End Welfare Reform as We Know It
Gilder, George
George Gilder End Welfare Reform as We Know It In its zeal to rush welfare moms to work and track down deadbeat dads, the right is just as wrong as the left. Does it make any sense to "reform"...
...S till, there is the cherished notion, renewed by every upwardly mobile governor, that workfare reforms have succeeded in the states, beginning with the Deadbeat Dad of All Welfare Reforms, Governor Ronald 26 The American Spectator June 1995 Reagan's famous California crackdown...
...Countervailing all the advances in technology allowing the disabled to work, the system reaches out to new groups, previously rare in the program, such as people under 40 and the mentally disabled, each now a quarter of all beneficiaries...
...It denies the female opportunism and promiscuity that sex education campaigns are avidly promoting...
...Crackdowns can reduce the rolls in the short run...
...Like all welfare crackdowns focusing on desirable activity—honest work, savings, and tax payments—the DNA-Dad programs will destroy marriages and forcibly drive men out of the official economy into crime and other underground work...
...Short of the pages of Fortune magazine, most people disapprove of men who leave their wives as they grow older and run off with a trophy from their business's affirmative-action track...
...pare them for jobs, and/or care for their children...
...Does it make any sense to "reform" welfare in a feminist culture...
...The entire welfare state—from Donna Shalala to Bob Dole's Senate offices—is relentlessly feminist, mandating preferences for women on construction sites, in police cruisers, in Air Force jets, and in athletic scholarships...
...Everyone seems to agree that welfare should be denied to women who refuse to give the names of possible fathers of their children...
...It is the women's skewed and traumatic relationships with men and boys...
...This means abandoning the idea of lifting the "truly needy" above the poverty line...
...The workfare state proposes to take away the mothers as well...
...4) Unmarried "deadbeat dads" bear equal responsibility for the children and should pay up...
...In the 1960s, as Daniel Patrick Moynihan demonstrated, black women were already beginning to exceed black men in the government work force...
...Now that high school sex educators are terrifying teenagers with the notion that some ten percent of them are homosexuals—a condition said to be genetically based and virtually incurable—young men are going to be still more avid to prove their manhood...
...6) The undeserving poor should be kicked off the rolls at a date certain...
...Following this script today is current California governor Pete Wilson...
...If it were as easy for government to create jobs and provide day-care as the workfare advocates assume, socialism would have succeeded...
...A new generation of reformers now promises to "end welfare as we know it"—to throw women off the rolls after two years or five years...
...The American Spectator June 1995 25 form: its unpopularity with women voters...
...Men learn love from women who say no and insist on marriage...
...Echoing the public opinion polls, the answer of the reformers is to put these women to work...
...Also running for president, Alan Keyes suggests caning, recommending "a trip to Singapore to learn how to administer a civil beating...
...Unless they are tamed by marriage and the provider role, men become enemies of civilization, and revert to their primordial role as predators...
...Their best strategy is to seduce as many men as possible and then summon the constabulary of the welfare state to collect child support payments from the few who find jobs or win the lottery...
...With 25 percent more cases than economically stagnant New York, California's caseload was growing 40 percent faster...
...Here is a welfare crackdown that even Hollywood can applaud...
...As the sexual proprieties of civilization break down, young women are increasingly explicit and challenging in their appraisal of male sexual adequacy...
...They represent a potentially huge expansion of the welfare state...
...2) These mothers should work, or train for employment...
...in amount of welfare spending and number of recipients in proportion to population...
...As Fortune recently explained, they do it for "intellectual stimulation...
...Male sexual drives are inherently aggressive and promiscuous...
...Texas Governor George W. Bush wants to lift their hunting licenses as well...
...They talk tough and people apexpanded by $8 billion under Clinton, have emerged as a favored source of support for which even the dimmest client can readily figure out how to qualify...
...The reason is simple...
...In the House, these provisions, minus the IRS empowerment, passed 426-5...
...These ten principles are all fallacious...
...It will continue as long as welfare feminism is the regnant ideology of government...
...f welfare women and children are not the basic problem, politicians can eagerly bring on the deadbeat dads...
