The War Against Welfare

...Welfare reform pressures temporarily subsided, while administrative reforms proceeded apace...

...Despite its somewhat 212 • DISSENT Ending Welfare Machiavellian overtones, this approach could more or less be justified as "antipoverty," if services supplemented, rather than substituted for, policies to reduce poverty through economic growth and, to an extent, through liberalized welfare eligibility...

...All were poor...

...Welfare is reasonably effective as an instrument for relieving the destitution of needy families...

...On the other hand, it is clear that if antipoverty Democrats are going to find a way out of the corner into which they have painted themselves, they need to recognize that it is not possible to build a program to fight poverty on the back of a program to fight welfare...

...The seventies marked a transitional period in the politics of welfare reform...

...From this historical legacy, welfare came to acquire the dubious distinction of being the one national program deemed successful only if it disappeared...

...If Democratic majorities in Congress had previously been able to constrain the antiwelfare efforts of Republicans in the White House, this time the Republican president was able to constrain the antipoverty efforts of congressional Democrats...

...Yet, by the end of the decade, welfare caseloads had not returned to their pre-1982 levels...

...SPRING • 1995 • 211 Ending Welfare However, two statutory provisions for direct cash assistance were made permanent...

...More likely, they will make things worse...

...It wasted no time in writing the poor out of its "contract" with the rest of America...

...It can neither create private-sector jobs nor assure that they provide health benefits and a living wage...

...Those hard-fought battles demonstrated that antipoverty Democrats were still a force to be reckoned with...

...In this context, antiwelfare reformers were able to move ahead with two strategies to restrict welfare's growth...

...Some analysts have professed amazement that the Nixon administration actually wanted to enact the dream of antipoverty warriors to secure a right to a minimum income...

...Although the Clinton administration did not create public hostility toward welfare, it did seek to capture political advantage from it by appealing to antiwelfare sentiment as a means of luring disgruntled working- and middle-class voters into the "new Democratic" coalition...

...Thus, the House Ways and Means Committee supported Kennedy's welfare reform because it "places emphasis on the provision of services rather than depending on welfare checks...

...The effectiveness of means-tested programs in raising families out of poverty dropped by 29 percent between 1979 and 1991...

...The tactical benefits of this approach were fully appreciated by sixties reformers...

...By workfare, I refer to a specific policy that requires welfare recipients to work off their benefits at or below minimum wage...

...The fact that welfare caseloads rose less rapidly than family poverty might have been taken to suggest that welfare reform had failed because poverty increased...

...However, despite the best intentions of past Democratic reformers, the budgetary and political "benefits" of attacking welfare (if they existed at all) were not readily transferable to efforts to attack poverty...

...This scenario is fraught with political dangers, especially for Democrats...

...The bill would . . . provide incentives to recipients . . . to improve their condition so as to render continued public assistance . . . unnecessary" (emphasis added...

...But, at this point, it is far from evident 218 • DISSENT ending Welfare that antiwelfare Republicans can be placated...

...In moving the party from its erstwhile position as protector of the poor to one ready to be "tough" on the poor, the administration helped lower political barriers to the ascendence of a much tougher "new Republican" coalition...

...Over time, the party of antipoverty warriors has evolved into a party of antiwelfare warriors...

...In order 214 • DISSENT Ending Welfare to "clean up the welfare mess," the administration inaugurated "quality control" reviews of welfare payments and threatened to impose fiscal penalties against states with unacceptable levels of payment errors...

...The Eighties The bold Reagan agenda of cutting government's social welfare role was presaged by a spate of popular literature that starkly blamed government programs for creating persistent poverty and the so-called underclass...

...In return for limited funding for services, liberal Democrats conceded any prospect of restoring the value of eroded benefits...

...q The 100 Day Revolution This continued, unremitted effort of the members of your Assembly I take to be one among the causes of the mischief they have done...

...But this time, not only Republicans, but mainstream Democrats were part of it...

...Before getting caught up in the raging debates about welfare reform, it might be useful to step back and consider what has brought us to this point and where we are headed...

