The New Politics of Poverty
Mead, Lawrence M.
Only 16 percent of heads of households worked full time (as opposed to 58 percent in all income groups), and only 9 percent of female heads of households (40 percent among all income groups). By...
...New Jersey has adopted a law that disallows additional benefits to a mother who has more children while already on welfare, and continues benefits for a woman if she marries...
...They want the poor to prove themselves in menial jobs before expecting better...
...It doesn't take much imagination to realize that, while "workfare" may pass muster in Washington, it is going to be perceived by state welfare administrators as exactly what it is—a draconic attempt to herd mothers of small children into the workplace...
...Most analysts support them, arguing, one way or another, for public provision of better or easier jobs for the nonworkers, or support unrelated to working...
...In other words, there is a clear alternative to the white-knuckled policy of driving unattached young mothers into the workforce...
...Nonworking men—as always—will be left out of the equation...
...Wisconsin has just won federal approval for an almost identical innovation sponsored by Governor Tommy Thompson...
...Through nonwork, poor adults ask, in essence, for better or easier employment than the economy offers them...
...they now arise from the nonworking underclass...
...Johnson was blunter: "Read over your composition and when you find a passage you think particularly fine, strike it out...
...Then there's Orwell's sixth rule, in reference to the previous five: "Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous...
...Today it goes overwhelmingly to women who have never married but who bear illegitimate children and then turn to the government for support...
...The question is what degree of competence—meaning work effort—is to be expected of citizens...
...Most voters and politicians resist, in part on account of the financial cost, but also because they reject tampering with the traditional terms of belonging in the society...
...The moral, in Mary Jo Bane's words: "The problem of poverty should be addressed by devoting attention to employment...
...Workfare has been successful where it has been tried, he argues...
...But liberals have the more credible view of the psychology of poverty...
...To view the seriously poor as self-confident maximizers, as conservative analysts tend to do, is implausible...
...In my opinion, the liberal viewpoint overstates the obstacles facing the poor, but captures quite well how the poor themselves feel...
...It is only going to institutionalize the single-parent household, attempting to turn unwed mothers and their children into viable economic units...
...The choice is between a policy that tries to institutionalize single parenthood and one that tries to reinforce the nuclear family...
...Since most welfare administrators are not very draconic, the actual implementation will produce an endless series of exemptions and excuses until all but the most willing recruits have been eliminated—as has already happened...
...By the 1950s, it had been extended to the children of divorce...
...This is a policy built The American Spectator August 1992 61 around reducing the government-provided disincentives for marriage and building families...
...Four of the rules tell what the writer should avoid using: clichés, long words, the passive voice, and foreign or obscure terms...
...Mead's program may be convincing on its own terms (although the difference between voluntary enlistment in the armed forces and coerced work in the welfare system certainly needs a little elaboration), but when we contemplate where it leads, the reality sets in...
...Actually, each side seems to understand the other's subject better: Conservatives grasp that society is open, while liberals grasp the convictions poor people have that society is closed...
...One of the most aggravating rhetorical devices in public policy books is when an author defines the opposing positions as "the two extremes," and places himself judiciously in the "sensible middle ground...
...With public opinion rapidly mobilizing around welfare reform, it is imperative that we start moving in the right direction...
...Says Thompson: "Some people are calling this a shotgun wedding with 'the state holding the shotgun...
...So far, the job has been undertaken almost entirely by liberal Democrats...
...Mead summarizes: The great question in social policy is whether to enforce the competence assumption against all odds or accommodate the special inhibitions of the poor...
...Mead does much better, making the disarming argument that both sides are right: Conservatives are largely correct that opportunity is available to the poor...
...in only 12 percent of cases is it loss of earnings...
...Although few grasp this, people cannot collect welfare simply because they are poor...
...Much more promising are those welfare reform programs that seek to reinforce the family...
...I prefer to call it, 'Making Room for Daddy...
...AFDC (Aid to Families with Dependent Children), which constitutes 95 percent of what we call "welfare payments," is awarded to poor people because they are in single-parent households...
...The New Deal and union rights used to be fighting words...
...Dr...
