Welfare reform and the "Third Way,"

...Unfortunately, none of this came to pass...

...The poor received an across-the-board income floor in the form of food stamps in the 1970s, and the welfare-poor and the disabled received health coverage in the 1960s, a program that in its total cost has become more expensive than any piece of the safety net except for Social Security...

...Those with children—mainly unmarried women—had since 1935 been eligible for the program traditionally called welfare...

...I believe in social justice and in an important role for civic institutions...

...The Red Cross should do everything it could to help, he said...

...None of this is publicized by politicians taking credit for a great reform...

...In fact, I believe very strongly in the importance of a civic commitment in every community to work to cut off poverty at its roots...

...Championed by Bill Clinton and Tony Blair, it claims to be situated somewhere between old-style social democracy and neoliberalism...

...The New Deal ended the acceptability of that kind of thinking...

...The social justice envisaged by Third Way proponents turns out to be a matter of the largesse of private actors...

...The Third Way, we are told, involves the superiority of neither the government nor the corporate sector, but the partnership of both with a third force, civil society...

...Corporations and wealthy individuals are still entitled to lobby the government for subsidies that seem startlingly like something for nothing, and nobody appears to have a responsibility to help the poor except the poor themselves...

...In the prosperity of post—World War II America we thought it was just a matter of time before we would succeed in filling in the holes in our safety net...

...A hallmark of that combination is said to be the end of entitlement politics, the end of people getting something for nothing, the end of the era in which rights exist without corresponding responsibilities...

...The cost of the program to the federal government has always been well under 1 percent of the federal budget...

...Even so, the radical right in the United States has been joined by a new constellation calling itself various names—the Third Way, the Democratic Leadership Council, the "blue dogs"—which has built a rather successful politics by attacking an American welfare state that never was...

...The disabled received income protection in stages, together with legislative protection against discrimination in employment and accessibility to public accommodations...

...We need a politics that addresses this inequality, that talks about a living wage for all (not just the poor), that makes issues of the widely shared health coverage, child care, housing, and educational needs of so many millions of people...

...When the time limits hit or a recession comes or if both occur together, we will be beset by very serious problems...

...And I believe in personal responsibility, although I believe also that the idea of "no rights without responsibility" ought to apply to everyone in society and not just the poor...

...We would also have income support for everyone who needed it, especially children...

...WE DID make progress...

...In Mississippi the benefits have for years been 11 percent of the poverty line—with food stamps added in, 40 percent of the poverty line...

...Real welfare reform would make sure people receive the help they need to get and keep jobs, and would provide a safety net for children...

...Over half the American people have lost economic ground during the past twenty-five years, while the top 20 percent have done very well and the top 1 percent extraordinarily well...

...But at least we can reduce the number of children who are tortured...

...Haven't over five million people left the welfare rolls since the peak caseload of 14.3 million adults and children combined was reached in 1993, over three million since the law was signed in 1996...

...Still, the radical conservative change represented by the 1996 so-called welfare reform would not have happened if America had not had a president who advocated a Third Way but engaged in a politics of personal political survival at any price...

...At least we thought so...

...A genuinely good policy or a radically terrible policy would have required a massive change in the distribution of political power in Congress, and there was a deadlock in Congress —until the elections of 1994...

...America has always had strong civic institutions in its communities...

...A backlash began, with racial overtones...

...In the 1980s the states tried a number of experiments to make welfare more work oriented, and there was a modest federal reform in that direction in 1988...

...He now teaches at Georgetown University Law Center...

...Federal policies remain vital, but by themselves they are insufficient...

...In fact, nobody liked welfare...

...It was never generous...

...Despite all this, welfare reform also creates new opportunities if our civic institutions, especially at the community level, can mobilize in response...

...PETER EDELMAN is former assistant secretary for health and human services in the Clinton administration...

...Once the poorest Americans, the elderly became less poor than the rest of America by 1982...

...Even so, only 60 percent of those leaving the rolls are getting jobs, at best...

...The Third Way, we are told further, combines a belief in the dynamism of the free market with a commitment to social justice...

...Those are not the exact words I would use to express my views, but they are not inconsistent with the social policies that I support for children and other vulnerable groups...

...The Third Way turns out to mean not a genuine three-way partnership and division of responsibility, but abdication of governmental responsibility to an amorphous group of people and institutions in the private sector...

...Over the years there were bipartisan efforts to change the system...

...The working poor have come into vogue in recent years with a major expansion of a federal tax provision that adds to their income...