...In a hint of things to come, he argued that the welfare system "should be scrapped and a totally new system implemented...

...What does this transformation suggest about the prospects for welfare initiatives today and, ultimately, for the nation's capacity to address poverty...

...Now both Democratic and Republican reformers make the case that "ending welfare" constitutes a strategy for "ending poverty...

...This proposal indicated that a dangerous new stage had been reached in the transformation of the Democratic agenda from one of fighting poverty to one of fighting welfare...

...However, the CEA also argued that breaking the "vicious circle" of poverty would require social services, such as education and training, to prepare poor adults to take advantage of the new opportunities that antipoverty policy presumably would open for them...

...By "meeting the numbers" for increasing "service provision," states were able to use the welfare amendments to capture new federal dollars to supplement tight state budgets...

...In other words, it was willing to concede the symbol of a guaranteed income so long as it could control how much there would be to pass around...

...Rising poverty coincided with the return of Democratic majorities in Congress and demands from governors for relief from state budgetary pressures...

...It shows, instead, that these are contradictory enterprises...

...In introducing his reform proposal, Clinton stressed: "This is not a conservative or a liberal idea...

...While antiwelfare sentiments grew more prominent, they did not fully displace antipoverty interests...

...Facing a divided Congress, it seemed politically advantageous to employ antiwelfare rhetoric to achieve antipoverty objectives...

...Much like the 1962 amendments, reform was predicated on the notion that a services strategy is an antipoverty strategy...

...They will reduce welfare's effectiveness in the one area in which it has demonstrated some success—mitigating poverty's worst effects...

...Recall that only six years ago, congressional Democrats claimed victory in reforming welfare by passing the Family Support Act of 1988, an act signed by Ronald Reagan...

...This disillusionment fuels a Republican politics of reaction and resentment that undermines the electoral prospects of Democrats across the nation, as the 1994 election so starkly demonstrated...

...They fully excused economic policy, discrimination, and declining social assistance from any responsibility for persistent and worsening poverty.* The administration's major welfare policy victory occurred in the earliest years of the Reagan presidency and without sparking a focused legislative debate...

...In effect, the Clinton plan promised to end welfare first and end poverty later...

...That idea clearly influenced the Heineman Commission of Income Maintenance Programs, which in 1969 recommended a minimum income guarantee as preferable to a work- or services-based strategy...

...If states were able to meet all the conditions required to receive their full share of federal funds, that would only provide them with an estimated $800 to $1,400 per participant for services...

...There our tactical decision was let's concentrate first on preparing people for jobs...

...However, the price paid for that strategy in 1988 was high...

...In recent years, it has become politically advantageous to promise to end welfare...

...It does create hardship...

...If ever a president had proposed a plan to "end welfare as we know it," Nixon did...

...In fact, welfare policy made a relatively small contribution to these developments...

...When reforms fail to accomplish what they promise, the reaction may create an environment that pushes future reforms even farther off target...

...Welfare is not an effective instrument for managing the economy...

...Its most notable feature, a guaranteed minimum income, reflected dissatisfaction with servicebased approaches to poverty and the ascendance of the idea of a negative income tax...

...The "services amendments" to AFDC, enacted in 1962, provided federal support to states for job training and intensive casework with welfare recipients and extended welfare eligibility to two-parent families...

...In the aftermath of reforms that reduced and restricted welfare, poverty increased and expanded...

...The final bill totaled $3.5 billion over five years and formulated services funding as a "capped entitlement...

...In 1950, with the full implementation of ADC by the states and the extension of benefits to adult caretakers of poor children, the number of recipients increased to slightly more than two million, a level that rose only modestly in the 1950s...

...But it also guaranteed that the extent of the "entitlement" would be subject to the legislative process...

...There are plenty of good ideas about how to tackle these problems, ideas spanning issues of national health care, community investment, housing allowances, school reform, and the EITC...

...Legacy of the New Deal Ironically, the transformation from antipoverty to antiwelfare politics is rooted, not only in contemporary electoral and economic conditions, but also in the historical legacy of the New Deal...

