No, and to be fair, I was assuming they were more general in their accusations.

I understand the issue being highlighted in the article, and I wasn't commenting on that specifically. I was merely expressing disjunction with their characterization of the CPS system in the sense that they implied there was a hostile motive behind it in a general sense. In my experience, this isn't true.

Funding is insufficient to address the problems I pointed to in my comment. It's not about money; it's about parenting and the related psychological skills. The only thing that can address that is complex social support; not just teaching of specific skills but relational improvements. I'm a therapist in a community mental health clinic. In addition to definable psychiatric disorders, I can tell you that at least half of what we treat is effectively the psychosocial consequences of generational poverty. In other words, we deal with "ghetto", "ratchet," "x-trash" people. These are people who don't necessarily qualify for any psychiatric diagnosis, but are nonetheless folks who no one wants to deal with in life. They're the products of bad parenting, who haven't been taught how to manage their emotions, and thus react in extreme ways to minor stressors, which makes them an annoyance and a threat to people we consider "normal." These folks need re-parenting. They're broken in a real sense, and I don't put it that way to diminish them. They weren't given the things we take for granted, and as such they can't function in ways we expect them to. And it's not fair to expect "normal" people to tolerate them either, because those "normal" people weren't prepared to deal with them. This is a hugely complex problem and it requires a solution that likely requires decades to fix, because it is generational in nature.

Do you think money allotted to the state for welfare should be used to fund CPS investigations?

No.

Do you think the foster care system is well run?

No.

What can you divine from these two closed-ended questions?

Whether some problem is the “direct” or “indirect” consequence of poverty does not matter for whether poverty reduction programs like TANF are effective.

Oh, yes it does. TANF is a band-aid on poverty; it does not address the systemic issues that poverty creates at all.

t’s a non sequitur.

With respect, I don't think you're using that phrase correctly.

You imply that improving the delivery of social supports like TANF will not be effective at helping the poor (who are, after all, the direct cause of their own problems in your experience!). But other rich countries with better social safety nets enjoy much better outcomes for the poor than the US. It’s strange that you criticize a systemic change to the delivery of welfare to the poor for not being “complex” or “systemic”. I’m not sure how blaming the poor for their problems is more “complex” or “systemic”. On the contrary, that’s highly individualistic and moralizing.

I'm not blaming the poor, and if you think I am, you haven't understood my comment at all. Other countries that have done better in terms of outcomes for the poor achieve those outcomes for a variety of reasons, many of which have nothing to do with government programs but rather culture or societal homogeneity. A lot of countries in Europe enjoy relative ethnic homogeneity compared to the United States and other countries, and champion their success falsely upon the neglect of the fact that they haven't had to deal with the issues that stem from having a multi-ethnic population. Just look at the Netherlands and what happened to their celebratorily tolerant society when they started admitting Islamic immigrants into their population: they experienced culture clash and began isolating immigrant groups into effective camps to "educate" them in order to ease social conflict. In other words, mixing cultures always results in social conflict, and governments tend to abuse the newcomers to those conflicts out of a legitimate desire to preserve their own culture above that of the newcomers'. Egalitarians like to think acclimation is a neat process, but it's anything but. It's hard and difficult and messy, and there really isn't any good solution to it. It requires continued empathy and tolerance, and willful assimilation by the newcomers; if there is resistance from assimilating populations, such as ghettoization, cultural conflict and violence are an inevitability. So, immigrants are sometimes part of the problem. That's just the way it is.