I don’t want to suggest that all of the arguments in this debate are insincere or without merit. But the rhetorical extremes – pitting claims that reform will end the “culture of dependence” against cries that it will “throw children into the streets” – reflect the self-interest of the debaters and ignore the difficulty of the task. What we call welfare reform is really the most ambitious sort of social engineering: it presumes government can alter how people behave.
Welfare itself illustrates how flimsy this power is. Recall that in 1960 only 5 percent of births were out-of-wedlock (2 percent among whites, 22 percent among blacks). By 1993 that figure was 31 percent (24 percent among whites, 69 percent among blacks). Welfare didn’t singlehandedly cause this explosion, and among the other causes (earlier sexual activity, later marriage and more economic independence for women), it is probably low on the list.
Still, welfare may have contributed by enabling poor mothers to survive alone and, thereby, encouraging fathers to abandon their children. Nor is it inconceivable that tougher welfare could help reverse these disastrous trends, especially if it coincides with a general re-evaluation of the importance of families. When New Jersey prohibited extra payments to mothers who had another child, birthrates among welfare mothers dropped by more than 10 percent. Maybe that was a coincidence, and maybe it wasn’t.
Certainly, the welfare bill now being completed by Congress is tougher. It would end automatic federal payments to poor single mothers. Instead, states would receive a fixed “block grant” with which to operate programs. The states could set benefits and eligibility within broad mandates from Washington.
Lifetime eligibility: Most welfare recipients couldn’t receive more than five years of cash benefits, though states could set shorter limits. States could exempt 15 percent of their caseload – people deemed dependent – from this requirement. Now almost half of recipients at any one time have been on welfare five years.
Unwed teenage mothers: To receive benefits, they would have to live with parents or other approved adults. They would also have to attend school. States could go further and deny benefits entirely to unwed mothers under 18.
Family ‘caps’: States could decide whether or not to increase benefits for a mother who had a child while on welfare.
Child support: By 1998, states would have to have a system to check newly hired workers to see if they were making child-support payments. If not, employers would be ordered to impose payroll deductions. States would also have to empower themselves to strip delinquent fathers of drivers’ or professional licenses.
Work: By 2002, states would have to have half their welfare recipients in a job, even if subsidized by government.
Something like this will probably become law. President Clinton might veto the bill as a way to placate angry liberals and to start bargaining over details. A lot of what’s in the bill doesn’t relate to standard welfare (Aid to Families With Dependent Children); for example, a big chunk of budget savings comes from restricting legal immigrants’ use of other programs. In the end, Clinton – having pledged to “end welfare as we know it” – isn’t likely to obstruct a bill.
This sort of approach would probably cut welfare rolls. An Urban Institute study estimates that the eventual drop might be 25 percent. Some eligible recipients wouldn’t show up at all, seeing welfare as a last safety net and fearing they might prematurely exhaust their lifetime benefits. Others would find jobs more quickly; already, about 40 percent of recipients leave welfare in less than two years. The harder question is whether tougher policies would ultimately make more poor families better off.
Eloise Anderson, director of California’s Department of Social Services, argues they will. “Starting to treat people like adults is not mean-spirited,” she says. The best job training, she adds, is a job. “In the classroom, you don’t learn work skills . . . the whole notion of being on time, following directions and not mouthing off.” Increasingly, studies support this; a job connects people more to the world of work than formal job training.
The poor are not always helped by more services or money. These can deprive people of the sense of accomplishment that comes from doing for themselves. But the crusade for self-reliance would be more credible if it weren’t laced with hypocrisy. If Republicans want the poor to work more, they shouldn’t raise taxes on the working poor (by limiting the earned-income tax credit). Likewise, the severe curbs on Medicaid – health insurance for the poor – are driven mostly by budget considerations.
The moral verdict about welfare reform is muddled, precisely because both the hopes of its advocates and the fears of its critics will, to some unknowable extent, be realized. Some people are unemployable; some states will botch programs; some mothers will be thrown off the welfare rolls without any obvious means of support. We can’t predict where the vectors of good and bad will intersect, in part because we can’t predict how much out-of-wedlock births might drop. We are dealing with people’s most basic drives. We are trying to reorder a world (as one writer put it) of “sick kids, dangerous neighborhoods, abusive boyfriends, broken cars.”
The point is not that we should do nothing, because we don’t know exactly what we are doing. “Welfare reform” is worthwhile, because the status quo is dismal. But we ought to embark on it with modest expectations, realizing that the dramatic predictions-for good and ill – of the debate’s antagonists are shaped by their own political and psychological needs as much as by what they know.