...Reform Redux The Family Support Act was enacted with much fanfare and predictable claims that work-based services would reduce welfare use...

...However, the history of welfare reform suggests that, at least tactically, this plan was not so different...

...By the time Congress turned off the spigot in 1967, it was unclear what in the way of real services had been provided...

...The national Democratic party also had an interest in sustaining the support of labor and big city political leaders...

...Responding to these interests, Kennedy administration officials initially had one big advantage over their counterparts today: they had a federal budget surplus that they could distribute across potentially opposed constituencies so that each could profit, to some extent, from the antipoverty effort...

...In 1987, the median state welfare benefit for a parent with two children totalled $4,248 per year, a figure 64 percent below the poverty line...

...It's different...

...The program Franklin Roosevelt offered the nation was built on the assumption that economic recovery would make cash relief largely unnecessary...

...Paradoxically, cutting families with workers out of welfare hurt not only them, but also the families who remained...

...Passage of the Family Support Act was hailed as a great victory by Democratic reformers, the first comprehensive legislative reform since the 1960s...

...Welfare was the problem, according to pundits such as George Gilder and Charles Murray...

...But it won't be easy...

...You know them but at a distance, on the statements of those who always flatter the reigning power, and who, amidst their representations and grievances, inflame your minds against those who are oppressed...

...But, in retrospect, it also revealed a critical weakness in their position...

...Initially, about one million children received benefits through ADC, a number that grew to only 1.4 million by the end of the 1940s...

...On the other hand, neither the Republican program of radical welfare cuts nor the administration program of smaller cuts and modest services will make things better...

...OBRA limited AFDC eligibility to the desperately poor—that is, to families with gross incomes no greater than 150 percent of state need standards (which more than half of the states set at a level lower than the poverty threshold...

...Into The Seventies Looking back at the early sixties, one is struck by the unusual opportunity for real antipoverty initiatives created by relatively stable welfare caseloads and federal budget surpluses...

...The essentials of that proposal were developed through the work of the National Governors Association (NGA) task force on welfare reform, headed by then-Governor Bill Clinton of Arkansas...

...In contrast to high visibility legislative reforms, administrative reforms indirectly and incrementally reduced the ability of poor families to claim welfare...

...Welfare policy exacerbated the hardships created by these shifts, limiting access to the most destitute, and then providing benefits insufficient to raise them even to the poverty line...

...Ironically, the transformation of welfare agencies from social service providers into claims processing bureaus—a transformation that seemed sensible in the late seventies and early eighties—later left state welfare agencies unprepared to implement the extensive workrelated services mandated by the Family Support Act of 1988...

...They proposed to "end welfare" by the simple expedient of eliminating income support as an entitlement and excluding any assistance for categories of poor families classified by marital status, immigration status, and the duration or recurrence of need...

...It is also part of a bidding war for the swing voters (mostly white, middle- and working-class) in national elections...

...In the process of legislative logrolling, Democrats reluctantly conceded workfare as the quid pro quo necessary to attain funds for their favored program of job-related services...

...In hopes of learning from history, I have searched previous episodes of welfare reform for clues to understanding the almost normalized sense of "crisis" and accompanying impulse to reform that have become hallmarks of contemporary welfare politics...

...Welfare did not disappear after the economy recovered and "normal" business cycles resumed, but neither did it grow very much...

...These reforms fueled a political backlash against welfare and widened the divide between those who have and those who don't...

...However, the campaign's decidedly antiwelfare approach to poverty was also the product of the electoral logic guiding the Clinton campaign's efforts to build a "new Democratic" coalition...

...FAP was a vehicle for responding to budget pressures by controlling welfare costs...

...Often, the same term is loosely used to include all types of workrelated policies, including those involving education and training services...

...The federal government's response to the crisis of the Great Depression did not contemplate the provision of direct relief on a permanent basis...

...However, a "residual" poverty rate of 17 percent and its concentration in declining regions like Appalachia and in growing urban centers suggested it might not wither away after all...

...In the midst of a deepening recession and labor market restructuring, one might have asked why more families were not being saved from poverty by welfare...