...There may be little society can do to reverse the tide of instability in American families, especially among the poor...
...Conservatives respond that there are plenty of jobs around, that America is the land of opportunity, that immigrants are constantly moving past blacks by taking advantage of those opportunities, and that the welfare system itself is the cause of that crippling dependency...
...It's not that work is not a good thing, but that the poor are just being led down the same old road to serfdom: each successive solution seems only to lead to more government control over people's lives...
...Defining the problem so clearly, however, doesn't mean Mead can sit on the fence all day...
...Liberals make a slew of excuses for blacks, arguing that "good jobs" aren't available, that blacks face special social and historic barriers, that single mothers find it too difficult to work, that day care is inadequate, and that the poor are crippled by a psychology of dependency...
...Says Mead: "Once, the most divisive demands on government were inspired by the working class...
...It is a dispute over social standards, much more than opportunity...
...Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the bill's main advocate, said, however, that we "wouldn't really know if it will work until the year 2000...
...Still, he dismisses the whole matter as intractable...
...One rule, faintly echoing the advice of Samuel Johnson, states: "If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out...
...On the other hand: "When a woman goes on AFDC, three-quarters of the time the reason is that she separated from her spouse or bore a child out of wedlock [note the failure to differentiate...
...The program includes some workfare requirements...
...Sooner or later he has to come down, and when he does, it is on the side of breaking the stalemate through enforced work requirements...
...A report issued to the Senate in March indicated that, after four years and $1 billion, the 1988 workfare law is having virtually no impact on long-term dependency...
...When first included in the 1935 Social Security Act, AFDC was conceived as a small pension for "widows and orphans...
...Near the end of his famous essay on "Politics and the English Language" (1946), George Orwell gives a list of six rules that a writer "can rely on when instinct fails...
...By 1989, 51 percent of heads of poor households did not work, up from 31 percent in 1959...
...Having persuaded millions of low-income, mostly black young women to abandon the search for husbands and marry the government, the government would now turn welfare into a kind of THE NEW POLITICS OF POVERTY: THE NONWORKING POOR IN AMERICA Lawrence M. Mead Basic Books/356 pages/$25 reviewed by WILLIAM TUCKER 60 The American Spectator August 1992 vocational education program to turn dismembered "families" into self-sufficient economic entities...
...Where does this leave us...
...rather than hand-wringing about the decline of the family...
...It is often said that the right explains poverty by blaming the victim, the left by blaming society...
...Let's start by defining exactly what we mean by "welfare...
...If anything, the figures argue against Mead's point...
...With all the facts in his grasp, Mead has clearly made the wrong choice...
...Workfare isn't going to do anything to undo the damage AFDC has already done in disrupting family formation...
...Mead's arguments are compelling, often deft, but in the end unconvincing...
...In The Art of Persuasion, Linda John R. Dunlap teaches English at Santa Clara University...
...Mead doesn't pay much attention to such issues: The argument that [family] breakup necessarily causes poverty or dependency is unpersuasive...
...He even argues—not unpersuasively—that poor people feel "abandoned" when the system does not make strict demands on them...
...We are always just a few years and a few billion dollars short of solving the problem...
...It is rarely true in any gross sense that social and economic barriers deny opportunity to nonworkers...
...B ecause the poor—especially the black poor—have moved so far outside the American mainstream, it has become far more difficult to assemble a sympathetic national consensus on what to do with them...
...but today, controversies over the homeless, welfare, and law and order' are more bitter...
...He cites the armed forces as a branch of American society that blacks have successfully joined under terms of strict demands and discipline...
...While other factors play a role, that impasse is the essential cause of the work problem...
...When mothers leave AFDC, the reason is remarriage [sic] in 35 percent of cases, earnings increases in 21 percent...
...But earnings may play a contributing role when mothers leave the rolls for other reasons, so the share of exits attributable to earnings may run as high as 42 percent...
...Says Assemblyman Wayne Bryant, the bill's principal sponsor, who represents impoverished Camden: "Nothing is going to change until we change morality...
...Thus, the only "nonworkers" who are going to be affected by workfare are mothers of young children...
Vol. 25 • August 1992 • No. 8
