A BREAKDOWN OF CONSENSUS: PROBLEMS IN THE WELFARE STATE
Greenberg, Mark
Mounting Problems in the Welfare State With "A Breakdown of Consensus: Mounting Problems in the Welfare State," Mark Greenberg has won the First Essay Contest for Young Writers sponsored by...
...The creation of a broad base also diminished the likelihood that people would think of Social Security as a welfare program, since welfare programs are thought of as, by definition, narrow in base...
...And so it is hardly surprising that the low-income, ineligible person, who is constantly confronted with the presence of the lowest-income, eligible beneficiary, will make invidious comparisons...
...At that time each of the categories defined—the elderly, the blind, mothers (presumably widows) with young children—were categories one could acknowledge as incapable of self-support...
...Those who had to shape and develop the details of the welfare structure had to consider the provision of benefits in relation to the problems of the secondary labor market...
...Were they unable to afford decent housing...
...These changes will eradicate the already limited commonality between the working and nonworking poor...
...As social forces broke down the arbitrary barriers, it became possible for all persons to apply for the programs they were eligible for...
...The lack of commonality then generated a myth of generosity that led to the presumption of program adequacy, to a process of invidious comparison, and to a sense of moral superiority among nonrecipients...
...The Social Security Act established the basic structure out of which all other and later programs have evolved...
...instead they chose programs of in-kind benefits—benefits that are not jobs and not money...
...We seem to be providing an infinite array of programs for the poor, and for some who appear to be doing at least as well as many of us...
...This is partly a methodological problem: it is enormously costly to assemble and evaluate the relevant medical and vocational factors that decide a person's category...
...They are holding actions that cannot reduce poverty except in a narrow, definitional sense...
...The determination to structure programs without providing a basis for permanent employment resulted in a deceptive multiplicity—and in a perception that all the many programs accomplished nothing at all...
...The specific changes have standardized and reduced existing deductions, and the law now limits the time for which a household can receive the major work-incentive deduction to four months (after which the household cannot receive the deduction again until it has been without benefits for 12 consecutive months...
...Their construction generated limited constituencies, high visibility, and a deceptive multiplicity of programs in which the relationship between poverty and the economy was carefully ignored...
...This contrast is important because, in many respects, the Food Stamp program has come as close as this country ever has to a guaranteed annual income...
...In hard times, charity is often viewed as the first "unnecessary expenditure" to be dispensed with...
...At any rate, federal countercyclical employment has always been so minimal as to have a negligible effect on the labor market...
...It is a basic guideline of American politics that in order to make a program fail, one organizes it upon a narrow eligibility/ineligibility basis...
...The gap between the general public impression of the easy life of the welfare recipient and the recipient's actual experience has always been and continues to be enormous...
...These categorized needs programs were able to respond to the demands of the time, could aid in warding off the most egregious social disasters, yet still would maintain fairly strong work incentives...
...Similarly, participation was limited through state imposition of a range of "moral" requirements...
...Until the 1960s, racial discrimination continued to be the rule in provision of welfare benefits in much of the nation...
...Benefits for the elderly are so low that they are found eating dog and cat food, and programs are established to feed the elderly...
...As a result, AFDC now served a greater mix of working and nonworking households...
...but this provision has resulted in a large constituency that makes the program virtually invincible...
...Rather, in welfare as in other areas, we should seek to analyze and gain an understanding of how liberal answers have tended to self-destruct, and find alternative ways that lack the same corrosive internal dynamics 478...
...The architects of the Great Society programs were faced with the dilemma that the Social Security Act had probably gone as far as the government could go in laying down unobjectionable categories of poor persons— and yet some further response was demanded...
...The Food Stamp program has come to be viewed as the obvious, classic example of liberal government gone haywire...
...They are not part of the original "safety net" and were never perceived as part of the middle class's protection from credible threats...
...The programs that emerged in response to the Depression reflected both the recognition that it was possible to lose one's job and be unemployed for some time through no fault of one's own, and also that there were categories of people in our society that could not be expected to be part of the work force...
...There is a vague, general awareness that some people cannot reasonably be expected to work and that, in principle, it should be possible to set their benefits at a level approaching social adequacy...
...In 1967, Congress adopted legislation that changed the manner in which income eligibility was determined...
...Second, whenever the slogan of "Jobs or Income" has been raised, it has been possible for the political authorities to respond by providing income or in-kind benefits...
...Were the poor hungry...