...From this vantage point, it appears that recurrent waves of welfare reformism may be better understood as responses to electoral and tactical issues facing politicians than as responses to the needs of the poor—less useful in drawing attention to poverty than in provoking hostility toward the poor and the government programs that benefit them...

...Liberal Democrats who had previously promoted reforms as a means to reduce welfare rolls found themselves largely without arguments to counter those who claimed to have the same end in mind...

...Among other things, "it was less expensive . . . than to create jobs for people...

...In the midst of all the uproar, it would be difficult to overstate the political dilemma confronting Democrats, inside and outside the administration, who want to find ways to address poverty...

...Using a combination of colorful anecdotes, speculation, and "creative" statistics, they painted a vivid —but false—portrait in which rising welfare benefits seemed to create and intensify social pathologies...

...The Republican majority swept into Congress last fall could be tougher because it was largely unfettered by labor, urban, and minority interests...

...By measuring and penalizing only excess payments, but ignoring underpayments and failure to pay eligible families, quality control encouraged states to adopt an array of administrative practices that restricted access to welfare...

...They also proposed that those savings be used to satisfy the traditional antipoverty side of the agenda, that is, to increase and equalize benefit levels...

...The Clinton pledge signaled a new stage in the "reinvention" of Democratic party politics, one that has profound implications, not only for the current Republican attack on welfare and other social programs, but, ultimately, for the nation's capacity to address poverty...

...This ambiguity is not without its political advantages, enabling an apparent consensus to form around "workfare," while sidestepping fundamental differences between workfare as a punishment and workfare as a social service...

...The Clinton administration and its allies have found themselves in the awkward position of criticizing Republican welfare reforms as "mean-spirited," while defending their own initiatives—initiatives that first launched and legitimated time limits, family caps, and state discretion to reduce or eliminate benefits to entire categories of the poor...

...In practice, states did not provide much in the way of new or worthwhile services to welfare recipients...

...As the General Accounting Office later reported, OBRA reduced welfare rolls by 493,000 families, initially saving the federal government $93 million per month, largely by increasing poverty, hunger, and health risks for low-income families...

...In the heyday of antipoverty policy-making, Democratic reformers promoted their program with the unrealistic promise that services would, on their own, reduce welfare...

...Another provision of the Social Security Act of 1935 established Aid to Dependent Children (ADC), creating a mechanism for supporting state relief efforts and, over time, for influencing the terms on which poor families would be eligible for relief...

...Drawing from an array of antipoverty and antiwelfare proposals, PBJI packaged together a negative income tax, work mandates, employment services, earned income tax credits and government provided jobs—all within a limited budget...

...There is more to this shift than mere rhetoric...

...Between the two lies a world of difference...

...The combined value of benefits from means-tested programs declined by 26.2 percent from 1979 to 1992...

...As in 1962, Democratic reformers promised that their strategy would save money by decreasing welfare use...

...For the great majority of families who turn to welfare for help, it provides a temporary lifeline to pull them through bad times...

...Recalling his campaign promise to reduce the "misery index" and buoyed by a substantial Democratic congressional majority, Jimmy Carter took on welfare reform early in his administration...

...More significant were tax changes that redistributed income from the poor and middleclass to the most affluent, economic recession that reduced the capacity of the economy to provide enough jobs for those who badly wanted them, and economic restructuring that cut the number of stable jobs with good wages...

...In the current electoral and budgetary context, even more than in the past, it may seem tactically necessary to placate antiwelfare sentiment by, as the administration proposed, packaging time limits and workfare with useful antipoverty initiatives, among them the provision of job-related services and the EITC...

...It has only a modest relationship to choices about work, which are more strongly related to the availability of good jobs, the ability to get them, and, for women, to the availability of good day care...

...Kennedy's Council of Economic Advisors (CEA) had argued that policy must attack structural causes of poverty, most important among them racial discrimination and the inability of the economy to produce jobs paying a living wage...

...Relieving poverty's harmful effects on children and families will mean continuing, even improving, income support for those living at the margins of the economy and society...

