Welfare Responsibility: Surveying the Territory

March-April 1993

By Stanley W. Carlson-Thies

WASHINGTON, D.C.—[Late last year the Center for Public justice began a three-year project on the roots of the crisis in America's welfare policy. As part of a preliminary assessment of contemporary approaches to this subject, project director Stanley Carlson-Thies offered the following summary to the core team at its first meeting.—Ed.]

At least five approaches to welfare policy appear on the American horizon today. The arguments range from rejection to reform, from expansion to replacement. We need to evaluate each of these carefully and critically as we go about charting our own course.

Reject Public Welfare

Federal welfare programs, in Charles Murray's provocative phrases, have harmed rather than helped the needy. "We tried to provide more for the poor and produced more poor instead," he argues in Losing Ground. "We tried to remove the barriers to escape from poverty, and inadvertently built a trap." The poor, like all of us, respond to an incentive structure: if success and happiness require hard work, they will work hard, but if they can get by with little effort, they will not exert themselves. According to Murray, the well-intentioned but misguided programs of the War on Poverty inadvertently fostered lack of effort. The structure of incentives in these programs made it rational for people who could live otherwise to become dependent on handouts instead of mobilizing their own resources. Welfare clients adapted their behavior accordingly. Under these conditions, the more money spent on welfare, the greater the need for even more spending.

The solution, Murray urges, is to scrap federal social programs. Unemployment insurance should be retained to aid the self-motivated who are between jobs. But all the other federal assistance programs should be ended. This would "leave the working-aged person with no recourse whatsoever except the job market, family members, friends and public or private locally funded services." Then parents would insist that their children become employable and employed; mothers would insist that fathers not renege on child-support obligations; pregnant young women would decide to keep their babies only if they knew they could muster the necessary resources on their own.

Replace Public Welfare

Implicitly accepting Murray's diagnosis of the evil of our public assistance programs, Marvin Olasky (in The Tragedy of American Compassion) proposes not simply to destroy those programs but to replace them by private charitable efforts. The welfare system, he says, wrongly offers benefits indiscriminately both to those who cannot help themselves and to those who can. Moreover, in the case of the genuinely needy, it does not provide the multidimensional and personal assistance required. Thus, we need to go "beyond the stingy welfare state" to an interventionist and discriminating approach. This will take the revival of the kind of private charitable organizations that existed at the turn of the century.

Deeply committed to helping the needy, but realistic about the human propensity to take advantage of others, those organizations inquired thoroughly and intrusively into the situation of supplicants for assistance and then tailored their assistance to fit. The able-bodied received assistance only after demonstrating their willingness to work; those who refused to work were refused assistance—for their own good. When possible, connections were forged between the needy and those morally obligated to render assistance but who had not done so—the spouse who had fled, other members of the nuclear or extended family, church groups, ethnic benevolence associations. Supplicants whose need stemmed from a personal life in disarray were given the personal assistance necessary to establish orderliness and competence; the morally dissolute were confronted by biblical standards for life and assisted to overcome their failings. Thus, the needy were empowered rather than rendered dependent.

Reform Public Welfare

Dependency is the core problem of our public assistance efforts, Lawrence Mead agrees. But public welfare need not be abandoned, for it does not have to foster dependency. What is required is a reform of public welfare to obligate those seeking assistance to become active on their own behalf. Poverty these days, he argues (in Beyond Entitlement and The New Politics of Poverty), is most commonly the result of the failure of the poor to function adequately—to persevere in school, to maintain their families, to find work and stick with it. But instead of helping the poor get their lives in order by requiring good functioning as a condition of receiving benefits, welfare programs have typically permitted the underlying behavioral problems to be maintained, thus perpetuating poverty.

This is the crux of the problem of the so-called ghetto underclass. Typically black and concentrated in the inner cities, the most intractable of the poor have multiple strikes against them. Their children usually live with single mothers; the fathers are usually both unattached and unemployed. The residents of urban ghettos are surrounded not by the normal institutions of society (such as factories, offices, and shops) but rather by institutions designed for dependents: soup kitchens, homeless shelters, and public assistance agencies. Residents with the qualities to succeed in society depart when they are able, leaving behind role models not of success but of dependency.

