A Workable Family Policy

...The Democrats need a family policy...

...Millions of single mothers do currently support themselves and their children, something that would have been WINTER • 1988 • 91 impossible in the 1930s...

...These programs together constitute a "family policy" that would be sensible, progressive, and well within our means...

...The welfare replacement program might save government money...

...To these liberals, welfare is a partial compensation for the failure of our economic and social policies to reduce unemployment among men, particularly black men...

...All children with an absent parent are entitled to a payment from the state equal to what that parent had paid or to a guaranteed minimum, whichever is higher...

...But there would be a gain in independence and respectability, even for low-earning single mothers...

...Until these men can be enabled to bring home a "family wage" on a reliable basis, so as to support their children themselves, these liberals believe that generosity in welfare benefits is simply the only humane alternative...

...Politically, such a program presents a realistic and constructive contrast to the right-wing obsessions with abortion and school prayer...

...That so many mothers have chosen to take employment undermines the assumption that husbandless mothers can and should choose to devote themselves full-time to motherhood and homemaking, at public expense...

...The classic liberal position on welfare and work for single mothers is neither wise nor politically feasible any longer...

...The unifying theme of a liberal family policy should be the need for governmental action to accommodate the new conditions these developments have created...

...The entry of large numbers of women into the work force, the high incidence of divorce and out-of-wedlock births will not be reversed in the near future...

...2. Should the taxpayers shoulder the whole cost of child care, or should parents be asked to pay some or all of the cost...

...However, it has failed to provide a line of high-quality "brand name" child care facilities operating reliably at a price that parents in moderate circumstances are able to pay...

...Quality Care for our Children The key ideas in a campaign to further the public provision of child care are availability, reliability, quality, affordability...

...Any barriers to good jobs for them—lack of training, sex discrimination, race discrimination—need to be attacked...

...Their sitter had been letting them play in the street, and worse, she was taking them on unscheduled trips...

...Because of their particularly vulnerable state, they also need access to a relatively generous system of unemployment insurance...

...Once women and children could count on men to share their earnings on a lifelong basis...

...In Western Europe, Sweden and France have done the most...

...Under current conditions most welfare clients have access only to jobs with wages that are not high enough to keep them and their children out of poverty...

...A system to replace welfare and keep single-parent families out of poverty would include the following elements: 1. For single mothers to live at a decent standard, much of their income will have to come from their own earnings—there is simply no other way...

...The growth of jobs is not perfectly synchronized with the growth of the labor force, and there are periods of economic ill health when the growth of jobs ceases...

...France has a large and popular system of public centers that provide high-quality, culturally enriching child care, largely at public expense...

...Here I would argue that the best approach would be to provide public facilities, since the major problem is assurance of quality and reliability...

...Single mothers and their children have the highest incidence of poverty of all groups, and their problems appear the most intractable...

...Issues that we would have to resolve if we got serious about government involvement with child care would be: 1. Should government provide vouchers that parents could use to pay the fees of private child care facilities, or should it provide child care facilities under public management...

...One might as well say that no new young people should be allowed to come into the labor force until new jobs have been earmarked for them...

...Child care is a major part of the problem...

...Most important, it would put a floor under quality...

...Other countries are far ahead of us in providing government funds to finance and organize the care of preschool children...

...Some of the functions that the traditional family previously served are no longer provided for large parts of the population...

...Millions of married mothers are employed as well...

...Each day after dropping off her two preschool children at the baby sitter's, the thirty-four-yearold consumer research manager for Procter & Gamble went to work with a knot in her stomach...

...But on balance this package of programs would increase expenditure...

...Low unemployment rates and healthy economic growth are desirable for this and for many other reasons as well...

...3. In the minority of cases where fathers cannot provide substantial support payments, government child support grants should substitute...

...Free public child care could not be justified solely or mainly on the ground that it reduced welfare costs...

...After the under-the-rug approach of the Reagan years, well-conceived, activist remedies can be made politically popular...