...Parts of this essay are adapted from the new edition of his book Visible Man, reprinted this month by ICS Press and the Discovery Institute...
...The welfare state has already deprived these children of fathers...
...T he effort to foist "love children" on the technical fathers clashes with "pro-choice" abortion laws that deny men any choice over whether the child is born...
...All societies have always been beset by "invasions of barbarians"—i.e., teenage boys...
...They are on welfare in the first place because they would or could not get jobs that remotely compete with welfare benefits...
...A declamation against these monsters even brought Republican congressmen to their feet cheering for Clinton...
...After all, 55 percent of all women with young children hold jobs...
...Soon enough, after the campaigns against "fraud and abuse" eliminate all honest clients with any enforceable link to a man with a legal job, the welfare rolls swell again, full of computer-certified "ideal" recipients—i.e., women with several illegitimate children of unsure paternity or with unmarried fathers safely out of the legal economy...
...Any policy favoring marriage must begin by grasping the differences between the sexes on which marriage is founded...
...Informing nearly all current debate and legislation on welfare from both parties are ten key principles: (1) The key welfare problem is single mothers and their illegitimate children...
...The American Spectator June 1995 27...
...3) Government can create employment for them, preGeorge Gilder is senior fellow at the Discovery Institute...
...Favored by the feminists dominant at all levels of government, this balance of power virtually prohibits marriage, which is everywhere based on the provider role of men counterbalancing the sexual and domestic superiority of women...
...But we know from reams of studies and centuries of experience that only fathers can satisfactorily sustain families, reliably discipline teenage boys, and lift a community from poverty...
...These programs necessarily concentrate their job incentives, training benefits, and subsidies on women rather than on men because, in general, it is only the mothers who are on welfare...
...While there are many motives for marriage beyond the acquisition of a man's earnings or a woman's children, marriage in general depends on a set of economic incentives that favor these implicit exchanges...
...More fundamentally, we must eliminate all government programs, from coed job training to affirmative action, that fail to face the crucial differences between the sexes that make marriage possible...
...It denies many of these fathers any economic power to marry the mother or to prevent her from cohabiting with others...
...This process has turned disability into the nation's largest early retirement program...
...In a reversal of the usual pattern in civilized societies, the women have the income and the ties to gov24 The American Spectator June 1995 eminent authority and support...
...The focus is less on failure to pay the wife than on failure to pay the government...
...This won't happen no matter how many times President Clinton quotes Charles Murray...
...Both Engler and Wisconsin governor Tommy Thompson have also imposed a largely meaningless shuffle of welfare reforms and work programs...
...But if people can routinely figure out how to become disabled, they can still more easily manage to become "truly needy...
...As AFDC becomes increasingly hedged with red tape, homeless programs, Events, Reagan's reforms were so successful that he could increase payments to the truly needy...
...Why not welfare mothers...
...10) Welfare, as we know it, can be ended...
...Thus the threat of garnishment makes official employment a treacherous arena for inner-city men...
...By 1978, California was running behind only Massachusetts in the, continental U.S...
...The president wants to take away their driver's licenses and occupational accreditations...
...Despite the constant projections of insecure men, appraising various women as "good in bed," the fact is that men alone truly face this test of performance...
...Apart from denying new apartments to teenaged single mothers, the only welfare reform that makes a long-term difference is a private economy that grows faster than the public dole...
...It conflicts with the expressed desires of many women to avoid marriage with the "sperm donors" they may bed...
...Unlike women, men have to prove their masculine powers by performance...
...Come back five years later, however, and the previous welfare addicts and their legal-aid auxiliaries will merely have shifted their focus to other programs...
...Thus, the recipients of welfare-related work will mainly be women...
...As night falls on an urban culture without marriages, the ghetto games of musical beds account for a large share of inner-city violence...
...True, the same public opinion polls that support welfare reform also support the enrichment of such services as daycare and job preparation...
...Governor William Weld in Massachusetts wants to subpoena their DNA, put liens on their houses, and hound them through the bureaucracies of 50 states...
...But if welfare meant a greased track to employment training, free day-care, and a government job, most of the population would join...
...All programs addressed to relieve the condition or upgrade the employability of welfare mothers will only ensconce more fully these welfare "queens" on their leisured thrones and render the men still more optional, desperate, feral, and single...