...Even many who said they truly regretted the welfare cuts asserted that there was "no choice," if we wished to control inflation...
...As unemployment and severe underemployment hit more and more of the traditional middle class, the Invisible Hand rationale and the tenet that systematic federal income support was improper could no longer be maintained...
...The programs now under attack were constructed in a manner that virtually assured their loss of support in a no-growth economy...
...it would enhance the unions' capacity to improve working conditions...
...they also will remove the minimal instances when working men and women who aren't poor will have occasion to seek public assistance...
...Just as accelerated depreciation reduces the cost of capital, welfare cuts reduce the cost of labor...
...A family's need for food, housing, heat, and medical care has little ebb and flow from year to year...
...Food Stamps is the only federal benefit program available on a continuous basis to poor persons so long as they meet income eligibility guidelines, without the need to fit into other categories...
...Thus the existing structure was shaped so as to virtually ensure that in time it would lose its popular support...
...Hence it is natural for people to draw the conclusion that the poor are uniquely provided for...
...This is the impression because over time tens of millions of people fit, and many of them continue to fit, official definitions of "the needy...
...Program growth tended to slow during the 1970s, but only where legislation or inflation narrowed eligibility...
...When the requirement that households pay for Food Stamps was eliminated, the program finally became available to the poorest of the poor, and participation expanded...
...AFDC became the basic income support program for households where a parent was missing, incapacitated, or (in some states) unemployed...
...Multiple Needs" Program THE WELFARE ARCHITECTS of the 1960s faced a critical decision once they had concluded that there were no remaining unobjectionable categories of needy persons...
...As a result, the poor among us have become more distinctive, and poverty tends to be seen as a problem limited to those persons who now are poor...
...The decline in public support for the programs is too important a phenomenon and can't be explained away...
...The result was the provision of goods to the poor that were unavailable to the nearpoor—and most nonrecipients saw no reasonable likelihood that they would ever become recipients of these programs...
...From the perspective of a submerged middle class, the Social Security programs responded to an existing credible threat...
...Opponents of the cuts documented, in meticulous detail, the impact the various individual and cumulative cuts would have on the living standards of the poorest sectors of the population...
...Food Stamps are made available to the poor, but benefits are set artificially low to maintain work incentives...
...Now our analysis suggests that over time inherent defects in the income structure will result in a climate of opinion in which all such benefits are dangerously vulnerable...
...Aspects of this perspective often laced the rhetoric of the time...
...Because they cannot lead to improvements—because poverty has never been structurally acknowledged to be more than temporary—the programs are assumed to accomplish nothing...
...Therefore bureaucratic structures were set up with the purpose of providing low benefits that are combined with a set of disincentives—so that the receipt of benefits will never be an attractive alternative to work...
...A needy household provided with a monthly Food Stamps allotment still has no way to pay its rent...
...But over time the general public impression is fostered that benefits programs pervade the society, and that if people are poor, the reason is quite likely that they choose to be so in order to receive benefits...
...Thus the feeling of moral superiority is reinforced in the nonrecipient community, and the presumption of the poor's criminality is confirmed...
...The only program under the Social Security Act that has been significantly attacked is Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC...
...Their defense has become increasingly difficult and politically ineffective...
...These also did not derive from a mass perception that many Americans, at one time or another, might have to face the threat of poverty...
...The Social Security trio of Aid to the Blind, Old Age Assistance, and Aid to Dependent Children was established in a manner that allowed states to impose arbitrary conditions— and with the government's full knowledge and expectation that many states would deny eligibility to black people...
...Their self-image is that of citizen rather than Social Security recipient...
...But if the same person misrepresents eligibility to obtain enough Food Stamps to get bread for the family, that person is subject to criminal prosecution and public vilification...
...Why then has the Reagan administration attacked the welfare system, and why has the public responded without demur...
...Benefits are so low that school children suffer in their daily performance...
...Despite the gradual development of limited legal protection and some notable advances made by welfare rights groups, the experience of being a welfare recipient continues to be characterized by an unlearnable maze of rules and regulations pervading daily existence...
...Now, suddenly, we find politicians in both parties arguing that the development of such a program is impossible (or unnecessary...
...The shift in public response to these problems since the 1930s can best be illustrated by contrasting the manner in which the Social Security Act emerged with the emergence and design of the postwar income-support systems...
...Though we may have serious doubts about the likelihood and consequences of full employment in the present organization of production, the focus on employment would still seem to offer the best long-range prospects...