...If more mothers entered the labor force as a result of the program, or if day care costs were significantly greater than conventional school costs, the budget would have to be correspondingly larger...

...However, the idea that we cannot reform welfare until we have a special guarantee that jobs are available for welfare mothers is erroneous...

...An alternative would be fees paid by parents on a sliding scale, depending on income...

...To rescue single mothers from poverty and dependency, we should move to a childsupport system that could replace welfare...

...A somewhat liberalized version of unemployment insurance could be made available to single parents...

...Yet in most states benefit levels have never been high enough to keep a mother and her children at the poverty line or even close to it...

...Publicly funded and provided child care would particularly help women just entering the labor market and those women who become unemployed...

...These developments have been part of a movement toward greater independence for women that many welcome...

...The instability of child-care arrangements, and the inability of child-care providers to deal with sick children are a major cause of absenteeism in this country...

...The New York Times gave the following account of one parent's anguish: Last year was a nightmare for Carol Berning...

...We could do a great deal worse than copying the French system of providing centers paid for and run by the government: nurseries (creches) for infants, and preschools emphasizing music, art, social skills (ecoles maternelles) for children in the two-and-a-half- to six-yearold age group...

...Publicly financed school expenditures for WINTER • 1988 • 89 grades one through twelve currently run about $125 billion annually...

...A governmental child care program would have considerable budgetary costs, as might a substantial jobs program...

...If most single parents were white men, good jobs would be open to them, and almost all of them would already be self-supporting and above the poverty line...

...Apolicy package that promised governmentsponsored child care, lower welfare budgets, greater independence of single mothers, and lowered poverty levels should be saleable to the American people...

...More constructive versions of the work solution involve putting pressure on welfare recipients to take training and look for jobs...

...We will not reduce it in the foreseeable future by preaching "good behavior...

...Effective programs, including training, job creation and affirmative action, are needed to get single mothers into relatively well-paying jobs, which few of them now hold...

...Child-support reform can be sold as a way to make parents responsible for their own children and to get as many people off welfare as possible...

...2. Payments to single mothers should be for the purpose of helping them with the expenses for their child or children...

...In the United States, private enterprise in the child care field has expanded the number of places...

...Single motherhood is not a passing phenomenon...

...Free or below-cost care for the children of the entire population would have to be justified by a concern for the quality of child care, to save parents from having to depend on trouble-prone private child care, and as a way to assist parents with the trouble and expenses of bringing up children...

...So we need again to think about long-term solutions and a set of policies that would allow single mothers to live in the mainstream of American life...

...There is a sense, however, in which the unemployment problem of single parents is more acute than that of other people...

...The availability of child care would encourage them to make a first step toward self-support...

...Even if they could be enacted and enforced, laws mandating prayer in the schools and a ban on abortion could do little if anything to bring back the traditional family structure as the dominant form...

...Berning's workday...

...After a suitable trial, we should consider the nationwide adoption of the Wisconsin system, or one like it...

...Since absenteeism reduces productivity and competitiveness, some members of the business community would be likely to support government-provided child care...

...Extending publicly run out-of-the-home care for an additional five years to the 65 percent of children who have employed mothers, under the assumption that per-child costs in schools and day care centers would be roughly equal, might increase our national expenditures for public education by about 25 percent, or about $30 billion...

...It would allow them to hunt for jobs more easily...

...Forcing a mother to abandon the full-time care of her children because she was poor and lacked a man's support would have been considered cruel...

...The second step would be an explanation of where the money is to come from, whether new taxes or cuts in the defense budget, the farm program, shipbuilding subsidies, or the many other programs not worth their cost to the taxpayers...

...Those who argue in this way seem to be implying that most of the welfare mothers would be unable to get jobs, or would be displacing others, and so reforming welfare would simply increase the number of unemployed people by four million...

...Jobs for Single Parents The welfare system was set up in a period when mothers were not expected to take paid jobs...

