Reagan's Welfare Fraud
Joe, Barbara E.
Reagan's Welfare Fraud by Barbara E. Joe I chanced to be a middle-level bureaucrat in California's state welfare department in 1966, when a social reformer named Ronald Reagan became governor....
...Carleson claims that because of the Reagan plan, California has 300,000 fewer recipients (both AFDC and general assistance) than in 1971...
...Reagan's Welfare Fraud by Barbara E. Joe I chanced to be a middle-level bureaucrat in California's state welfare department in 1966, when a social reformer named Ronald Reagan became governor...
...Quite the contrary...
...Another 3,000, Gleason said, were removed but later reinstated by the courts...
...In 1973, there were only 295,000 babies...
...Another share of Reagan's claimed 182,000 was 40,000 people dropped from county general assistance...
...For the aged and disabled are the "deserving poor" Reagan says need more help...
...In the two years before the plan (1969-70), California experienced a phenomenal rise in unemployment— almost an 85 percent leap...
...without our reforms, there would have been half a million more Californians drawing welfare than there actually are, at an increased cost to our taxpayers of $1.1 billion this year and next...
...Next Reagan told a national television audience, "California's welfare system was literally out of control...
...After subtracting the people removed by demographic changes or other factors unrelated to the "drastic action," Gleason came up with exactly 8,000 people...
...The "$1.1 billion saved" must have come from the same phantom logic...
...By February 1972, only five months after his "reforms" took effect, he was proudly testifying in Washington about the success of his plan...
...threatening to bankrupt the s t a t e . . . . " We thought all our worst fears were about to be realized...
...it is a separate administrative entity...
...This was pretty hard to challenge since the figures were "projections...
...Meanwhile, welfare caseloads are lower now than in 1971, both nationwide and in California...
...The actual number is 180,000...
...The only hard figure Reagan ever quoted was the 182,000 supposedly knocked off the rolls...
...After all, he had promised to knock recipients off the rolls...
...Workers got off the dole, as they would have, reforms or not...
...It's interesting to note that former HEW secretary Caspar Weinberger, who was once Reagan's finance director, didn't let this slip by unnoticed...
...Without drastic action, it threatened to bankrupt the state's treasury...
...Where he got the phantom three million figure is anyone's guess...
...Yet the falling birth rate accounted for almost all the decline in the system, a decline Reagan credited to himself...
...Reagan based his "savings projection" on the fact that he said he expected 40,000 more people per month to register...
...out of control...
...Reagan's main target was a program called Aid to Families with Dependent Children—aid directed at single mothers and illegitimate kids...
...If social reformer Ronald Reagan becomes president, he will have an interesting opportunity to test his "crackdown" theories here...
...The only Reagan provisions to actually be implemented were the substitution of flat grants for more complicated case-by-case payment formulas, and changes in the compilation of work expenses...
...But all were rejected by the Democrat-controlled state legislature the governor was never able to master, or overturned by the courts...
...AFDC caseloads stopped expanding in almost every state in 1971 and 1972, then started back down, reform bills or no...
...Trends, come to think of it, that Reagan easily could have known about before he started his crusade...
...He never said anything about not letting them back on...
...The "success" of his "reforms" has gone on to become a major part of the Reagan mythology, constantly cited by the governor and his aides on the campaign trail, the subject of countless flattering articles...
...Birth rates are still dropping, too...
...He told a Senate Finance Committee hearing that 176,000 welfare recipients (later he changed the number to 182,000) had been kicked off the dole...
...In any given year, one third of AFDC recipients can be expected to leave the program...
...Reagan claims to have carried through his attack on the California welfare system...
...The number of people eligible for welfare but not getting any was no longer significant...
...Reagan's drastic action involved little more than watching mothers grow older...
...So if you subtract the 230,000 children from the 143,000 total decline, you discover the number of adults—those freeloaders Reagan was after—has increased some 87,000...
...This is not to say the governor was an out-and-out liar in claiming 182,000 cuts...
...Many have fallen for the hype, including Reader's Digest and Harper's, both of which recently featured articles of warm praise for the "reforms...
...AFDC caseloads had risen dramatically during the 1960s, as new laws enlarged the role of welfare, and welfare-rights activists alerted people to what was available, helping them register...
...A second big change in California welfare came from another nationwide trend that had nothing to do with legislation...
...Having been part of it, I remember things a little differently...
...Reagan wanted AFDC eliminated altogether, "to purge our overblown system of those whose greed is greater than their need...
...In 1964, 375,000 children were born in California...
...Reagan also started "projecting" that the total number of AFDC recipients would have reached three million in fiscal 1971-72, were it not for his plan...
...By the beginning of the 1970s, basically, everybody was signed up...
...The rest of the "reductions," even Reagan staffers admitted, came from the correction of a convenient accounting error...