...In this sense, OBRA helped lay the groundwork for the intensifying antiwelfare campaign to come...

...They must find a way to put poverty first...

...FAP was neither an archetypal antipoverty initiative nor was it clearly an antiwelfare plan...

...When welfare rolls began to climb, both the services strategy and its apparent beneficiaries, the poor, were discredited...

...As Senator Russell Long of Louisiana worried aloud, FAP's income guarantee would undoubtedly make it more difficult for him to find a maid to iron his shirts...

...Welfare policy constituted a relatively small part of the Kennedy administration's "War on Poverty...

...As should be obvious by now, policies that promise much but don't deliver intensify disillusionment with government and politicians...

...The question is not how to end welfare, but how to end poverty...

...You cannot feel distinctly how far the people are rendered better and improved, or more miserable and depraved, by what you have done...

...The Republicans seized their opportunity to overtake the administration's pledge to end welfare...

...Prefiguring the initial Clinton reform strategy, officials within the Kennedy administration sought to build a reform coalition around the notion that social services constituted both an antipoverty and an antiwelfare strategy...

...When that promise proved false, both government and the poor were blamed...

...Although Democratic reformers were prepared to fight for more generous benefits for the poor, they also were prepared to concede that increased welfare use—regardless of its causes—constituted a serious public problem...

...Although the Kennedy administration's motives for developing an antipoverty agenda may be debated, that agenda was at least consistent with the Democratic party's electoral needs to mobilize and incorporate minority and poor voters in key states that could provide the margin of victory in presidential elections...

...However, despite its strategic cleverness, efforts to build a legislative coalition collapsed as liberal Democrats and welfare rights organizations fought low benefit levels and workfare requirements, while Southern conservatives attacked provisions that would increase benefits in their states...

...Antipoverty Democrats increasingly found themselves trapped by their own strategy —a strategy that depicted welfare as the critical national problem, more critical, it seemed, than the problem of poverty...

...These are amongst the effects of unremitted labor, when men exhaust their attention, bum out their candles, and are left in the dark...

...Rather, the fact that the pledge to end welfare came from a Democratic presidential campaign is emblematic of a major political shift that has gone largely unremarked...

...It's both...

...With rising welfare caseloads came a resurgence of antiwelfare politics...

...But critics could more easily brand those receiving welfare as "nonworkers" and, in a dizzying leap of causal analysis, blame welfare for fostering their "dependency" and "causing" poverty...

...In an effort to redeem its "end welfare" pledge, the administration's initial reform plan combined expanded job-related services and earned income tax credits (EITC) with a two-year time limit on welfare receipt, followed by Reagan-style workfare (assigned public-sector jobs in which poor adults work for welfare benefits...

...In bringing together antipoverty and antiwelfare elements, it was reminiscent of prior reform plans...

...In a masterful piece of policy strategy, the administration, mindful of the power of antipoverty Democrats in Congress, offered them a policy granting a guaranteed minimum income...

...Although the administration had no serious reform program of its own, Reagan did assert one caveat...

...SPRING • 1995 • 215 Ending Welfare budgetary reform, the Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of 1981 (OBRA) enacted the most sweeping cuts in welfare provision in two decades...

...What accounted for the rush to reform again so soon, even before the 1988 Act was fully evaluated...

...When combined with food stamps, median benefits fell short of the poverty line by about 25 percent...

...You can never plan the future by the past...

...The inability of either set of interests to dominate derailed the Carter administration reform initiatives in the late seventies, just as it had previously stalemated Nixon's reform program...

...The elements of the governors' plan became the basis for congressional efforts to develop the Family Support Act of 1988...

...The plan also acknowledged the administration's need to accommodate antipoverty Democrats as a condition for reform...

...Apparently, all the fuss over welfare by Democrats and Republicans has convinced much of the public that welfare constitutes a fearsome national problem...

...FAP's defeat left in its wake a profound sense of crisis: welfare was "out of control" and must be contained...

...He sent word from the White House that welfare reform must include some version of his favored workfare program or he would veto the entire package...

