The Uncomfortable Challenge of Welfare Reform (I)

July-August 1994

SPECIAL CONFERENCE ISSUE: Excerpts from papers prepared for the Welfare Responsibility Project and from speeches at the national conference on Public Justice and Welfare Reform, May 19-20.

The Uncomfortable Challenge of Welfare Reform (I)

WASHINGTON, D.C.—"My job this evening," said W. Wilson Goode, former mayor of Philadelphia, "is to make you leave here uncomfortable, because unless you do something beyond this conference, you will have contributed very little toward solutions."

Dr. Goode gave the closing address, Friday evening, at a national conference on the roots of the welfare policy crisis organized by the Center for Public Justice, May 19-20, at the Crystal City Sheraton Hotel.

"Those of us who are Christians," said Goode, "must do more, because if we don't, the social fabric of our society may collapse." We cannot leave it to the politicians, Goode went on, "because they will take the easy way out and do what is most popular and what they feel will get them the most votes in the next election."

Friday morning, more than 150 conferees heard encouraging words from William Galston, domestic policy adviser to President Clinton. "You are starting at the right place," said Galston, "with moral questions and theological questions as the framework for thinking about welfare reform.

I think [A New Vision for Welfare Reform] will make an extraordinary and distinctive contribution to the public debate, and I hope it gets the attention it deserves. It speaks with a unique voice. It's a unique voice but it is not an alien voice."

A New Vision for Welfare Reform is the essay-in-draft produced by the Center's Welfare Responsibility project. It was released at the start of the conference Thursday afternoon.

Also addressing the conference on Friday were Bret Schundler, Republican mayor of Jersey City, New Jersey and Wendell Primus, Deputy Assistant Secretary for Human Services Policy in the Clinton administration. Five panels of experts, composed mostly of those who authored papers for the project, discussed various aspects of the welfare crisis and responded to an array of penetrating and often uncomfortable questions from the floor.

Excerpts from the papers appear in the following pages of this special conference issue.

Poverty and the Dynamics of Responsibility
Bob Goudzwaard Free University of Amsterdam

How can the persistence of poverty in the United States be explained? What is an effective way to respond to it? These key and still puzzling questions were first raised in the 1960s and 1970s as people became aware that persistent forms of poverty were growing even during economic booms and despite changes in welfare policy. A similar kind of poverty, a "new poverty" amidst plenty, has been on the rise in Europe, too. It is unexpected, paradoxical, and resistant to all conventional remedies. Why? One reason is that the views of economists and other social scientists have been accepted uncritically, leading not only to an undervaluation of the insights of poor people themselves, but also to a distortion of public opinion and government policies in the direction of a mechanistic perspective on society, which leads to a deterministic misunderstanding of poverty.

Equally important is the way in which disputes between conservatives and liberals have been structured and distorted by the underlying mechanistic consensus. This turns attention away from the deeper causes of persistent poverty rooted in the direction and structure of society itself.

Persistent poverty is typically found where people are poorly equipped or lack proper motivation and simultaneously have few social opportunities. But in these cases, the standard liberal and conservative remedies will be counterproductive. What is needed instead are multiple-purpose efforts with a community-building dimension, in which the poor are full participants, and which encourage good functioning by institutions such as families, schools, churches, government agencies, labor unions, and businesses.

The simultaneous increase of persistent poverty and the general standard of living has occurred because all wages are ratcheted up in response to productivity-driven wage gains in manufacturing. But services, including such vital public services as education and health care, cannot achieve equivalent productivity gains. The prices of such services are thus driven up, and these necessities become inaccessible to more and more people. What is required is a turn to a responsible economy, which aims first not at income or productivity gains but rather at providing meaningful employment, care for the poor and powerless, and good stewardship of the environment.

Towards Welfare Choice
Marvin Olasky, University of Texas

We have much to learn from nineteenth-century America. The United States then had a large welfare system, but welfare was in the hands of churches and private agencies run by men and women with warm hearts and hard heads who emphasized compassion in its literal meaning of suffering with. They stressed personal involvement and spiritual challenge; we stress passing laws, sending checks, and avoiding God.

Now that family non-formation and deformation have brought us social disaster, the subject our politicians have been emphasizing—how to get people off welfare—is of secondary importance. The imperative is to keep new people from getting onto welfare.