...Then, unexpectedly, the sitter resigned and the chore of finding a replacement was soon absorbing much of Mrs...

...The result of the child care problem is low-quality, unreliable care that puts children at risk and forces absenteeism on working parents...

...Public provision of child care would simplify the lives of employed mothers...

...In the United States about one quarter of families with children are currently maintained by women who do not have husbands living with them, up from 7 percent in 1960...

...Some old-fashioned liberals, many of whom are attached to the idea that women ought to be home with their children, favor more generous payments in the form of conventional welfare benefits...

...The more punitively inclined conservatives suggest workhouselike arrangements to "make welfare recipients work off their benefits...

...Even middle-class parents have a hard time arranging for care they trust, and any arrangements they make are likely to come undone...

...The part of the guarantee paid by the state, like the payment made by the absent parent, would not be lost if the custodial parent earns a wage...

...Adequate child support, plus their earnings, supplemented by unemployment insurance, would keep a high percentage of single parents out of poverty...

...In the decade of the 1970s, the labor force grew by 23 million, of whom 13 million were women, and the number of jobs grew about proportionately...

...We also have to watch out that programs don't unduly enrich a particular segment of the population, as Medicaid and Medicare have done for providers of medical services...

...They can afford to do so, in a considerable percentage of the cases...

...The absent fathers of the children who can afford to make such payments should be the first source for such payments, whether the children were born in wedlock or not...

...Recently, would-be welfare reformers have looked to work for single mothers as the solution to the welfare problem...

...The social agenda we actively campaign for and try to enact into law should consist of just a few programs of exceptional promise that we 88 • DISSENT have good reason to believe will be helpful and cost-effective...

...Thus, unlike welfare, child support payments would not deter employment...

...There are three programs that deserve to be given priority—a quality child care program, the replacement of welfare by a system of guaranteed payments for children's expenses, and a program of helping single parents to get good jobs...

...We don't have to accept the right-wing assumption that government programs are inevitably poorly designed, but there is an obligation to avoid programs that are shots in the dark, that have obvious major flaws, that are mostly pork barrel...

...Replacing the Welfare System The current system for helping single parents, whose number is rapidly growing, needs replacement rather than reform...

...4. Support payments to single mothers to help with the expenses for their children, whether by fathers or by the government, 90 • DISSENT should not be withdrawn or be substantially reduced—as occurs with welfare—when the mother earns some money...

...Increasing government help to all poor people (for example, by a substantial negative income tax) would be much more expensive than child-support reform, and much harder to sell politically...

...For these reasons a program of improving child-support collection (including a governmentguaranteed minimum) is the best first step toward a new antipoverty program...

...Dependable child care at government-funded centers would reduce absenteeism among parents...

...The preschool might be a good place to inculcate "values" —that a good American child, like a good Annapolis cadet, does not lie, cheat or steal...

...Now men cannot be reliably depended upon to serve that function...

...August 4, 1985...

...On our back burners, we should have a great many small-scale governmentsupported experiments, to look for solutions to the problems we don't yet know how to deal with...

...Once every family had reliable built-in live-in child care...

...Of course, it is one thing to declare that action is called for, and another to design a good program and sell it politically...

...The unifying idea of the right is a desire to slow down and if possible reverse the move to new roles for women and the resultant changes in the family...

...Now, however, the full-time mother is the exception rather than the rule...

...The consequences of a spell of unemployment are more severe for a single parent than for a spouse in a two-earner couple, or for a single 92 • DISSENT person with no child to support...

...But over the longer term labor force and employment grow at roughly the same rate...

...Making a new and improved child-support system the centerpiece of welfare reform would do nothing to improve the situation of those two-parent families or other people who are in poverty...

...Child-support reform increases the proportion of poor people who have an incentive to get a job...

...I would argue for complete assumption of costs by the public purse, precisely on quality grounds: no parent should be tempted to go below the standard of publicly available care for monetary reasons...

...Like the regular unemployment insurance, it would be limited in duration, but would be available to single parents just entering the labor market...

