Bloomberg Wants N.Y.C. To Adopt Mexican Social Engineering Program

By The Stiletto (bio)

For the second time in a month The New York Times is touting a 10-year old Mexican anti-poverty program that New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg wants to import. The social engineering program essentially offers bribes to adults to get jobs, and to make sure their children stay in school (second item, The Daily Blade). According to The New York Times:
The payments are tied to changes in behavior intended to lift families out of poverty. So the program requires families to keep their children in school and take them for regular checkups. Parents must also attend talks on health, nutrition and family planning.
In addition, pregnant women, infants and breast-feeding mothers receive an iron-fortified supplement to ward off malnutrition.
Earlier this month, the mayor traveled to the town of Tepoztlán (pronounced teh-pos-LAHN) to see the cash exchanging hands (AKA “fact-finding trip”):
[H]undreds of women from surrounding villages, many tugging along children by the hand or carrying infants slung at their waists in rebozos … come in by bus or foot and gather in the cool shadows of the municipal auditorium, where government workers sit at tables on the stage, ready to hand out cash. …
[A]bout 800 women waited for three hours or more in the auditorium to go up to get their money. If the women and their children have kept all their medical appointments, and if their children have stayed in school, the money is theirs to use as they wish. The awards range from 360 to 3,710 pesos (about $36 to $370), enough to buy food or shoes or other necessities. The size of the award depends on how many children they have and what level of school the children are in.
The program is 10 years old, has a budget of more than $3 billion a year and covers almost a quarter of all Mexicans. …
But since this program got its start in rural Mexico in 1997, it has been heralded by the World Bank and others as a powerful model for fighting chronic poverty.
But here’s the $64,000 question: Despite whatever arcane measures the World Bank uses to gauge the success of the program, shouldn’t the acid test be a demonstrable decrease in the number of Mexicans who cross into the U.S. illegally day in, day out to find work so they can send money back to towns like Tepoztlán? The 10 years the program has been doling out cash coincide with 10 years of unprecedented levels of illegal immigration into the U.S.
Even the New York Times reporter managed to intuit the disconnect: “[T]here is the question of whether they can find a decent job locally, or whether they will feel forced to migrate to the United States.” Ah, but the program’s “principal architect,” Santiago Levy, a former undersecretary of finance, has a ready answer: “Progresa is a program to improve human capital; it is not a jobs-creation program.”
So when you come down to brass tacks, the Mexican anti-poverty program fails the real-world test. Nonetheless, Bloomberg – once an astute businessman before he got into politics - remains undeterred in his desire to give poor families ion New York up to $5,000 a year to meet such “goals” as attending parent-teacher conferences, getting regular medical checkups and working full time.
A privately financed pilot program is scheduled to begin in September with 2,500 families chosen at random to get the bribes just for doing the things they should for their own and their children’s well-being. The New York Times reports that New York City “has already raised $42 million of the $50 million needed to cover the initial costs. If it is successful, Mr. Bloomberg hopes that public money will eventually go into it.”
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PoliticalMavens.com http://politicalmavens.com/index.php/2007/04/26/nyc-to-import-mexican-antipoverty-plan/
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