...There is no other way...
...Any program that upper-middle-class social scientists deem adequate will outpace the earning ability of most teenage boys and young men...
...Running for president, Lamar Alexander wants to give them "jail time," presumably so they won't vote...
...The idea that welfare mothers can do it while the government raises their children is incredibly naive...
...9) Tough welfare reforms have worked in California under then–Governor Ronald Reagan and are working in other states...
...The result was that throughout the 1970s, while earned income stagnated, welfare payments and clientele soared in California, perhaps the world's most attractive venue for leisure living...
...By the 1980s, black women were earning 106 percent of the incomes of white women of similar age and credentials...
...Welfare benefits must be capped—and not enhanced with new programs—while marginal tax rates must drop for the rest of the economy...
...Everyone seems to support federalizing welfare records, creating a national system of electronic directories containing the names of all new hires, indexed by Social Security numbers, to be cross-checked by computer against lists of child support delinquents (or any other miscreants...
...Deadbeat dads overcome the key obstacle to welfare reAll programs addressed to relieve the condition or upgrade the employability of welfare mothers will only ensconce more fully these welfare "queens" on their leisured thrones and render the men still more optional, desperate, feral, and single...
...After systematically destroying the family, the welfare state offers to replace it with government coercion and DNA tests, requiring that men support women and children without marriage...
...Many black youths, in particular, can be linked as DNA dads to some ghetto child or other...
...With young women commanding power over income, sex, and children without marriage, why should they marry...
...Thus the current feminist reforms promote the violence and poverty for which marriage is the only workable remedy...
...Then he skipped town to run for national office...
...This is true for all people in all times, but in our day it has been America's blacks, at all levels of society, who have been the targets of most government attention, and whose communities thus come to mind when we speak not merely of social problems but of social crisis...
...They might better be termed "DNA dads," since many of them have no other tie to the child...
...Of decisive effect on family formation, the value of female incomes, whether from jobs or from welfare and associated leisure time, far exceeded the short-term value of marriage, and far outpaced the earning power of marriageable young men...
...Because of the promotion of early sexual activity through television, films, sex education, and the welfare state—all attacking the constraints of chastity and female modesty—the girls of the welfare culture are widely promiscuous from the age of 14, whether black or white...
...Requiring women to identify the fathers of their "love children" and using DNA to prove paternity, however, the new deadbeat dad crusade is chiefly a way to raise taxes for the welfare state...
...Nonetheless, the men retain greater strength, aggressiveness, and sexual compulsions...
...Described as "spectacularly successful" in a recent editorial in Human Events, the California program was based on the key illusion of most welfare reforms: that there are two categories of poor people, deserving and undeserving, the truly needy and the agents of waste, fraud, and abuse...
...The fathers use the apartments and take the money of a series of welfare mothers, usually without joining the dole...
...All civilization is based on female sexual selectivity and restraint...
...To fear young black males has become a mandate for survival on the streets of American cities...
...To bring them into the workforce would require heroic efforts: enriching welfare with day-care, education, and training, and then cutting off benefits and granting government-subsidized jobs run by disciplinarians who can require more work effort...
...The men are economically and socially subordinate...
...But as long as the payoff stays high enough, the clientele soon learn the new rules and adapt their lives to them...
...it won't happen if Charles Murray is president...
...W hen Charles Murray is quoted respectfully by President Clinton, when Bob Dole receives friendly tributes from George McGovern, when the portly conservative Michigan governor Robert Engler rivals Barbra Streisand' s standing-room crowds at congressional hearings—then we know that welfare revolution is in the air...
...8) Government can support families without requiring marriage...
...Welfare reform consists in cracking down on the undeserving by changing the rules to exclude them, while even increasing funds for the "truly needy...
...The idea that welfare mothers should work is seductive...
...This unspeakable social tragedy—with all its infuriating reverberations for law-abiding black citizens—is the inevitable harvest of our misguided social policies...
...However you slice it, marriage suffers from any welfare reform that enhances female employability and income above men's...
...The fact is that serious workfare programs are far worse than the existing welfare system...