...In addition, the measure incorporated workfare and other mandatory participation provisions that satisfied the antiwelfare interests of lawmakers in both parties...

...Poverty had been declining fairly steadily since the thirties as the economy grew...

...OBRA was subsequently amended, easing somewhat the restrictions placed on welfare eligibility...

...The original proposal sweetened the deal by capping spending at a level that would initially reduce no welfare payments and would actually raise them for poor families living in eight Southern states providing extremely low benefits...

...One strategy involved the extension of work requirements imposed as a condition for receiving welfare...

...They led, instead, to liberal reforms that did not address the structural sources of poverty, reducing neither welfare nor poverty to any substantial degree...

...Putting Poverty First When Franklin D. Roosevelt launched the United States on the path toward a social welfare state, he also placed a major obstacle on that path...

...Democrats had long before conceded that growing caseloads, regardless of the reasons for them, indicated trouble...

...If that disillusionment is to be avoided, Democratic leaders must break out of the corner into which they have painted themselves by pretending that fighting welfare is the same as fighting poverty...

...Second, promising services is not the same as delivering them...

...In fact, work relief programs were quickly reduced and then abolished once the worst of the crisis had passed and well before economic recovery was solidified...

...Public anger and frustration at programs that don't work and politicians who don't deliver are the stuff of which the Perot phenomenon and the 1994 Republican sweep were made...

...It is hardly surprising that, in those circumstances, the objective of reducing welfare costs would displace the objective of reducing poverty...

...With Richard Nixon's election in 1968, one might have expected Republicans to take the opportunity to pursue decidedly antiwelfare reforms...

...PBJI proposed to replace AFDC, SSI (Supplemental Security Income), and food stamps with one umbrella program...

...You never go into the country, soberly and dispassionately to observe the effect of your measures on their objects...

...In part because of its ambiguity, the "end welfare" pledge offered symbolic evidence to conservatives that Clinton was not a traditional liberal Democrat while proffering services-based reforms to reassure liberal supporters that he would not abandon the poor...

...Like the New Dealers before them, antipoverty warriors assumed that the most important reform—the creation of new jobs —would occur through other means, among them tax cuts proposed by the Kennedy administration...

...It is time to abandon a failed strategy that pretends that welfare, alone, can solve the problem of poverty...

...By reducing poverty, they would reduce welfare use as well...

...Consequently, little was known about whether quality services of specific types might help poor adults prepare for jobs or how much these services could contribute to the economic prospects of welfare recipients under specific labor market conditions...

...In plain language rarely heard from an official body, the commission asserted: "The poor inhabit a different world than the non-poor, primarily because they lack money" (emphasis added...

...The reasons for poverty are complex and varied, deeply rooted in structural features of the economy and society...

...On the other hand, there was something different about the Clinton reform plan...

...You cannot see with your own eyes the sufferings and afflictions you cause...

...The current campaign to "end welfare" is a consequence of past strategies that have backed Democratic reformers into a corner where ending welfare takes precedence over ending poverty...

...OBRA also reduced support for the working poor by lowering work-related deductions and work incentive provisions...

...It provided income support to elderly citizens based, to some extent, on their prior earnings from work...

...If Democrats want to put poverty first, it will mean fighting for programs that address poverty at its roots, in the decline in jobs that provide health benefits and a living wage, the movement of jobs to suburbs out of reach to inner-city residents, and the failure of urban schools to educate...

...Promoted by one of the Senate's staunchest, antiwelfare Southern Democrats, the "Talmadge Amendments" expanded the WIN (Work Incentive) program first established in 1967 after the "failure" of the services strategy...

...These services must be carefully structured so they suit the employment needs of individual participants...

...By keeping these strategies modest and indirect, they could advance restrictions on welfare provision without provoking intense opposition...

...However, he included in that calculation spending on social security, which dwarfs spending for means-tested programs that serve poor families...

...A partial answer is that caseloads grew as the economy declined...

...One could hardly be expected to imagine from all the brouhaha over welfare that, at $16 billion, it constitutes a scant 1 percent of federal spending (compared to about $300 billion each for Social Security and defense...

