryant just days after he left office to say, “I’d like to give you a company package for all your help. ... We want and need you on our team!!!” to which Bryant responded, “Sounds good. Where would be the best place to meet.” </p>
<p id="Vrz95C">Favre <a href="https://mississippitoday.org/2022/04/04/phil-bryant-brett-favre-welfare-scandal-payout/">texted</a> VanLandingham at one point: “This all works out we need to buy her and John Davis surprise him with a vehicle I thought maybe John Davis we could get him a raptor.” [sic] Ted DiBiase Sr., on receiving a particular TANF payment for $250,000 for motivational speaking, forwarded it to his sons <a href="https://mississippitoday.org/2022/05/09/mississippi-welfare-scandal-civil-lawsuit/">saying</a>, “Look what I got today!” This feeling of impunity may be understandable: neither Favre, VanLandingham, Bryant, nor DiBiase Sr. has yet been charged with a crime.</p>
<p id="vnTUeg">All this taking of funds comes alongside a deterioration in services; Mississippi saw its predominantly Black capital of <a href="https://www.vox.com/2022/8/31/23329604/jackson-mississippi-water-crisis">Jackson lose usable water</a> for a month and a half. Reeves, the current governor, joked one day after a boil-water advisory was lifted that it was, <a href="https://www.wapt.com/article/a-great-day-to-not-be-in-jackson-mississippi-governor-says-during-hattiesburg-event/41252344">“as always, a great day to not be in Jackson.”</a></p>
<h3 id="gWd4XD">The real welfare fraudsters</h3>
<p id="cPRc5H">Finally, there’s the bleak reality that while Mississippi’s TANF spending is notable for its shamelessness, it’s less of an outlier than you might think. </p>
<p id="Yzc4Ol">While Mississippi had a slush fund for personal gain and favors, TANF acts as a slush fund for state governments everywhere. Its structure as a block grant, its lack of oversight, and the paternalistic structures of its 1990s policy goals have allowed states to use the money on almost anything they want, whether filling budget holes or funding lawmakers’ pet projects. </p>
<p id="ZckUB7">Some of that spending has been in theory defensible, such as money going toward college scholarships or foster care. But many states have used money that could’ve helped poor people on programs<strong> </strong>that don’t look much different from Mississippi’s. </p>
<p id="dv8kQs">A <a href="http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/moneybox/2016/06/_welfare_money_often_isn_t_spent_on_welfare.html">single company in Oklahoma used</a> more than $70 million in TANF money to run adult relationship classes and make pro-marriage ads. <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/jun/04/states-divert-federal-welfare-funding-anti-abortion-clinics">Many</a> states divert welfare money to fund “crisis pregnancy centers,” or thinly veiled anti-abortion clinics. Utah cut back cash aid only to have state caseworkers repeatedly tell applicants to seek help from the LDS Church, including non-Mormons who <a href="https://www.propublica.org/article/utahs-social-safety-net-is-the-church-of-jesus-christ-of-latter-day-saints-what-does-that-mean-if-youre-not-one">would need to be baptized</a> to receive aid. Many states just don’t spend the money at all, amassing tens of billions of unspent dollars, even during the pandemic. </p>
<p id="tZoWUb">Experts I talked to were blunt about the program’s failings. Aditi Shrivastava, a senior policy analyst at CBPP, told me simply, “TANF’s focus should be cash assistance.” Heather Hahn, a senior fellow at the Urban Institute, pointed out that of “the four purposes of TANF, none of them is to reduce poverty. ... The ideology of the program is not about reducing poverty.”</p>
<p id="vJjkId">The obvious irony is that decades of welfare debates, and TANF’s structure itself, were driven by the often racist and sexist fear that mothers, especially Black mothers, were getting money they didn’t deserve and wasting it. But the kind of staggering organized theft that took place in Mississippi was only possible because of TANF’s giant-pool-of-money design. Shrivastava and Hahn both told me that such fraud would have been nigh-impossible under AFDC’s cash payment system. </p>
<p id="mlT1D6">One remaining question is why the program hasn’t been reformed or fixed. The answer may be found in these numbers: <a href="https://mississippitoday.org/2021/12/23/anna-wolfe-mississippi-welfare-fraud-case/">According to Wolfe</a>, in 1996, 33,000 adults were receiving assistance in Mississippi. Last year, and with at least $77 million gone elsewhere, that number was 208 adults.</p>
<p id="bEvVKf">In other words, it hasn’t been fixed because it’s performing the way it was designed to.</p>
<p id="mqYHt9"><em>Jack Meserve is the managing editor of </em><a href="https://democracyjournal.org/"><em>Democracy: A Journal of Ideas</em></a><em>.</em></p>
https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2022/9/24/23368759/mississippi-welfare-fraud-scandal-brett-favre-reformJack Meserve