...If Newt Gingrich truly wants to reform welfare, he must begin by throwing out the polls...
...T he key problem of the welfare culture is not unemployed women with illegitimate children...
...T his trend is already underway...
...It ignores that many recipients see welfare as a promiscuity entitlement...
...When the payoff in leisure time and income exceeds the value of earnings, disability insurance encourages the promotion of minor ailments into temporary disabilities, and temporary disabilities into permanent ones...
...Changing the rules of the game in mid-play and policing the system more aggressively, Reagan managed to move some 400,000 people off welfare and reduce the rate of growth of welfare spending from 25 percent a year to five percent...
...By threats, violence, and remorseless pressure, these males extort beds, board, money, and other comforts from the welfare mothers...
...No welfare payment can end poverty as measured by an ever-rising "poverty line...
...Reagan's programs mandated work by the able-bodied, unleashed new police powers against deadbeat dads, and removed from the rolls all recipients who showed up on the computers with excess income or property (in other words, all recipients honest enough once to have declared income, or married a man with earnings in the official economy...
...Moving to create a generation of American boat people, Senator Bill Bradley is leading a group of senators seeking to seize their passports...
...Congressman Henry Hyde wants to expand the powers of the IRS to confiscate their assets...
...If welfarist Democrats are smart—and they are—they could use the cover of tough Republican rhetoric to enact most of their socialist and feminist dreams...
...Finally, and simply, the very idea that women with small children should work outside the home is perverse...
...On the whole, white or black, these women are slovenly, incompetent, and sexually promiscuous...
...And it prevailed in the underclass, where, as the New York Times reported in 1994, a typical welfare package of benefits yielded a monthly disposable income of $995 compared to employment income of $775 after expenses for a typical single mother...
...The overthrow of welfare is the most popular clause in the Contract with America and the most comely idea of the newest "New Democrat" summits in the halls of the White House...
...Today's welfare discussion is bounded by the failed principles of the feckless "workfare" campaigns and bogus welfare crackdowns of the past...
...Amid general acclaim there now begins a new game of "can you top this" in bashing the deadbeats...
...With garnishees substituting for husbands, women lose the last economic reason to marry and domesticate the fathers of their children...
...Indeed, according to Human plaud...
...The workfare state proposes to take away the mothers as well...
...Yet these programs defy the facts of life and frontally attack the prerequisites of marriage...
...But the transformation of government makework into real jobs depends on entrepreneurial supervisors who force their charges to work and fire them when they don't...
...The day-care and training components of this scheme expand every year...
...He raised their benefits 43 percent and indexed them to inflation...
...5) For the deserving poor—the "truly needy"—benefits can rise...
...They can never know when their paychecks will be devastated by a huge lien, representing years of support payments for some unknown child (or even for a known child who has long received payments off the books...
...7) The government can tell the difference between the deserving and undeserving poor...
...CI The very idea that women with small children should work outside the home is perverse...
...The welfare state has already deprived these children of fathers...
...Although welfare reformers and DNA Dad crusaders claim to support the family, they would eliminate all its advantages by giving to any woman who manages to bear the child of a teenager a permanent option on his income, regardless of marriage...
...Today, with 9 percent of the state's population on AFDC and with one-third of all children born out of wedlock, California faces a welfare Armageddon...
...This regime prevailed even at the highest levels of the economy, where black women college graduates with five years on the job outearned both comparable white women and black men in 1991...
...Yet for all the streams of sulfurous talk and all the seemingly bold proposals, no one is really changing his mind...
...Today, in large American cities, fully 40 percent of young black men between the ages of 17 and 35 are in prison, on probation, or on the lam, and some 40 percent of young black women say they have been forced into unwanted sexual activity...
...Workfare would fail even if it worked splendidly, because it focuses on women rather than on men...
...Any politician who follows the public opinion polls on this issue—and on most others, by the way—soon earns the contempt of the public, which wants competent leaders in office, not poll-bearing panders...
...Five years from now, from midtown Manhattan to Santa Monica, you will find "homeless" and "disability" crises...
...Together, the earnings and welfare payments received by black women came drastically to exceed the incomes of black men...
Vol. 28 • June 1995 • No. 6
