Putting Welfare to Work
DRAPER, ROGER
Writers & Writing PUTTING WELFARE TO WORK BY ROGER DRAPER Apart from giving money to foreigners and exploring outer space, the provision of welfare is the least popular government undertaking. By...
...To replace AFDC ,Kaus proposes a Federal program to create public-sector jobs at a salary slightly under the minimum wage (now $4.25 an hour) for anybody—of either sex, married or not—who wants one...
...But his aim is not to save money...
...Kathryn Edin, a colleague of Jencks who collaborated on his final chapter, "Reforming Welfare," made one of two existing studies of welfare recipients' actual sources of funds...
...That statistic does not deserve the faith he places in it...
...It is...
...Social disparities, too, "have gotten worse in recent years," Kaus acknowledges...
...Kaus has in effect written two loosely connected books...
...Most economic egalitarians, he points out, do not aim at anything remotely like exact parity of earnings...
...Until the 1960s Americans shared a common culture, formed through common experiences in the military, say, or in mixed neighborhoods and schools...
...But few obtain direct government support, and few live off their girlfriends' AFDC checks, since these are very low...
...Since illegitimate black births haven 't really exploded, and remained stable in the late '60s and early '70s, when the percentage of single mothers on welfare shot up, there is no reason to think that abolishing AFDC would have a significant effect on illegitimacy...
...Even so, were Kaus correct in his insistence that abolishing AFDC would remove the growth engine of the underclass, which to him is illegitimacy, we might expect that his scheme would have some impact over time...
...households from the rest of us...
...by 1972, 63 per cent did...
...The other comparable inquiry, conducted in New York, reached similar conclusions...
...Upward of 90 per cent, he says indignantly, claim to be unemployed...
...Although we cannot do much to stem the polarization of incomes, says the author, we at least ought to reinvigorate social equality: the belief that personal worth bears no relation to fortune or rank, and the willingness of different classes to mix...
...Had they continued to reproduce at their 1960 rate, "the proportion of black babies born out of wedlock would only have risen from 23 per cent in 1960 to 29 per cent in 1987...
...Yet Kaus, otherwise so pessimistic, asserts that it is not irreversible...
...Kaus contends that the "core" of the underclass consists of young, unemployed black males...
...Nonetheless, both would greatly expand social spending...
...The official poverty line to which Kaus wants to raise everyone is quite arbitrary...
...The important point, in any event, is that they obviously can't be forced into it, because they are already surviving without government help...
...Somehow, we must dissolve this threat to our future—and Kaus is confident that we can, because he, like Charles Murray, the neo-conservative author of Losing Ground (1984), thinks it has a single foundation: welfare...
...virtually the entire sum of their earnings would be deducted from the government grants...
...The larger sum makes better sense, especially if we expect the poor to take public service jobs rather than work off the books, sell drugs, prostitute themselves, or mug us...
...The truth is that very marked polarities impede capitalism by repressing consumption to levels that cannot sustain mass production, and by making it cheaper to hire laborers than to buy machines...
...Jencks, too, urges Washington to provide employment for anyone who wants it, to increase the EITC allowed poorly paid workers in the private sector, and to define most social benefits "as rewards for work...
...it simply divides the poorest fifth of U.S...
...Jencks plausibly denies that it is...
...Nor can illegitimacy be the heart of the underclass problem—not at any rate if, as Kaus would have it, the problem is growing...
...Suburbanization, of course, began a century ago...
...Alas, these will continue to be possibilities...
...people will continue to take advantage of them...
...I will not refrain from suggesting that, once again, there is no reason to accept Kaus' optimism...
...Capitalism, in Kaus' version, does not seem to require consumption...
...Unlike Kaus, he does not attribute the underclass problem to one big cause, and consequently does not place his hopes in one big solution...
...The proportion has since dropped steadily: to 45 per cent in 1988, the latest available figure...
...Between 1960 and 1974, the absolute number of these births rose hardly at all, and it has not gone up a great deal subsequently...
...The first is a philosophical treatise on equality...
...It is currently slightly under $11,000...
...In Chicago, where she did her investigation, an adult with two children receives $6,700 a year under AFDC, including the value of Food Stamps...
...No doubt, he admits, a progressive tax-and-transfer system, profit sharing, retraining, and other devices could buck the trend...
...So long as some people have to work at awful jobs," Jencks says," I do not think others should have a right to refuse such jobs and demand public assistance...
...It is deeply rooted...