...Although, unquestionably, the cuts would affect the federal poverty programs substantially and severely, the public seemed to respond with acquiescence...
...The longterm problem concerns the question of how to advocate necessary structural changes, when the transitional programs are, perhaps necessarily, so unsatisfactory that they dissolve the consensus by which they are achieved...
...Let us call these disincentives the "welfare recipient experience...
...For the Reagan administration, the major goal for supporting a welfare structure is the prevention of social disorder, and the Administration is seeking to attain that goal at the least possible cost...
...The welfare structure either must find some means of distinguishing between these two categories of people or peg benefits at the lower level of the two...
...The case worker presumes it...
...Because the benefits of the poor are seen as unique, they are also uniquely vulnerable...
...For the categorization of "unable to work" depends only partially on the person's aptitudes and medical condition—and to a greater extent on the condition of the economy and the provision of supportive social services...
...Further, to the extent that this Administration is responsive to small-business interests, which require a compliant minimum-wage labor force, the welfare cuts are a means of reducing the need for taxation while providing targeted assistance...
...When, emboldened by initial success, the Administration began to consider modifications of Social Security, the ensuing enormous furor rapidly dissuaded them...
...In short, at a time when liberal programs are under attack, we must take care to avoid the uncritical defense of flawed structures...
...Again, one cannot say that this structure flows from a popular mandate...
...Let us recognize that this denial of assistance to persons who are working does not have a work-incentive effect...
...They were initiated in a growing economy, at a time when moral commitments did not seem to have expensive price tags...
...benefits have never averaged more than $0.45 per meal...
...But the major problem in creating an entitlement to employment is that it would fundamentally reorient the bargaining position of labor...
...Over time high program participation without "improvement" is taken to prove that the programs must be providing assistance to persons who do not need them...
...Training, support services, and income disregards— all reduced in the past year—are far more effective in encouraging work-force involvement...
...Rather than attempt to persuade the nation that the public interest is served by reducing tax rates for high-income individuals, the Kemp-Roth tax bill was structured to obtain approval by claiming to offer benefits to all tax-payers...
...The establishment of socially adequate welfare benefits is commonly considered undesirable, because they supposedly will "destroy work incentives...
...The most dramatic growth occurred in the 1960s, as the combination of civil rights/welfare rights consciousness, urbanization, and the decline of formal racial discrimination made AFDC generally 476 available to more households meeting eligibility definitions...
...Its recipients receive a check every month, cash and deposit it, and are indistinguishable from the rest of the population...
...The new law made it possible for some households to retain eligibility when members were employed at minimum wage or subminimum wage...
...The Threat of Poverty— Credible for Whom...
...Public housing recipients live in massive and clearly labeled structures...
...The answer was to shift from categories of persons to categories of needs...
...In practice, the government's unwillingness to compete with private enterprise has functioned as the greatest restraint in flourishing periods that were close to full employment...
...These programs, rather, were initiated in response to the demands and moral suasion of the civil rights movement and to the threats of unrest and disorder in the nation's cities...
...The more specific strategy, however, was to structure each program on a relatively narrow eligibility/ineligibility basis, justified by considerations of cost rather than need...
...Since these are the programs where one sees government money being spent, the public reaction to the charge 474 that the budget cuts were aimed disproportionately at them was that in hard times there is "no choice" but to have such cuts fall upon the poor...
...Nevertheless, the public is convinced that the program is extravagant...
...They responded to the national attention that was then focused on the fact that the poor were hungry, without medical care, and ill-housed...
...To a great extent, they were also viewed as programs for black people...
...Witness the strong impression that the "truly needy" are a definable group...
...First, since program benefits are perceived as more than adequate there is, of course, little support for program expansion, and a general assumption that benefits could well be reduced without causing harm...
...In this framework, some of the preliminary cuts of the Carter years can be viewed as a "testing of the water"—so now the Reagan administration can be bolder...
...The welfare structure has many objective functions that were never mandated by the millions of Americans who are not personally involved in its shaping or operation...
...In each case, rather than confront the significance of the presence of millions of poor persons who did not fit into the categories designated by the earlier programs, the response was to provide categories of benefits, labeling the poor person as a Food Stamp recipient, Medicaid recipient, Public Housing recipient...
...Having exhausted the obvious categories of poor persons and nevertheless finding poverty pervasive, how could the welfare system be expanded without risking additional subversion 471 of work norms...