...The 1972 amendments required women to register for work or training once their youngest child reached the age of six...

...Welfare does not create "dependent" personalities, nor do most families depend on welfare for more than a few years at a time...

...SPRING • 1995 • 217 Ending Welfare Put briefly, the campaign sought to rebuild a Democratic constituency by repairing relations with disaffected former Democrats and luring away Republican voters disenchanted with the state of the economy and the Republican candidate...

...On the other hand, ending poverty, the real problem, has become an issue that most politicians prefer to avoid...

...One, Social Security, eventually became the big success story of the New Deal reforms...

...Federal welfare costs were rising and, to many, seemed out of control...

...Eliminating welfare does not magically create "independence," if by that we mean the ability to make it in the labor market...

...The cost of welfare was one of those pressures...

...In providing a minimum income guarantee, the Nixon plan implicitly acknowledged that fact...

...The complexity of this plan reflected the political complexity of accommodating antipoverty and antiwelfare interests within one reform package...

...They selectively adopted antiwelfare elements of the Clinton plan and pushed them to new lengths, unimaginable to the Democratic reformers who first proposed them...

...The promise that welfare would largely wither away as the economy recovered was no more sustainable then than it is now...

...Unfortunately, these may seem unattractive to politicians desperate for a quick fix and cost-free solutions...

...EDMUND BURKE, A Letter to a Member of the National Assembly 220 • DISSENT...

...There were two big catches to the Democrats' strategy...

...You never give yourselves time to cool...

...This strategy had obvious political advantages in building a legislative coalition for reform in a Congress divided across both partisan and liberal-conservative lines...

...Remarkably, Nixon's initiative, the Family Assistance Plan (FAP), presented a program of patently radical reform that had strong linkages to the sixties antipoverty perspective...

...Congress responded, not only by cutting funding but also by instituting new work requirements as a condition for welfare receipt...

...First, as many reformers understood, services did not themselves increase the supply of good jobs or eliminate structural barriers to employment, such as racial or gender discrimination...

...However, the short-term advantages of this strategy obscured its long-term costs...

...If, as we are reminded, the Clinton campaign was about "the economy, stupid," where did the new impetus for welfare reform come from and why was it framed as antiwelfare rather than antipoverty...

...When benefits were later indexed to the cost of living, the economic well-being of the elderly was largely secured...

...The administration's alternative, proposed in August 1977, was the Program for Better Jobs and Income (PBJI...

...The second strategy was constructed around the administrative reform of welfare...

...Welfare is not effective as an instrument for social engineering...

...Decades of careful research show that welfare is largely irrelevant to the personal life choices made by poor adults about childbearing, marriage, and living arrangements...

...That context had changed dramatically by the seventies...

...Among other things, these reforms also sped up and legitimated the conversion of state welfare bureaucracies into nonprofessional, administrative entities...

...A recent poll by the Kaiser Family Foundation and Harvard School of Public Health found that 40 percent of the public believes welfare is one of the two largest areas of federal spending, larger even than defense or Social Security...

...Under the rubric of * In a particularly egregious misuse of statistics, Charles Murray claimed that poverty among the nonelderly had increased as social welfare spending had increased...

...Unlike previous Democratic initiatives, it omitted any income guarantees or increases in welfare benefits, but included welfare cuts-by-timelimit and expanded workfare...

...However, once spending was capped, the administration would be in a position to hold the expenditures in check and push benefit levels down...

...However, immediately following OBRA, welfare reform pressures briefly dissipated, as national attention turned toward other issues...

...In presenting its proposal, the NGA stated: "The principal responsibility of government in the welfare contract is to provide education, job training, and/or job placement services to all employable recipients...

...It also undermines support for antipoverty programs that can work, both to relieve immediate distress and to secure the nation's economic and social future...

...If welfare had not withered away, its prior growth had certainly been stopped in its tracks...

...Rather, it constituted an attempt to forge a compromise between these two opposed interests, producing bitter fights that ended with the plan's defeat...

...This assumption justified a strategy based largely on the provision of social services...

