Editorial
Mayor's 'Incentive' Plan Has Holes

On March 29, Mayor Michael Bloomberg announced that "Opportunity NYC", the nation's first "conditional cash transfer program", would debut in September. The two-year pilot program will offer 2,500 poor New York families up to $5,000 a year for reaching goals such as keeping their children in school, staying healthy and earning more.

Mexico is one of a number of countries around the world to have instituted conditional cash transfer programs, and on April 24 Bloomberg, Deputy Mayor for Health and Human Services Linda Gibbs and a small delegation sponsored by the Rockefeller Foundation went to Mexico City to observe first-hand how Mexico's program works and develop effective implementation strategies which can be uniquely applied in New York City. Under Opportunity NYC, select families will earn rewards ranging from $50 to $300 for achieving targets such as attending a parent teacher conference, visiting the dentist or getting job training

There are a number of "cash transfer programs" already operating in American society. One of them is called gainful employment. Under this program, which has been in existence for several millennia, a person by whatever means necessary acquires the skills necessary to do work for which another person is willing to pay. Acquiring the skills to do the work is what requires the incentive payment, according to the plan.

We think Opportunity NYC is an insult to the many generations of immigrants who came to this country and sustained themselves and their families by doing whatever work they could find while they trained and studied- on their own time and frequently at their own expense- to get better jobs that required more skill and enabled them to move up the economic ladder.

The children of those families did not expect an incentive for going to school. They went because they knew the avenue out of their families' situation was the book learning that would enable them to find work that would let them come home at night with cleaner, softer hands than their fathers'. Their parents attended as many parent-teacher conferences as they could. They missed a few of these conferences, but they still monitored what their children were doing in school and made sure their attendance was regular and consistent.

Maintaining their children's health was something else previous generations of conscientious parents never needed an incentive to do. The many parents who couldn't afford a private doctor took their children to the free or low-cost clinics that were part of every American urban landscape. If the parent could not make a clinic appointment, someone else in the family or the extended family of neighbors and friends could step in- and did.

We do not believe that the cycle of poverty will be broken because some people are offered an incentive- for which in this case a better word would be "bribe"- to do what they know they should do and what they are morally obligated to do. What's more, this is a beast that feeds on itself. History is replete with examples of people who to start were offered an incentive to do what they knew they should and came to expect some sort of recompense for refraining from unfriendly or unlawful behavior. Once started, the process won't stop.

Bloomberg is raising $50 million in donations from private sources, including himself, to cover the program. This is good thinking on his part. What works in other parts of the world is by no means guaranteed to work here and the citizens of New York should not have to foot the bill. We would feel extremely uncomfortable knowing that taxpayers' money was being used for a program based on a faulty premise- that people have to be bribed to do what they know is right- and with extremely limited chances of success.