...This absence of commonality has generated a set of attitudes that have undermined program support...
...Public reactions to the first round of Reagan budget cuts need to be recognized and analyzed as more than mere deference to a new president elected with "a mandate...
...The problem is, however, that there is no sharp division between this category and that of persons who could work under some circumstances...
...Now that the threat seems minimal, the government takes another look, finds benefits higher than they need be, and the tinkering begins...
...The public, of course, is not a monolith with a single mind but a sum of individuals and interest groups, and any generalization of "public attitudes" must fail to account for those who do not share the majority's view...
...The move toward workfare needs to be recognized as a particularly unpleasant way of maximizing the visibility of program recipients...
...PEOPLE'S PERCEPTIONS of how the nation should deal with poverty depend to some extent on whether they think it likely that they themselves may some day be poor...
...Similarly, the denial of benefits to the working poor does not assist low-wage employers, since benefits function as a supplement to the low wage rather than as an alternative to it...
...Because these categories cannot be sharply delineated, it is feared that persons capable of working may be drawing benefits approaching social adequacy...
...The perception of multiplicity is generated because people have many kinds of needs, and the attempt to respond to them without creating entitlements and without providing adequate benefits for the employable has led to a crazy quilt...
...Certainly, it is inefficient to 472 provide benefits to millions of persons who do not need them...
...Our existing structure has made a half-hearted attempt to distinguish, and in some measure provide for, the clearest members of the "unable to work" category— and it makes all others rely on low benefits...
...Then a WIC (supplemental nutrition program for women, infants, and children) is established...
...The high visibility of receipt of these benefits led to the belief that the government programs were uniquely preferential...
...Only the continuous experience demonstrates its systemic nature...
...The sudden expansion of the unemployment rate to a level in excess of 20 percent demonstrated that broad economic forces were determining destinies...
...And surely, even the tax loss that follows just one deductible business lunch will often amount to more than the entire monthly Food Stamp allotment for many a household...
...thus a school breakfast program is established...
...Poverty has ceased to be a threat for much of the population, and over time the willingness to pay for programs one will never need oneself will decline...
...The multiplicity is retained, the limited areas in which the programs helped people find employment are further diminished, and the gap between public perception and reality is further increased...
...Hence public commitment to programs designed only for the poor thins out...
...Second, the myth intensifies a process of invidious comparison between recipients and nonrecipients...
...Social Security can be dramatically contrasted with Food Stamps...
...One fundamental difference between the programs adopted at the time of the Social Security Act and the more recent ones is that the latter have fewer artificial barriers to eligibility...
...The most common reaction of the first-time recipient is that the treatment he is receiving is a mistake or caused by a 469 misunderstanding...
...In retrospect, the most striking features of the structure were its simultaneous concession of the economy's inability to generate incomes, and its patently limited response...
...It no longer matters whether or not that woman exists...
...Social Security is the classic example of a welfare program that was structured to avoid the narrow eligibility/ineligibility distinction and establish commonality among a broad base of Americans...
...They all are set apart from those who don't receive these benefits...
...The preference for workfare should be understood as a means of labeling public-assistance recipients and parading the objects of our charity before us...
...Yet, other than instituting welfare badges, it would be hard to come up with a labeling device that could more clearly set recipients apart and would make them more visible than the Food Stamp program...
...THE COLLAPSE OF CONSENSUS around the welfare structure has been a predictable result of the shape of the structure...
...Thus it is important to analyze how and why the program has lost popular support...
...The changes in consideration of income from employment are not the only ones in AFDC...
...AFDC began as the Aid to Dependent Children portion of the Social Security Act...
...In light of the presumption that the middle class's submersion in unemployment and economic disaster was a temporary phenomenon, the programmatic response was to establish one program—Unemployment Compensation—for the frictionally unemployed, and otherwise to focus relief programs on categories with no likely relation to the labor force...
...The notion that there really are no fixed categories has never figured in the public debate...
...It reflects the notion that you cannot give things away because, if you do, people will take advantage of you...
...The basic structure that has generated resentment remains in place, in a form 477 that will continue to generate resentment...
...How did this perception come about...
...Hence the earlier programs retain support, and the later ones are vulnerable...
...Most middle-income and surely lower-income Americans are constantly made aware of a range of goods and services they desire but can't afford...
...In periods of sustained recession, when the connection between the poor and the labor market is most tenuous, the government has been less adverse to provisions of countercyclical employment...
