Welfare Reform As We Know It
DIIULIO, JOHN J. Jr.
Welfare Reform As We Know It by John J. Dilulio Jr. Listen carefully to the latest conservative chatter about the course and consequences of the federal welfare reform of 1996, and you will hear a...
...Despite the "fix of '97," and thanks to Republican pushes for reform in the states, welfare rolls decline by 25 percent...
...Moreover, a recent study by the president's Council of Economic Advisers estimated that over two-fifths of the decline was due to economic growth...
...She fails, and with Clintoncare defeated, in 1995 the historic Republican-led 104th Congress forces the president's hand on welfare reform...
...In a scrupulously objective report summarizing the empirical evidence, Thomas L. Gais, Donald Boyd, and Elizabeth Davis of the Nelson A. Rockefeller Institute of Government at the State University of New York-Albany emphasize that in many states the caseload decline preceded the reforms...
...Thus, Pennsylvania and New Jersey underwent similar economic cycles and showed very similar patterns of caseload growth and decline...
...The worst has not even come close to happening, and there is little evidence that former welfare recipients are crowding shelters or flooding food banks...
...Dependency is falling precisely because government is growing, and not in spite of it...
...Here the legend-in-the-making takes a sharp right turn to a happy ending...
...States are required, for example, to have three-quarters of their two-parent welfare families working at least 35 hours a week...
...By the same token, both Pennsylvania and New Jersey—along with roughly half of the states—are defaulting on one or more of the federal law's work requirements...
...In his recent book What It Means to Be a Libertarian, Murray writes, "The first step in asking whether we can get rid of government is this standard test: Draw a trendline showing what was happening before and after the intervention of government...
...As Lawrence Mead concluded in one detailed report on the Wisconsin experience, reforming welfare "can save money on balance, but it requires more bureaucracy rather than less...
...In many states, the welfare rolls were already declining from their March 1994 high at the time most reforms kicked in...
...Growing bureaucracy is exactly what one should expect if the main task of reform is to get on top of the caseload...
...Listen carefully to the latest conservative chatter about the course and consequences of the federal welfare reform of 1996, and you will hear a new political legend in the making...
...Despite much pushing and prodding by welfare officials, Pennsylvania has only 46 percent of those families working, New Jersey 49 percent...
...The reforms "send the right moral message," and the message has already gotten through...
...Nor have its biggest advocates come to grips with credible, up-close accounts of how the most widely touted of the reforms were actually implemented—namely, by strengthening, not slashing, state and local welfare bureaucracies...
...But they had risen dramatically in the early 1990s, and the recent decline left nearly 44,000 more households on AFDC in May 1997 than in July 1989...
...is the co-editor (with Frank Thompson) of Medicaid and the States, forthcoming from Brookings...
...But nobody really knows...
...How much...
...To get these people working will require, among other measures, the development of many thousands of community service jobs (cleaning parks, staffing zoos, and so on), which welfare officials in most states are just beginning to debate...
...When the dust settles, Clinton signs Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC), the basic welfare entitlement, into statutory oblivion, replacing it with a block grant, Temporary Assistance to Needy Families, in October 1996...
...Two-parent families are only 2 percent of Pennsylvania's welfare households and 4 percent of New Jersey's...
...Split the analytical difference and it's about a third...
...But are they working...
...That's 25 percent...
...Philadelphia's 200,000 people on welfare, including 80,000 children under 6, make up 43 percent of the Pennsylvania caseload...
...But there's more to this story...
...Reforming welfare is but one of the many hard tasks of contemporary, post-Great Society conservative governance...
...Contributing editor John J. Dilulio Jr...
...Begin with the much-celebrated 25 percent drop...
...The consensus is that each 1 percent rise in unemployment triggers a caseload rise in the 2 to 5 percent range...
...So what accounts for the other two-thirds of the drop...
...A new Rutgers University study of New Jersey's post-August 1993 experience with denying cash-benefit increases to mothers who have more children while on welfare found no statistically significant effect on childbearing...
...But Clinton feels the pain of defeated welfare stand-patters, including the first lady...
...Welfare reform at both federal and state levels has yet to pass what Charles Murray terms the "trendline test...
...The same story holds for most of the much less well publicized instances of dramatic caseload decline in states from Tennessee to Texas...
...And what has become of those among whom "dependency is falling...
...President Clinton, a liberal in centrist's clothing, comes to power promising to "end welfare as we know it...
...Undoubtedly, what Republican governors like Tommy Thompson of Wisconsin and John Engler of Michigan have done to move people off the dole and into work is a noble fact of public administration and no rank ideological fiction...