The best way to keep new people off AFCD rolls is to put into practice what our predecessors knew. Abstinence, adoption, and family formation: these are what all new efforts should emphasize. Those who nevertheless fall through the cracks should be able to enter into a system of welfare choice (based on church and private activities) that would be regulated by states and localities. .

Rural Poverty
Mary P. Van Hook, University of Michigan

Poverty in rural areas is linked to limited opportunity structures (the social mechanisms by which persons can move out of poverty). Rural poverty is pervasive but is especially concentrated in the South, the Ozarks, Appalachia, and American Indian reservations. Children, women and their families, and the elderly are at greatest risk of being poor. Poor rural children are more likely to be living in a two-parent family than to be living in a single-parent, female-headed household. Although 73 percent of rural poor are white, it is minority groups who bear the worst brunt of rural poverty. Most rural poor families have adult members who are employed but rural wage scales tend to be low and the jobs often lack benefits.

The economic and social processes that typically attend persistent rural poverty require responses based on a biblical social justice orientation and not merely Christian charity that is vital in short-term emergencies.

Problem Identification, Program Response, and Policy Framework
Stephanie Baker Collins, Citizens for Public Justice, Toronto

The biblical view of human nature and responsibility offered in the Center for Public Justice's A New Vision for Welfare Reform can help us move beyond the false dilemma of "individual" versus "structural" responsibilities for poverty. Individuals are accountable for their multiple, simultaneous vocations. Institutions and government are responsible for the institutional and public policy support that is needed in order for vocations to be fulfilled.

Welfare reform has implications for both social and economic policy. Social programs should not be held solely responsible for inequities that originate elsewhere, such as the labor market. Both social and economic policies should be bound by the same requirements of justice.

Biblical Teaching and the Objectives of Welfare Policy
John Mason, Gordon College

The ideal polity for early Israel was a limited governing authority, reflecting God's preference for deconcentrated political power (accompanied by deconcentrations in property ownership and the economic arena generally).

Nevertheless, one of the responsibilities of local village elders was to assure that the poor were assisted properly. Ideally and typically this would have been done through private initiative (Deut. 16, Job 31). But a breach in the adequacy of private compliance would have been met by some form of moral/legal coercion by the village elders of the early Israelite communities—a reality expressed well in job's recounting of his role as an "elder at the gate" (Job 29:7-17).

Early Israel's structure of assistance contained strong work expectations (especially for the able-bodied), albeit, like other institutions (such as private property rights), these expectations were not to become an end in themselves but to serve the foundational objective of strong (extended) families. Use was made of the able-bodied/dependent distinction, but this informed the type of assistance rather than the fact of it. The standard for assisting poorer members of society was liberal sufficiency for need, such that each family unit could remain an economically viable and contributing member of the larger community. Any assistance to the poor was to be achieved at the lowest possible level of society and to rely primarily and ideally upon extended family and voluntaristic responses.

Foundations of Welfare Responsibility
Stephen Charles Mott, Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary

The theological requirements of legal provisions for the poor were perceived by Christians throughout history. In the Middle Ages, the primary institution in charge of welfare was the church. But the church's administration had a civil aspect. The interconnection of church and state became particularly pronounced at the municipal level in the late Middle Ages.

At the heart of the system of urban law was a covenant that included a promise of mutual assistance and protection with regard to all aspects of the community's social, economic, and political life.

The Protestant Reformation provided strong impetus to this late medieval practice. Calvin, for example, citing the duties of the ruler in the Bible, saw the Christian commonwealth ameliorating the community through enforcement of laws that reflected concerns for the poor, just wages, schools, hospitals, and the critique of luxury. The obligation of the government for the welfare of the poor is firmly grounded in biblical thought, the structure of Christian theology, and historical practice.

Why End Welfare As We Know It?
Jean Bethke Elshtain, Vanderbilt University

Protecting, preserving, and strengthening family autonomy and the well-being of mothers and fathers is a way of affirming our commitment to the human person and to that democratic society that best speaks to the aspirations of such persons. The rights of persons are fundamentally social. What is at stake in the family debate and our response to it, is nothing less than our capacity for human sociality. We cannot separate family matters from welfare concerns and policy.