...The public's notion of a welfare-inflation link is hardly well-grounded...
...Indeed, significant numbers of Americans and among them many liberals responded, with little more than a mixture of regret and fatalism, that, while unfortunate, these cutbacks in social welfare spending were a necessary part of a "plan" to revitalize the economy...
...The myth of generosity may be based on little more than people's tendency to feel that "the grass is greener . ," that something they can't have must be good—and on a deep-felt American belief that the government is benevolent, sometimes absurdly so...
...With any degree of choice, we would not have structured them in their current fashion in the first place...
...This perception of a multiplicity of welfare programs also rein475 forces the myths of public generosity and of the recipients' uniqueness...
...the result is likely to be an intensification of all the problems that stem from the absence of commonality in program structures...
...Each of these aspects of the welfare structure tended to produce a set of attitudes that now have resulted in the public renunciation of income supports...
...Many Americans did not consider this an unreasonable percentage, because they generally assume that the federal government's primary activities are in the areas of defense and the provision of benefits to the poor...
...Traditionally, it has been the role of the left to question whether an adequate welfare program could ever be developed and maintained within the American economic system...
...This was a further choice made by those who developed the details of the programs —a choice the public is usually unaware of and on which it is unlikely to have a strong opinion...
...The point is that the program began by evoking the picture of a malnourished child, and now conjures up the picture of a person who is doing very well, probably has things you don't have...
...for the notion that employment and income derived solely from talent and a willingness to work was then put under enormous stress...
...The reality is quite different...
...As the public attitudes toward the budget cuts crystallized, one aspect stood out...
...Approximately 70 percent of the first-year Reagan cuts were directed at programs providing benefits to the low-income community...
...The person in the store presumes the Food Stamp recipient is doing wrong...
...Prior to the Depression, the limited programs that existed functioned on state and local levels, with minimal funding and coverage...
...The Reagan reorganization is in fact an attempt to drive a permanent wedge between the working and the nonworking poor...
...and by the constant anxiety that, at any point, one may be charged with welfare fraud...
...In response to increasingly wide and radical demands for an income-support structure, the federal government provided the Social Security Act of 1935...
...The specific manner of its reductions and reorganizations appears to be designed to intensify all these attitudes...
...And necessarily, for most, there must be a trade-off between food purchases and other expenditures...
...Give them Food Stamps...
...These categorical needs programs were never seen nor sold as programs designed for all citizens...
...In the AFDC and Food Stamp programs, perhaps the most significant long-run change for continuing recipients will be the incorporation of "workfare" options and requirements...
...Because the program offered the sole income support for many poor families, it grew instead of withering away...
...Yet, objectively, the existing structure has been highly functional...
...We soon shall find such benefits as price supports, acreage allotments, low-interest loans, tax breaks and loopholes, and government purchases—all subsidizing the incomes of a wide range of economic actors, including large corporations and some of the truly wealthy...
...Indeed, programs providing categories of need—without any connection to employment —are inherently static...
...Because of these claims of commonality, persons in objectively different circumstances perceived common interests...
...The implication is that welfare strategy must focus primarily on entitlement to employment...
...Part of the distinction may stem from the fact that the person who steals bread takes it from the baker or store owner, and the one who steals Food Stamps takes them from us...
...When the economy stalled and stopped growing, these programs were a readily identifiable portion of government spending that offered no reasonable prospect of material benefit to the nonpoor...
...Third, when the word-association game does not evoke the woman-with-steak picture, it elicits the word "fraud...
...They bear the seeds of ever-growing unpopularity...
...In the context of an increasingly rigidified class structure, the likelihood that an individual who was not born in poverty will become truly poor has diminished...
...So long as Americans trusted in the Invisible Hand, it seemed natural and appropriate that welfare efforts should be localized, addressing the specific failures of specific individuals...
...It was intended as a means of providing federal assistance to states for the funding of mothers' pensions, so that children would not have to be taken away from their mother when a male wage-earner died and left the household without a source of support...
...This distinction between the structure's objective effects and the popular mandate is important: the public never demanded either the program's specific details or the details of its cutbacks...
...And finally the recipient, required to "report all changes in circumstances" within ten days, often without any idea of what changes one is supposed to report, tends to presume it as well...
...This later set of income-support programs, founded in the days of the Great Society and thereafter—rather than the Social Security complex—have particularly felt the Reagan onslaught...
...The choice to respond to categories of needs rather than formulate an employment strategy also generated the widespread conviction that programs "don't accomplish anything...