These poor are poor because they (or their parents) do not work. But their non-working is not primarily due to an inability to work, or to the absence of desire to work, or to the absence of jobs. These poor are defeated by their expectation of failure; the non-working poor are not on the path of opportunity because they do not believe it is open to them. The solution is to help them transcend this "psychic inhibition" by enforcing moral behavior—primarily work or work preparedness—as a condition of assistance. "Workfare," Mead argues, "has the potential to change the passive nature of welfare." Forced to accept responsibility, the defeated poor learn that the barrier which had loomed so high in their minds was not real and that the defeatist attitude so prominent in their communities was mistaken. By actually doing what had seemed impossible, and through interaction with program workers and fellow clients, the defeated poor become assertive and are empowered to take their place in society.

Revive the Public Welfare System

For other reformers, the explanation of the high and increasing degree of poverty in the United States is essentially simple: we have never dedicated sufficient effort to eradicating poverty, and the Reagan-Bush era did even worse, scaling back expenditures and programs. These critics note the sharp bifurcation in our poverty-fighting programs. On one side are relatively well-funded and successful social insurance programs (Social Security, Medicare, unemployment insurance) designed to prevent workers from becoming poor when they cease working. On the other side stand public assistance efforts such as food stamps, low-income housing, AFDC, Head Start, and others, which have never been adequately funded. Why not? Because Americans persist in thinking that the clients of these programs are "undeserving"—that they could make it on their own if only they tried hard enough.

The War on Poverty represented a partial relaxation of this harsh attitude; benefits and eligibility criteria were made more generous, and new programs were started to help the poor become more skilled and assertive. But this was a short-lived change, interrupted by presidents Reagan and Bush. Although public assistance spending is a small part of federal and state budgets, it became the preferred target of cost-cutting politicians. Even as the number of poor single mothers and their children increased, spending on AFDC was cut. Health-care costs soared, but budget-balancers went after Medicaid. Workfare is not really a strategy to empower the poor but rather an additional means to punish them. Michael Katz (The Undeserving Poor) characterizes it as "forcing welfare recipients to pay for their benefits through work."

The outcome is no surprise. Single mothers increasingly become poor; more and more children are raised in poverty; a growing number cannot obtain adequate health care; inner cities become hellholes. The solution is equally obvious: turn back from this misguided and mean-spirited attack on the defenseless, and abandon the myth that welfare policies don't work. The issue is not the will of the poor, but the will of the public and government. Given sufficient commitment, poverty can be eradicated.

Radicalize Welfare Policy

Along with those who seek a reinvigorated public welfare system, another group of reformers believes that America has devoted insufficient effort to assist its needy citizens. But their call is for a qualitatively new public commitment to welfare. The problem is not merely insufficient effort along lines already established, but the inadequacy of the plan itself. Our aim should be higher than simply to raise America to the level of a "social security state" in which poverty is eliminated "by ensuring the least advantaged a minimum standard of civilized life." (Norman Furniss and Timothy Tilton, The Case for the Welfare State.) Assistance, under those conditions, would still be available only at the price of a degrading means-testing and would remain conditioned by an overriding concern to maintain work incentives. The continued bias would be to try to prevent the ineligible from gaining benefits rather than to ensure a decent life for all. A truly adequate response to the welfare needs of Americans requires instead the implementation of a genuine "social welfare state."

In a social welfare state, the false polarity of needy versus self-sufficient is rejected in favor of a conception of universal neighborliness or "social citizenship." No one in a complicated industrial or post-industrial society succeeds unaided; the market is in fact subject to a wide variety of political interventions. Such intervention ought to become more extensive, guided by the goal of promoting the equal well-being of all citizens and a commitment to social solidarity.

As citizens together, not as rugged individualists fighting for advantage in the free market, we should implement policies that ensure basic equality of treatment and opportunity for all. Decent housing ought not to be at the mercy of market forces. Health care, necessary for a decent life, ought to be universally available. All parents who wish to work ought, by right, to have access to affordable and good child care. Workers should be able to adapt to the changing economy by having access to extensive job training and retraining programs—at public expense. Elimination of the legal and physical barriers to employment of the handicapped should be followed by programs to adapt workplaces to their special requirements. This kind of social welfare state would eliminate both existing poverty and the factors that generate new poverty.