...The total number of California AFDC recipients is 143,000 less now than in 1971...
...During the period in question, some 100,000 recipients did leave AFDC rolls...
...Safety in Numbers also apparently felt obliged to distort the numbers...
...Birth rates nationwide were declining throughout the 1960s, and California was no exception...
...I remember that the "savings" and "reduced recipients" were all sleight-of-hand...
...The total number of welfare recipients did go down for a while when Reagan was governor, although not by amounts even close to what he claims...
...Who could say what actually would have happened...
...In any event, county general assistance wasn't affected by Reagan's statepassed bill...
...A large share of AFDC payments is money for babies—you know, the "with dependent children" part of the acronym...
...In fact it can be discerned easily by any student of the actual effect of Reagan's program, rather than the hype of his press office...
...Total AFDC expenditures that year were about $1 billion...
...He grew more brazen as the praise rolled in, at one point jumping the "projection" of recipients avoided from 495,000 to 600,000...
...Verne Gleason of California's Senate Office of Research analyzed Reagan's claim...
...Though Reagan was first elected in 1966, for some reason he didn't get around to seriously proposing a welfare reform bill until 1971...
...The number went down not because of reforms, but population changes that could have been predicted years in advance...
...But they were replaced with almost as many new recipients...
...The "reforms" were taking place mostly in Reagan press releases...
...All this may sound like perplexing number-crunching...
...He says he "turned the welfare monster around," saved taxpayers at least $1.1 billion, and most of all, knocked 182,000 recipients off the rolls in just ten months...
...But economic recovery had started just before the Reagan plan was announced...
...To say that a chill feh over our agency that day would be an understatement...
...The total for that period was only 1.5 million...
...Reagan's former welfare director, Robert Carleson, wrote in Human Events that the plan was "an unqualified success, consisting of sharp crackdowns on cheaters, non-interference from HEW, and the slashing of payments...
...It would have been physically impossible to find another 1.5 million recipients even if we were handing checks to passers-by...
...Martin Anderson, the governor's present domestic advisor, wrote in his book, Welfare, that the system was "a workable reform plan" which trimmed "$1 billion in waste...
...The form of welfare rapidly increasing in California and nationwide, by the way, is aid to the fast-growing elderly and disabled populations...
...Reagan had run on an unabashedly anti-bureaucrat, anti-welfare platform...
...Barbara E. Joe was an official of the California State Department of Social Welfare during Ronald Reagan's terms as governor...
...One third more can be expected to join...
...AFDC is a notoriously seasonal kind of aid...
...Reagan called our welfare system "a monster...
...So, all across the country, falling birth rates (and generally falling unemployment rates) caused the number of AFDC recipients to decline after the program hit its peak in 1972...
...He claimed credit on behalf of the Nixon administration...
...These sentiments were echoed in another article by Carleson, which leads off a recent issue of the scholarly Journal of the Institute for Socioeconomic Studies...
...When the Reagan "reforms" were enacted, another spring was coiled and ready to exaggerate the results...
...Thus while in 1964, the average AFDC recipient family had three children, by 1973, the average had fallen to two...
...Eight thousand, not 182,000...
...Using these and other suspicious statistics, he pronounced that without the reforms, "our projections were that there would have been a total of 495,000 more" recipients in less than a year...
...Reagan did not seem to think this distinction was important, and claimed the 100,000 as part of his "reductions...
...But the urge to inflate continues...
...We began implementing a series of strong actions designed to curb ludicrous abuses...
...In the months before the Reagan plan began, an unusually high number of workers exhausted their unemployment insurance benefits and were switched over to welfare...
...Reform in Fame Only This did not prevent the governor from claiming credit...
...The 40,000 figure, in fact, represented the record increase in recipients for a single month...
...Reagan's "crackdown" was aimed at freeloading fathers, not infants...
...Naturally, this drove people onto the welfare rolls...
...That was two strikes against us to start...
...In the following months, unemployment fell from 8.1 percent to 6 percent...
...But if you look closely, you find the number of children on AFDC is 230,000 lower...
...Demographics, not legislation, were controlling the change in California's welfare system...
...Reveling in the California reforms has become a preoccupation of Reagan aides...
...This was true, but again unrelated, because the drop was spurred by an increase in farm employment...
...Maybe Central Casting...
...Reagan further estimated that without his bill, another 40,000 people per month would have been added to the welfare system...
...Reagan had further ideas for welfare reform...
...She is now a child welfare consultant in Washington...
...Welfare rolls could not possibly have continued to expand as they did in the 1960s, because there wasn't anybody out there left to add...
...But he didn't say where they were supposed to come from...
...He said he wasn't after the "truly needy," the aged and handicapped, but rather those able-bodied freeloaders— ghetto fathers who skip out on their families...
Vol. 12 • October 1980 • No. 8