...The effect of this multiplicity of programs leads to a perception of a welfare state with cradle-to-grave protection—and with countless programs for the poor...
...Besides, there is that consistent tendency to overestimate the percentage of the federal budget allotted to goods and services for the poor...
...As David Stockman belatedly admitted, it was apparent to the Reagan planners that in order to lower tax rates for the wealthy, it was necessary to make it appear that the program was in everybody's interest...
...So far, the process of determining the lowest subsistence level that can prevent disorder is not a science but guesswork...
...therefore those who claim still to be hungry must be doing something wrong...
...Even if the Administration was totally committed to a balanced budget, there was a multitude of alternative reductions, taxation rates and loopholes that might have yielded at least the same results...
...An Absence of Commonality THE ABSENCE of a credible poverty threat for much of the society made it simpler to structure the Great Society and post-Great Society programs in a manner that limited their availability to a distinctly targeted sector of the population rather than to the society as a whole...
...At that moment, the essential base of Social Security, Unemployment Compensation, Aid to Dependent Children, and federal assistance to the blind and to the elderly all at once came into existence...
...Their reduction seems both possible and sensible, and doing no social harm...
...Two points need to be made...
...The benefit levels insure that whenever a minimum-wage job is available as an alternative or supplement, the recipient will opt for it...
...Yet it is hard to conceive of this choice as mandated by the public...
...More recently a great deal of, but unsuccessful, litigation was directed at efforts to draw meaningful entitlements out of the CETA legislation...
...Most Americans, however, do not normally talk of welfare as a means of curbing disorder, nor have they a clear sense of the structure and needs of the secondary labor market...
...The designers of the Great Society programs rejected the entitlement-to-employment option...
...And at no time in America has countercyclical employment been viewed as an entitlement...
...Here as elsewhere, the absence of commonality tends to generate a myth of public generosity, and this has led to a set of perverse effects...
...This was by no means inevitable but done by choice...
...The short-term problem concerns the question of how one defends admittedly defective programs, with full knowledge of their defects, when the only alternative is to allow them to collapse...
...A subsistence level of benefits insures that those who cannot find employment are able to avoid a highly visible desperation that would embarrass the society...
...As originally structured, AFDC was expected to be small, and to terminate as more and more households were covered by Social Security...
...That picture, however, will change as soon as we make even the most casual survey of support programs for the nonpoor...
...It is not puzzling that program participation did not decline...
...The programs are necessarily defective...
...They chose the latter route...
...In both programs, tightened rules relating to strikers and new requirements of retrospective budgeting will make it more difficult for persons temporarily out of work to receive assistance...
...yet this documentation carried remarkably little weight...
...In some instances, the results were unexpected increases in program participation...
...Their attitudes were best captured and played upon in Reagan's addresses to the nation: benefits to "the truly needy" should be maintained—but the existing system "has gone much further," and could and should be cut back...
...Making Beneficiaries Visible THE FACT that these support programs were structured without an attempt to engage the citizenry's sense of commonality did not necessarily have to lead to their recipients' high visibility...
...As members of the Reagan administration now eagerly acknowledge, there never was a clear link between the size of the federal deficit and the rate of inflation—and so the welfare structure surely was not the key factor...
...Give them Medicaid...
...It is hard to claim that the public has willed the structure to exist in this form or to operate as it does, but its functionality is apparent...
...The dehumanizing bureaucratic structure serves as a constant warning to any person that welfare is no alternative to working...
...They saw their basic choice between an attempt to provide income directly to employable people through government employment—or a design of categories of need, along with a set of punitive sanctions for the employable...
...This is a special case, as the transformation of AFDC over the past 45 years has resulted in a program that bears little resemblance to its original form, to which the Reagan administration apparently aims to restore the program...
...it would create conditions of labor security that might lead to union demands inconceivable so long as unemployment is a constant specter...
...second, government is fearful of a condition of full employment...
...Indeed, the word "myth" is most applicable here...
...One explanation for this response is that the notion had taken hold, by the time Reagan took office, that the federal budget was inflation's primary cause— and its social welfare portion the real culprit...
...The belief that the numbers of those seeking assistance consisted of a few unfortunates and an undetermined number of shiftless persons was rebutted by daily experience...
...by a general waiver of the right to privacy...
...In contrast, Food Stamp recipients must carry their stamps to the market every time they need food...
...When a poor person steals bread to feed the 473 family, people often feel great sympathy...