...It has never offered a safety net that provides a baseline of income support, health coverage, and other assistance for everyone...

...Richard Nixon actually proposed a guaranteed annual income...

...Ironically, three of Clinton's most senior political advisers told him he would benDISSENT / Winter 1999 15 efit politically by vetoing the legislation, but he was unwilling to chance even a relatively low political risk...

...This law literally removed any obligation for any state to assist anyone, and installed a lifetime limit of five years for federally financed assistance to a family, regardless of whether there is a recession...

...In both the United States and Europe in the 1990s, we are told that the answer to such problems as the suffering of some of our children is a new politics that has been given the name of the Third Way...

...A few states have pursued good policies, and a number are pursuing policies that are extremely punitive...

...The elderly, our most favored group, achieved national health insurance coverage in 1965, and their Social Security benefits were indexed to inflation in 1972...

...President Herbert Hoover said exactly that when the bonus marchers converged on Washington during the Great De14 DISSENT / Winter 1999 pression...

...The Third Way has ended "rights without responsibilities" by presenting the poor with a slogan in place of assistance: "Find a job...

...The system didn't help people to become self-sufficient, there wasn't enough assistance to prevent people from having to go on welfare in the first place, and the benefits didn't get anybody out of poverty...

...Beneficiaries hated the way they were treated by the bureaucrats...

...He was personally sympathetic, he said...

...Before the 1960s, the states, especially in the South, generally gave welfare benefits to people they liked and not to people they didn't like...

...Low-income housing, assistance to the poor to help with the cost of heat and air-conditioning, extra educational help for poor children, grants for low-income people to go to college, and other programs fill out the picture...

...16 DISSENT / Winter 1999...

...The numbers are correct, but they are also misleading...

...The problem is that, for many proponents of the Third Way in the United States, the words do not mean what I have just interpreted them to mean...

...This debate is hardly new...

...Benefit levels were set by the states, and the federal government paid for a portion of the cost...

...The most controversial group over the past thirty years has been nondisabled people of working age, and especially those with children...

...And the right wing hated welfare for reasons I already have indicated...

...Conservatives have always attacked efforts to expand help for the poor and for the vulnerable by saying these were matters for which government had no responsibility...

...America's safety net has always been a patchwork, providing benefits based on society's judgments about who is deserving and who is not...

...Most of the rest have been forced off the rolls by punitive policies that sanction them for failure to comply with work rules and for other misbehavior, such as failure to show up for an appointment at the welfare office...

...America has never had a welfare state in the European sense...

...We would have national health insurance, seek full employment, and have truly comprehensive unemployment insurance for those who needed it...

...I believe in the market economy, combined with whatever regulation is necessary to control its excesses...

...Whatever the rhetoric of the "Third Way," liberals and progressives have been struggling for a long time to find the right balance between government and the private sector, between national policy and local initiative and control...

...The program always helped African Americans disproportionately because the poor in America are disproportionately African American...

...What we need now is still the right balance, not just a clever repackaging...

...But not the government...

...Most of them would have preferred to work...

...We literally don't know what has happened to them...

...And an activated civil society must be animated by a politics of economics...

...This means business, labor unions, philanthropies, religious institutions, universities, nonprofit organizations —in short, everyone...

...In the 1960s a combination of newly subsidized lawyers for the poor, Supreme Court decisions, and a militant movement of welfare recipients converted the program into the entitlement that federal law had always said it was but that everyone in authority had always ignored...

...Is THE 1996 law really that bad...

...Third Way adherents in the United States might quote Camus approvingly, but their policy prescriptions seem more reminiscent of Anatole France's famous remark that the rich and poor have an equal right to sleep under a bridge...

...If, at first glance, the picture doesn't look too bad, that is mainly because this is a time of prosperity...

...Those without children were never eligible for federal benefits other than food stamps...

...It is that bad...

...And while we must still struggle against discrimination of all kinds, we need also to pare down the rough edges of identity politics so as to accentuate the unaddressed common interests that taken together could build a new majority...

...This talk was given to the international seminar on the welfare state cosponsored by Dissent and its Italian sibling publication, Reset, in Abano Terme, Italy, in October 1998...

...The personal responsibility that the Third Way calls for turns out to be the responsibility of the poor to behave themselves better, not a responsibility that extends across all the institutions of society...

...But the myth developed that it was a majority-black program, and that welfare recipients were lazy and unwilling to work...