I think that if a parent requires the government to hold their hand and tell them they should be buying food and clothes for their kids instead of lingerie and tattoos; their is clearly some ... deeper issue at hand, that won't be solved by such top-down paternalistic solutions.
There is a shocking lack of faith in poor people's ability to look after their own children among some conservatives.
I'm not sure some good old-fashioned paternalism would be necessarily be a bad thing. Certainly, the large amount of, for lack of a better term, ill-educated and socially dysfunctional minority youth whose life prospects are bound to be almost irreparably constrained, probably indicates that the parents are at least in need of some assistance in the task of raising their children properly.
The negative income tax would do much to help but there are broader values and social forces at work, and the question of whether a social, and not just an economic, policy intervention is called for is one that I think needs asking.