...The Reagan revisions of AFDC now make it impossible for many working but poor households to retain eligibility...
...This maintains the perception of program multiplicity and holds programs, apparently, in their static form...
...If everyone else in the society believes benefits are adequate, why can't I get by...
...Reductions of expenditures are achieved by redefining what constitutes a poor person...
...As the point that the concept of a welfare-inflation linkage is flawed is no secret, it is hard to believe that the public truly accepted that the cuts were unavoidable and that there was "no choice...
...These changes are compounded by reductions in social services, notably day care, and by alterations in the calculation of income in other programs too...
...The answer from the standpoint of the national leadership would be very different than that of the public...
...They were clearly structured and recognized as being for "the poor...
...It also reflects the notion that "these people" don't want to work—they just want to live off the government...
...The best recent example is the Kemp-Roth "Trojan Horse...
...In order to gain an understanding of how this public acquiescence and the events of the past year came about, it is 468 crucial to explore other aspects of the popular reaction...
...Future Directions IN ITS REORGANIZATION of the federal poverty budget, the Reagan administration is able to exploit the public attitudes I have described...
...Yet all these programs are virtually invisible to the general public, and none operate in a manner that will remind people every time they go to the store, restaurant, or bank that we are giving things away to these recipients...
...The workfare component also plays a vital role in making the programs as undesirable as possible at the time they cease being available to the working poor, and persons are presumably forced to choose between work and welfare...
...Rather, at certain historic moments, concerned social movements have conveyed a general demand or idea, which then was defined, put into practice, and shaped into a specific structure, without much public scrutiny...
...Even after the strategy of responding to needs was established, some broader notion of entitlement might yet have been developed, in which a complex of goods and services could have been seen as the fundamental right of all members of the society...
...Entitlement to employment would increase the cost of labor for low-wage employers...
...Benefits are so low that pregnant women receiving Food Stamps are at risk during pregnancy...
...by a constant fear that assistance may be terminated because of a case worker's whim...
...We shall find a similarly limited response, but in a dramatically different context, as we consider the Great Society and post-Great Society income/ in-kind programs...
...Nevertheless, our discussion proceeds from the hypothesis that so many attitudes and perceptions about welfare cut across class, race, and regional divisions that it is justified to discuss and evaluate them as a whole...
...Thus the long-range goal seems to be retrenchment of AFDC to its original, marginal, mothers' pension status...
...even in the present recession, the Reagan administration prefers to test its hypothesis that large reductions in welfare eligibility will make people find jobs...
...Were they unable to afford medical care...
...Mounting Problems in the Welfare State With "A Breakdown of Consensus: Mounting Problems in the Welfare State," Mark Greenberg has won the First Essay Contest for Young Writers sponsored by the Foundation for the Study of Independent Social Ideas...
...Because the current "social disorder quotient" seems low, this can be done, the Reagan people believe, without the risks it might earlier have entailed...
...The long absence of 470 federal income supports can in part be explained by the fact that until the Great Depression it was possible for most Americans to believe in the Invisible Hand theory, wherein work, merit, and reward are highly correlated...
...But, in greater part, the problem is conceptual: there is a large gray area in which it is impossible to determine a person's category...
...Expand public housing dramatically, and establish a range of rentsubsidy programs...
...Our dilemma is clear...
...The Social Security Act was the first federal effort at income support...
...This frustration, of course, is felt most intensely by low-income near-eligible persons...
...Thus, still, the carving-out of these appropriate categories contained an implicit ratification of the Invisible Hand theory...
...But all this is not automatic...
...Employment may ebb and flow in the secondary labor market, but the nature of that labor market insures that over time a participant's lot does not improve...
...Again, there is the contrast with Social Security...
...The result was a set of programs and program recipients with which nonrecipients did not identify...
...So far, the Reagan planners have avoided attacking either the base of Social Security or the related programs—with one exception...
...The establishment of a benefits program with a narrow eligibility/ineligibility distinction leads to a persistent public perception that the program is fully adequate for its recipients...
...In a word association game, when one says "Food Stamps," the standard response has become "woman with a full shopping cart buying steak...
...Rather than acknowledge that economic crises create poverty, the structure laid down that there were distinct categories of persons who needed assistance...
...From the standpoint of the economy, the programs represented a necessary measure, no more...
...The Perception/Reality Gap LET US LOOK, first, at some of the gaps between the welfare structure's actual functions and the public's perceptions of them...