...Prior to the 1970s it might have been argued persuasively that being home with her children was the normal place for a caring mother...

...Now a high proportion of parents are at their wits' end to find reliable child care at a price that will allow them to maintain a standard of living they consider reasonable...

...These are problems that the public knows and cares about...

...5. Single mothers and their children need a guarantee of high-quality child care and high-quality health care...

...When the suggestion is made that single mothers now on welfare (about four million people) would be better off in jobs, the objection is sometimes raised that jobs do not exist for them...

...But that doesn't mean that it is not worth doing...

...The welfare system traps millions of women and children in poverty and is almost universally acknowledged to be a failure...

...The State of Wisconsin is currently experimenting with a system in which each absent parent pays to the state as a "child support tax" a share of his or her gross income: 17 percent for one child, 25 percent for two, 29 percent for three, 31 percent for four, 34 percent for five or more...

...She] found herself staring at her youngsters' pictures and worrying...

...Of all black families with children in 1984, 56 percent were maintained by women...

...The tax is automatically withheld from pay...

...WINTER • 1988 • 93...

...a negative income tax that could be collected by any poor person would reduce work incentives for large numbers...

...A new administration should work to break the hold of that rationale...

...As new supplies of labor become available, the economy adapts, and the number of jobs grows...

...Freely available child care would also permit many unskilled women, who could expect only a low wage, to avoid welfare...

...The French, who have a per capita income somewhat less than ours but a somewhat lower birth rate, are apparently willing to finance these facilities for the most part through the public purse...

...There are millions of Carol Bernings having that "nightmare...

...The children of single mothers are an increasing percentage of all of our children...

...The big budget deficits of the Reagan years (which the "supply-siders" assured us would not occur) have been used as a rationale for refusing to consider programs that are costly...

...Millions of men have financially deserted the children they have sired...

...In actuality, of course, most of them are women and many of them are black or Hispanic, so that they suffer race and sex discrimination in employment...

...There is no reason to believe that the entry into the job market of single mothers coming off welfare would pose any problems of absorption not posed by the growth of the labor force from other sources...

...The result of the growth of single parenthood is poverty for an increasing proportion of women and children, and the growth of a nonearning population eking out a miserable existence on welfare...

...Another part is the welfare system and the whole question of single parenthood and what to do about it...

...By contrast, a negative income tax might double the number of people getting government poverty checks...

...So just getting them into jobs, desirable as that would be, is not nearly enough...

...This suggests that the unemployment insurance system ought to be more generous to single parents in terms of size and duration of benefits...

...The housewifelike position of the welfare mother no longer conforms to majority practice...

...Mickey Kaus in the New Republic has advocated abolishing welfare, but guaranteeing a job paying less than the minimum wage...

...Proposing good programs, worth the taxpayer money they would cost, is the first step...

...The increasing absence of fathers from the homes of their children occurs in all population groups, but is most evident among blacks...

...Welfare was supposed to give the mother who did not have a husband living with her (presumably a widow) the right to be a full-time homemaker—a pseudo-housewife, supported by the government rather than by a husband...

...The right already has one: outlaw abortion, inject religiosity into the public schools, ban textbooks that show females as carpenters and males vacuuming the family living room...

...This objection does not take into account that, historically, the labor force has grown continuously and that, except in unusual times, new entrants have been absorbed...

...But they have had negative consequences as well...

...Naturally, the absorption into the labor force of single mothers currently on welfare will be eased if economic policy can successfully keep unemployment rates low...

...Among whites, 17 percent of families with children were maintained by single mothers...

...Their access to better jobs should be increased, and their earnings supplemented with child-support payments...

...Their problems deserve a place on our national agenda, and policies designed to help them should be debated as part of the election campaign...

...This old-fashioned liberal view ignores the change in the economic position of women since the Great Depression...

...It would eliminate difficult, risky, time-consuming searches for places for their children, and allow them the luxury of carrying out their jobs in relative peace...