...As Thomas Carlyle said of Chartism, a movement of the destitute in mid-19th-cen-tury Britain, the underclass is but "a new name for a thing which has had many names...
...Kaus insists, unconvincingly, that the underclass is essentially a black phenomenon...
...Furthermore, Kaus' ideas might fail to increase the amount of work performed by women who currently obtain welfare...
...Instead, it rose to 62 per cent...
...Moreover, in an era when many women work, staying at home is a "luxury" that cannot be demanded as a right by the underprivileged...
...And anyway, why should relief be limited to unmarried, supposedly unemployed mothers...
...The author further contends that "Capitalism depends upon money inequality as the spur to work...
...The radical change is the plummeting number of births to married black women...
...Our society has the developed world's sharpest extremes of wealth and destitution, and the inner logic of our economic system does not require this...
...Two would-be reformers of domestic programs—Mickey Kaus, in The End of Equality (Basic Books, 293 pp., $25), and Christopher Jencks, in Rethinking Social Policy (Harvard, 280 pp., $29.95)—both accept that scruple...
...In his view, its "culture can't survive the end of welfare...
...They, and not welfare mothers, are the real source of our fear...
...Five were drug dealers and five were hookers...
...By 1992, the wealthy and the upper middle class had opted out of the military and retreated to "separate, often self-sufficient suburbs, where they rarely even meet members of nonwealthy classes...
...Still, Kaus opposes resistance...
...At present, Edin's survey implies, 22 per cent are idle...
...It is not surprising, therefore, that plenty of welfare clients were found to be employed, or that they failed to report this...
...The statistics disprove Murray's assertion that welfare directly inspires women without husbands to procreate, Kaus recognizes...
...In 1964,29 per cent of this country's unwed mothers received AFDC...
...This, to my mind, is an argument against absolute income equalization, not against greater equality...
...few men get significant Federal or state charity...
...Y Ies it can, and will...
...We must not only accept the principle of economic inequality, insists Kaus, but the specific inequalities that have developed over the past 20 years, auguring a historical trend favoring skilled over unskilled labor...
...Some such men would surely be attracted to Kaus' neo-WPA...
...Why get in a car," he asks, "and head off in the direction of a place you don't want to reach...
...Kaus calls for a universal day-care system, as well as a national health service...
...It will have many more...
...But as Jencks shows brilliantly in Rethinking Social Policy—an intelligent and highly readable, albeit statistically oriented, survey of social problems and solutions—booming rates of black out-of-wedlock births are largely a mathematical mirage...
...Of the 50 women in Edin's sample, seven had full-time jobs under false names...
...Whatever effect work-based Federal income maintenance might have on the "undeserving poor," it would be easier to defend politically and fairer than AFDC...
...Polls indicate that we object to the notion of paying people to do nothing, not to aiding the needy...
...According to Kaus, these changes imply net spending increases of $43 billion to $59 billion...
...I cannot say how representative her findings really are and will thus refrain from suggesting that Kaus' agenda would actually discourage initiative and effort...
...By welfare I mean Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC), the program supporting unmarried women and their offspring...
...A 1983 Gallup survey cited by Jencks showed that on average, Americans thought a couple with two kids needed $15,000 to avoid poverty, not $10,000, then the official threshold...
...The salaries of the "neo-WPA" workers (as he calls them) are to be topped up to the poverty level by Earned Income Tax Credits (EITC) resembling those currently awarded to poor privately employed persons, who would also get higher EITC allowances...
...Parenthood would not be a problem...
...Those who don 't sign up will" be on their own," Kaus writes...
...Surely this means they will continue to rely on crime, as may women...
...So he merely maintains that AFDC payments have made it possible for them to have children, whatever their reasons, and thus funded an explosion of illegitimacy—particularly black illegitimacy...
...the second comprises a set of proposals that are meant to replace AFDC through the practical application of the Kausian philosophy...
...An additional 22 were part-time bartenders, caterers, baby sitters, and the like...
...Yet welfare is no less unloved...
...Jencks, however, makes similar recommendations and embraces a form of egalitarianism Kaus rejects: the hope of distributing income more evenly...
...But he promises less in the way of results...
...Kaus, in a footnote—and he presents enough of his case in footnotes to make it hard to follow—speculates that a third of today's welfare recipients are psychologically or physically unable to take the positions he would create for them...
...the underclass," he reasons, "that most obviously sets in motion the vicious circle in which the degradation of public life in cities encourages the flight to the suburbs...
...it is to dismantle the underclass...
Vol. 75 • September 1992 • No. 12