...Studies conducted in sample projects have repeatedly demonstrated that workfare components in public assistance programs are not cost-effective, do not lead to employment or training, and only succeed in reducing program participation by increasing the demeaning nature of the public assistance experience...
...Medicaid recipients receiving health care still cannot heat their apartments...
...the Department of Agriculture has estimated that only 10 percent of the recipients attain the daily requirements of essential nutrition...
...The essential difference is that the former established a structure responsive to a broad range of social concerns, and the latter merely "gave things" to the poor...
...At the same time, out of the whole range of goods, services, and subsidies provided by the government, the only ones handed out so visibly are those received by the poor...
...Again, the nutrition example is illuminating...
...The provision of food or housing this month plays an important role in the family's subsistence but has little effect on its long-term prospects...
...Because they are not money, they still leave their recipients needing jobs...
...First, it is absolutely crucial, even when providing critical support, always to emphasize how the existing structure reflects stop-gap attempts to deal with particularistic problems of poverty while not dealing with the ways the economy generates and perpetuates poverty...
...Let us emphasize the inadequacy of the stop-gap response, and the reasons why it is inadequate...
...Therefore, some in the Reagan camp would argue, in times when the threat of unrest and disorder loomed large, the government may have erred and provided "excessive" benefits...
...In the case of Food Stamps, allotments are actually predicated on a computer-generated diet for a family of nutritionists...
...This high visibility reinforces the myth of public generosity, and generates an image of the recipients' uniqueness...
...The following pages will suggest that the development of the public perception was, to a great extent, predictable...
...Workfare is a parody of employment and training...
...Medicaid recipients must carry their card...
...The New Deal employment programs, for example, all were defined as temporary, without hope of permanency...
...The specific changes in AFDC eligibility are complemented by reductions in earnedincome deductions and the imposition of a gross-income cap in the Food Stamp program...
...Again, the point is not whether this response is rational but that it happens, flows from the structure of the program, is a predictable result of that structure...
...This partly is a corollary of the myths of public generosity and of the poor's uniqueness...
...The economy's collapse made these beliefs untenable...
...As the changes become implemented, the number of households with an employed member who are able to receive assistance will steadily decline...
...They decided against significant forays into government employment for two reasons: first, government does not wish to compete with private enterprise...
...The decision to develop such programs rather than pursue an employment strategy has had two distinct results: a perception of program multiplicity, and a perception that programs "aren't accomplishing anything...
...The Social Security programs demonstrate the manner in which the political structure could acknowledge the economy's inability to generate employment while simultaneously denying the full implications of the insight...
...Just as the Social Security Act had gone no further than necessary in responding to the demands of its time, so too the Great Society and post-Great Society categorical needs programs...
...Despite the patent irrationalities and inequities of its funding and benefit structure, Social Security's commonality component makes it untouchable...
...But the more important part of the distinction is the objectification that flows from the generosity myth: Food Stamps "deal with" hunger...
...Again, it no longer matters whether or how much fraud exists, because the myth reflects a deeper social implication...
...Finally, it is significant that so far Reagan's emphasis has been on program reduction and reorganization rather than on program elimination...
...THREE INSIDIOUS CONSEQUENCES flow from the myth of generosity...
...So, when one is shopping and making hard choices, it is a constant point of irritation that the Food Stamp recipient ahead in the line has free money to spend...
...The costs for many of its programs that were to be slashed had been minimal in terms of the total budget...
...This emerging consensus creates a short-term problem and suggests a long-term one...
...If one wants a program to succeed, one establishes commonality between persons who may be in dramatically different circumstances, and one finds ways to avoid narrow distinctions...
...by programmatically asserting that there were exceptions, the structure reaffirmed the old rule...
...As the new structure began to operate and take form, it reshaped the public attitude toward the original idea...
...Is all this assistance really necessary...
...Significantly, when announcing his attack on other income-support programs, Reagan wisely chose to lead off with the assurance that Social Security would remain unaffected...
...Other changes restrict eligibility of households with employed stepparents, redefine assets, restrict eligibility when a recipient receives any other income, and more...
...Rather than attempting to respond to this problem, the Great Society and post-Great Society incomeinkind programs were structured in a manner that made sharp distinctions between recipients and nonrecipients...
...The theme apparent in the AFDC revisions, and in the other Reagan welfare alterations, is the elimination of assistance for the working poor...
Vol. 29 • September 1982 • No. 4