To end welfare as we know it, we need the energy of revitalized communities. To revitalize communities people need the opportunity to define their own needs and the means to realize fruitful beginnings. For this, adults must be committed to the task of child rearing and to loving and enduring relationships with one another.

The Poverty Debate and Human Nature
Lawrence M. Mead, Harvard University

Before 1960, the leading issues in national politics were economic, and the chief controversy was how large government should be. Today, social problems like welfare or crime are more contentious, and the chief issue is whether government should control personal behavior. The underlying dispute is about the human nature of the poor, not the meaning of justice.

For a more effective social policy to emerge, consensus on these identity issues must form. One obstacle is that many professional church people, who have considerable influence, refuse to face those questions squarely. They still say the issue in social policy is how ambitious government should be. The liberal church demands that society be more committed to the poor, without demanding good conduct in return, while fundamentalists question any government role at all. Both sides appeal to outdated images of poverty from the Bible.

Black Churches in the Urban Context
James M. Shopshire, Sr., Wesley Theological Seminary

Historically, Black churches have been grounded in a biblical and theological understanding that embodied a social evangelicalism, which enabled them to see that their welfare was related to the general welfare. They could also see that the general welfare of all people is contingent on the movement toward freedom, justice, equality, dignity, and peace. Black churches advocated socially responsible caring for Black people in particular, but also called the nation to social responsibility for the general welfare of all the people.

Bret Schundler, Mayor, Jersey City, New Jersey

Jersey City Mayor Bret Schundler told the crowd that "the average family on AFDC welfare [in Jersey City] consists of a mother and two children and receives benefits—including food stamps, Medicaid, housing assistance, and income support—with a value of approximately $20,000. When this mother applies for these welfare benefits, she is asked to check a box which affirms that she is looking for work. Should she actually take a job, however—even a first-tier $12,000-a-year job without benefits—she will immediately lose almost all welfare support and instead be taxed, and her family income will be cut in half.

"What a perverse system it is that mandates virtue but pays for vice, that demands a woman confirm she will look for a job, but then penalizes her if she takes one!

"The key to emancipating the underclass," Schundler concluded, "is not just to change our cultural norms, but also, equally importantly, to change our social and tax policies such that beyond punishing vice, we begin materially to reward virtue!"

Luis Lugo, Calvin College

Calvin College political science professor Luis Lugo commented, "This [New Vision] document takes us to the important question of what kind of government is needed for dealing with the issues of social welfare. And it properly places primary emphasis on the diverse institutions of civil society."

Wendell Primus, U.S. Government

Clinton administration welfare reformer, Wendell Primus, said, "I come to this recognizing that government can't do it all, but I think government has an important role to play in improving child well-being."

The statistics make it clear, according to Primus, that "if children do live in a single-parent family, the chances that they are in poverty is huge."

Another problem, Primus explained, is that "our current welfare system is very sexist. We expect the females on the system to be the parent, the caretaker, the nurturer as well as the breadwinner. And we often let the males completely off the hook."

John Carr, American Catholic Bishops

John Carr, social affairs adviser to the American Catholic bishops, said, "I found in A New Vision for Welfare Reform many things that are complementary to much of our work at the U.S. Catholic Conference."

Ronald Haskins, U.S. House of Representatives

Ronald Haskins, adviser on welfare policy to the Republican members of the House Ways and Means Committee, asserted bluntly, "I came here to discuss illegitimacy, the rate of which, since 1950, has skyrocketed."

Stanley Carlson-Thies, Center for Public Justice

Stanley Carlson-Thies, director of the Welfare Responsibility project that produced the conference, emphasized the important moral and philosophical character of the discussion, but asserted that "if what we have been deliberating about at this conference has any merit, then it should have some significance for policy."

Sr. Christine Stephens, Industrial Areas Foundation

Sr. Christine Stephens, a colleague of Ernesto Cortes at the Industrial Areas Foundation in Texas, insisted that "No matter how poor the community, there is enough talent in that community that can be identified, agitated, and organized through their institutions to make an impact on their city."

Paul Marshall, Institute for Christian Studies, Toronto

"Treating welfare provisions as rights has serious drawbacks," according to Paul Marshall of the Institute for Christian Studies in Toronto. "One of those drawbacks is to focus on the person in relation to government while neglecting that person's relation to others in society who also bear responsibility."