...The Sixties By the time the nation "rediscovered" poverty in the early sixties, AFDC served just over three million people and cost just over $1 billion...

...They then had the singular misfortune to implement the Family Support Act in the midst of a recession marked by widespread job losses and state cutbacks in funding for the Act's job-related services...

...Rather, they used the new federal money to hire scores of unskilled caseworkers, not the professional social workers envisioned in the bill...

...Yet, complexity could not mask the fundamental division between liberals who doubted that the income floor was high enough and conservatives who feared that benefits would create work disincentives...

...They must find the courage to ask the right questions, not the expedient ones...

...On the contrary, the number of recipients began to climb, rising from 10.7 million in 1989 to 11.2 million in 1990, 12.4 million in 1991, and 13.4 million in 1992...

...An "explosion" in welfare caseloads hit the nation at the same time that Vietnam War-related spending sent inflation into overdrive...

...These are problems that, although central to the problem of poverty, lie outside of welfare's boundaries...

...They did not...

...Studies show that cuts in welfare are associated with increases in poverty and declines in educational progress, health, and the ability of families to stay housed and stay together...

...Those changes effectively took workers out of welfare and left them to face the increased hardship associated with low-wage work...

...With passage of this Act, Democratic reformers moved a step further along the road from antipoverty to antiwelfare policy-making...

...The strategy of promising that antipoverty services would pay off in reducing welfare use backfired...

...But history demonstrates that it does not...

...For a small fraction of families, those bad times are longer lasting and require additional types of help...

...Instead, reform was said to have failed because caseloads were rising.* Unfortunately, like the "old" Democrats of the sixties, contemporary reformers had painted themselves into a corner by promising that their reforms would "save" tax dollars by reducing welfare use...

...After endless debates about "floors" and "notches," the plan failed to satisfy almost anyone...

...At one point, the House bill included an enhanced 216 • DISSENT Ending Welfare federal match to encourage state benefit increases...

...You can never survey, from its proper point of sight, the work you have finished, before you decree its final execution...

...When Reagan mentioned welfare in his 1986 State of the Union Address, a loose coalition of congressional Democrats, governors, and social service advocates that had been working to craft a welfare reform initiative were ready to jump in with their proposal...

...Their program coupled elements of the old Democratic services strategy with new requirements that women with young children work or prepare for work as a demonstration of personal "responsibility...

...In fact, between 1970 and 1993, AFDC benefit levels declined by 45 percent, dropping by 27 percent during the period between 1980 and 1993 alone...

...As Adam Yarmolinsky recalled from his experience in the Kennedy administration: "You ask yourself, do you concentrate on finding jobs for people or preparing people for jobs...

...Proposals to eliminate welfare for categories of the poor, place arbitrary time limits on its use, and penalize personal life choices concerning marriage and childbearing move in exactly the wrong SPRING • 1995 • 219 Ending Welfare direction...

...Although the average AFDC grant for a family of three is only $366 a month, when added to food and housing assistance, it raises above the poverty line about half of the families with children who would otherwise be even poorer...

...Yet, there is a persistent urge for a quick fix, an urge that is hardly unique to this issue or this time As the history of reform demonstrates, a quick fix is easy to promise, but tough to deliver...

...However, the administration was less concerned about rights and more concerned about budgets...

...What happened to transform the war on poverty that once occupied lawmakers into the current war on welfare...

...While the success of Social Security was determined by how many individuals it reached and how its benefits grew, political success for ADC (and later AFDC, Aid to Families with Dependent Children) was determined in exactly the opposite way...

...Economist Milton Friedman, in Capitalism and SPRING • 1995 • 213 Ending Welfare Freedom, advocated a negative income tax as a response to poverty that would not interfere with market functioning...

...With social services and social work largely removed from welfare, the clerical orientation of welfare agencies seemed justified and, certainly, less expensive...

...They who always labor can have no true judgment...

...But, by framing new services as a solution, not only to poverty, but also to rising welfare caseloads, Democratic reformers began transforming the problem of ending poverty into a problem of ending welfare...