It’s Time to Rethink Our Welfare Policy

Seth Wessler

It’s Time to Rethink Our Welfare Policy

Earlier this week the New York Times reported that even as many states have skyrocketing unemployment, their welfare rolls are shrinking. As a researcher for a racial justice think tank, I’ve been traveling the country collecting accounts of how this recession is playing out in the lives of every day people. Millions who are out of work, losing homes and struggling to stay afloat are nevertheless denied access to Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF). The punitive rules established after twenty years of racially coded frenzy to “end welfare as we know it” have left Americans with no safety net during this deepening economic crisis.

TANF replaces the old Aid to Families with Dependent Children program (to insert the “temporary”) and its creation relied on mythologized images of the “welfare queen” driving Cadillacs conjured by Ronald Reagan’s presidential campaign. This kind of racial scapegoating, the politics many believe we outgrew with Obama’s election, vilified welfare recipients (who have always been mostly white) and led to rules that are so complicated and punitive that many struggling families cannot get the help they need. Now that all of us – not just people of color— are in recession free fall, there is nothing available to catch us. To fix TANF, we will have to put aside racial stereotypes to do what is best for the largest number of people.

When Welfare Reform passed in 1996, our macro economic outlook was optimistic and the rhetoric of "personal responsibility" was ubiquitous. The welfare rolls plummeted and conservative and liberals alike declared success. But unknown numbers of families (we mostly stopped counting) were left underemployed, underpaid and unable to comply with punitive regulations. According to Robert Wharton, the president and chief executive officer of the Community Economic Development Administration, "Ten years into welfare reform, caseloads may have decreased, but the number of people living in poverty has not". Welfare reform set up countless barriers to access. The most egregious of these are punitive work requirements and 5-year maximum time limits for lifetime eligibility.

One of the places I stopped in my travels was Detroit. Michigan has the highest unemployment in the country, passing 10 percent last month. Detroit has been hit even harder. Yet, reports the Times, the state cut its welfare rolls over 13 percent last year. In Michigan rules, like those in many states, public assistance is tied to work. A 30-year-old woman I met, lets call her A, lost her job as a teacher's assistant in a Detroit area public school, and then lost her TANF because she was no longer working. Now she has neither job nor welfare, and she's facing foreclosure with her four children. I heard dozens of examples like this. People who couldn't find a job, or even a decent volunteer opportunity, without childcare, transportation, and more help than the new welfare system provides.

A society cannot survive without a safety net and we don't have one during the worst economic crisis in decades. TANF needs serious reconsideration including a rescinding of punitive work requirements and an end to the time limits that cut people off after 5 years total enrollment. We need to ensure that families have access to supplementary benefits like food stamps, fully subsidized child care, transportation and housing assistance and we need to remove debilitating eligibility requirements that exclude many documented immigrants and people with past involvement with the criminal justice system. To do these things Americans have to be willing to move past their racial stereotypes about people of color and welfare.

The country recently came together in a proud moment to inaugurate our first president of color. We did so by putting our racial divisions aside in the name of collective economic self-interest. Now we need to do the same by rebuilding a system of support for everyone.

Posted at 1:31 PM, Feb 04, 2009 in Politics | Permalink | View Comments

Comments

Excellent piece. Thanks for these succinct and clearheaded observations.

but where will the money to pay for an expanded safety net come from?

in a progressive tax system (that the traditional left wants to make more 'progressive'), the richest pay the most into the system, and so for all intents and purposes, they become the 'tax base' for politicians (new york city today, post-wall street meltown being the prime example). More tax money to pay for 'more stuff' invariably gets tied into how well the the 'tax base' of society is doing.

the way i see it, the problem isnt the decreased safety net, but the very structure of the economy itself. Stagnating incomes for all sectors except finance was always going to be a recipe for disaster. Instead of arguing for more welfare, I feel that we on the 'left' should be arguing against the deepening of the processes of 'financialization'.

I absolutely agree that these social nets are very important. I recently went on unemployment and in the past I have been a part of the system through food stamps and federally assisted lunches (when I was a child). These are all temporary measures my mother used to make ends meet. As a child there were also periods we went on welfare. But we did these things temporarily. I've seen people who have used the welfare system across generations. Why do we need to extend welfare past five years? I thought the idea was that welfare existed as a means to provide disabled individuals or those looking for work a temporary income until they found work. If someone cannot find work within 5 years, why should we believe they will ever be able to find it? Do we want to create a permanent underclass dependent on those who work through government programs? Do we want to continue the cycle of poverty characterized by free public housing and welfare that has characterized the slums of the inner city (went to college in Hyde Park, walk 10 blocks west from my former campus and you'll see what I mean). Would it not be more logical, more productive and wiser to create a system that incentivizes people to seek employment? How else are we going to correct the perpetuating cycle of near serfdom that makes up the inner city? The current system does not work, we need to reform it so that people want to become employed. Otherwise, why not just call welfare "Bread and Circuses?"

Our public assistance programs in the U.S. are broken and inefficient. Of particular concern to me are the welfare-to-work programs that, in my opinion, were developed in direct response to misinformed beliefs and stereotypes that people on welfare are lazy and want to steal from/cheat the government for a living; read: welfare queen. These programs DO NOT provide valuable work experience that lead to long-term employment. Many of the jobs require little to no education, are service oriented and do have career ladders that will lead to higher paying jobs or a career.

In our current economy, where well-educated and well-trained people will find themselves needing public assistance, welfare becomes a sexy issue. The people who now need assistance are characterized as the deserving poor. If we want to re-visit and make visible the issue of our broken welfare system, it needs to be an ongoing interest that continues long after our economic crisis ends. Welfare, particularly welfare-to-work programs have not been good programs and will be both absurd and unacceptable to those who already have work-experience and education. While this may be an opportunity to make changes, we should except and be invested in a long-term fight to improve how welfare operates in the U.S.

It's always fascinating to read another liberal who doesn't realize that the gravy train is running out of track. Sure, we can scrape a bit more off the wealthy, and we can redistribute that last bit of savings of the middle class. But this socialist game is pretty much over.

What we have is not a failure of capitalism, because we abandoned capitalism about 60 years ago. "Safety nets" don't engender safety, they engender dependency and we have created that in spades. The verbiage used in advocating socialism change slightly over time, the outcome of its implementation never does. Well, we're snacking on the neckbone of the goose. Good luck finding another golden egg.

unhelpful, bill.

we may dislike the phrase 'safety net' but public policy on poverty has nothing to do with socialism or dependence. it's about creating a process so that our communities are strengthened. without supports that can effectively move those in poverty from the very dependence you deride, into something like sustainable work and stable, basic housing and healthcare, whole communities (and state budgets) will crumble.

in the same way that communities are strengthened by structures like bridges, roads, etc., they are also strengthened by the human capital within them. basically we're wasting our human resources because we can't figure out how to help move them out of poverty.

there are two issues here: sourcing revenue to fund these kinds of community/human infrastructure projects and finding effective ways to implement the kind of social change we need to move the working poor (and even the non-working poor) into self-sufficiency.

currently, state services are completely siloed, unconnected to one another, as if all the complex issues keeping one in poverty just sprang up independent of themselves and not associated with the other. as for sourcing state revenue, well, it will take a smarter head than mine to figure that out.

it's clear that states can't carry this burden alone. but it's going to take solutions and creative ideas from everyone in our communities to reform this situation. hoisting a partisan-baiting tone doesn't really lead to solutions, does it?