...It begins in 1992...
...The new program promises to reduce spending, streamline bureaucracy, enforce strict time limits on the receipt of welfare payments, and impose tough welfare-to-work provisions...
...He is aided and abetted by a disorganized and demoralized Republican congressional majority that has lost the spirit of '94...
...Are their children getting adequate medical care...
...But New Jersey had federal waivers [and imposed time limits, work requirements, and fixed family benefits regardless of the birth of additional children], while Pennsylvania was one of the few states that did not...
...And sooner or later, the boom will end...
...When it does, you can be sure that increases in unemployment will swell the welfare caseloads...
...Other studies, however, suggest that the laws were actually being implemented informally before they were officially in place, detecting and dumping welfare ineligibles, not merely deterring them...
...As the SUNY-Albany study notes, "State-by-state comparisons uncover many anomalies...
...Like most political legends, the GOP's welfare-reform legend blends fact with myth, misinformation, and self-satisfaction...
...With pardonable pride, the GOP's conservative legend-makers say, "We do...
...Until some significant part of the continuing decline can be clearly traced to the new policies, welfare reform cannot be deemed to have passed the trendline test...
...Nobody knows...
...In 1997 he makes good on his reelection pledge to "fix" the reform...
...indeed, changes in the laws often had their greatest impact in the year before they took effect...
...Murray recommended abolishing AFDC but with a grandfather clause, allowing people already receiving assistance to continue doing so under the old rules, rather than forcing them to meet unbendable time limits or unrealistic work requirements...
...It is an effective-governance task, on which a fresh and fruitful start has been made—but only a start...
...These families are more likely than the rest of the welfare caseload to contain people with a recent work history and less likely to live in inner-city neighborhoods with few jobs...
...Much harder to move into the workforce are the far more numerous, often highly dysfunctional, urban single-parent families...
...Other, more conservative analysts suggest that general economic factors account for about a fifth of the drop...
...Thus, before a single new provision has taken effect, mere publicity and street scuttlebutt about time limits and work requirements have cowed able-bodied loafers into removing themselves from the rolls and scared would-be welfare scammers off applying...
...The reforms enshrined in the federal Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996 and their sister reforms in all the states will deservedly go down in history as a reminder to the nation of the Republican view of republican virtue, a view centered on individual initiative and personal responsibility...
...All that seems definite so far is that many of those who have left the rolls and found jobs are drawn from the short-term, civil, sober, once-employed elite of the welfare population, not from the mass of long-dependent adults who have no job history and are socially dysfunctional in the extreme (drug or alcohol-addicted, in trouble with the law, and so on...
...It is true that, between March 1994 and May 1997, the AFDC rolls dropped by 23.3 percent—from 4.6 million households to 3.5 million households...
...Even amid the continuing economic expansion, that recommendation is gaining de facto assent in many state welfare bureaucracies...
...Even if the liberals who fought the reforms are ultimately proven right about such particulars as how tough it will be for most long-term welfare recipients to find jobs and how little cutoffs will do to reduce births to women on welfare, so what...
...What of the impact of the new federal and state laws on childbearing by welfare-dependent mothers...
...Right now, many households eligible for assistance under the federal reform are headed by people "mired in habits of dependency," as Murray put it in a 1994 essay in Commentary...
...That is precisely what Wisconsin is doing...
...The post-AFDC horror show predicted by some liberals starred starving hordes sleeping on mean streets as states ran a welfare-benefits "race to the bottom...
...But instead of the president's trying to reform welfare, his wife tries to nationalize health care...
...Similarly, economists Robert W. Fairlie and Rebecca A. London, writing in the current Journal of Policy Analysis and Management, conclude from a wealth of statistical evidence that "the potential effect of family caps on the fertility of AFDC recipients is likely to be small at best," while the scant evidence to the contrary relies on demonstrably imprecise measurements and spurious correlations...
...The Democrats' Great Society anti-poverty reforms, he argues, fail the test because using "retrospective calculations of poverty, the trendline shows a regular drop in poverty from World War II through the 1960s, with the Johnson years accounting for their fair share, no more...
...Did they trail back to other forms of cash or in-kind public assistance...
...And there's another rub...
...As the SUNY-Albany scholars note, several studies, including the analysis by the Council of Economic Advisers, have seconded the conservative conjecture that many able-bodied welfare-eligible adults saw the work requirements and cutoffs coming and responded by getting off the rolls or not applying in the first place...
Vol. 3 • October 1997 • No. 6
