A welfare primer: what's happened & what's likely to happen.

Washington, D.C. is about to begin something of an extended summer vacation from the welfare-reform debate. With a temporary lull in the budget battles and election-year distractions, federal welfare policy is being placed on the back burner. This "time out" can give political leaders as well as the general public an opportunity to evaluate the flurry of the past year's welfare-reform activity.

Recall the key events in the most recent attempt at reform, In March 1995, shortly after capturing Congress, Newt Gingrich's Republican majority ushered through the House of Representatives "The Personal Responsibility Act," one of the ten planks of the "Contract with America." Its provisions included the repeal of Title IV of the Social Security Act of 1935, eliminating Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC), the federally funded but state-administered program most Americans refer to as "welfare." Adoption of this measure by the Senate and the president (a president who had campaigned on the promise "to end welfare as we know it") would have spelled the end of Washington's commitment to guaranteeing income security to poor families. Instead of AFDC matching grants, the states would receive capped block grants from Washington, with wide discretion for how to distribute aid to poor children and their single parents. The few strings that were attached to the House version of the welfare bill were intended to reduce dependency and illegitimacy by encouraging states to do what many governors already favored: implementing family caps (no additional benefits for each newborn), time limitation of benefits ("two years and out"), categorical exclusions (teen-age mothers and most immigrants would become ineligible), workfare requirements, and other behavioral restrictions. Since "entitlement" had become a dirty word in U.S. politics--at least entitlements for the poor--the federal government was basically going out of the business of poor relief.

After months of delay and debate, during which Senate Democrats were repeatedly outflanked and eventually outvoted, the House version was moderated somewhat by the Senate and by a congressional joint conference committee. Clinton's veto of the final version in January 1996 was prompted not only by the intricacies of the then-raging budget battle, but also by a Department of Health Human Services (HHS) report that the welfare bill passed by Congress would have pushed 1.2 million more children into poverty. The last gasp for those favoring welfare reform in 1996 on the federal level (program changes on the state level will be discussed below) came from Republican congressional strategists in the spring. They floated plans to corner Clinton into signing a bill that resembled versions of welfare reform for which he had previously expressed approval. After this initiative was dropped, candidates Clinton and Dole fired a series of mid-May salvos on welfare reform which briefly seemed translatable into genuine legislative progress. But their posturing was soon revealed to be more about stealing welfare as a campaign issue from the other side than about shaping real reform, so we can now safely say that welfare reform has indeed entered its "summer vacation."

The past year's acrimonious debate has shed some light along with considerable heat. Many of the social and economic realities connected to welfare should now be in sharper focus, such as the causes of poverty, the effectiveness of potential policy changes, and the political and social values which influence our perceptions of the problem of poverty and the role of social policy. What follows is a discussion of the lessons learned in the past year.

1. Ideology makes bad social policy. The debate began when Republicans campaigned on the theme that the "opportunity society" should replace the "welfare state." But like the caffeine or sugar buzz that accompanies indulgence in "comfort foods," the satisfaction of citing free-market bromides or "pull yourself up by your bootstraps" social theory soon wears off. Good social policy must consider the central questions: How will a new policy direction affect actual people? Will program rules and procedures extend a hand of real opportunity to single mothers to improve their difficult lives? Will the 9 million children whose families rely upon AFDC, food stamps, and Medicaid to scrape by find themselves falling through gaps in the social safety net? Will taxpayers be able to see any welfare policy as an instrument of effective social policy and compassion, rather than as wasteful giveaways that mock their work efforts?

Good policy does not always make for good politics. Commitment to the well-being of poor families costs money and also risks the appearance of undermining some of the core values of the meritocratic American ethos. The safer, more popular strategy for politicians is to favor policies that make for slick soundbites--cynically to reaffirm rigid moral platitudes, to reinforce existing stereotypes of the poor, to blame low-income families for their poverty, and to ignore the complex structural determinants of economic inequality.

The American electorate, however, should be suspicious of those who pander to public anger over spending on the poor. Public support of program reforms should hinge not just on how many tax dollars would be saved, but also on how these proposals treat the poor among us. Will they offer needy families adequate security in the short-run and realistic hope and opportunity for a better life in the long-run?

2. There are no simple solutions to the complex problem of persistent poverty. The search for a single villain or a neat plot line in the saga of U.S. poverty is fruitless. Homelessness and hunger in the wealthiest society in human history create a paradox that defies any short-cuts to understanding. It does little good to rely on monocausal explanations--whether one places blame upon business for the exploitation of labor, upon government programs for fostering dependency, or upon low-income people themselves for engaging in destructive behavior that can lead to dependency, illegitimacy, and unemployment. There is plenty of blame to go round; simply blaming the victim won't do.

Commentators such as Charles Murray (Losing Ground) and Lawrence Mead (The New Politics of Poverty) make sweeping claims about the dyamics of poverty. In doing so they exaggerate the influence of selected parts of the overall picture: the supposed incompatibility of compassion and work incentives, "helping conundrums" that seem to doom social policy to eternal failure, and the salience of unintended consequences of policies that reward dependency and destructive behavior by cushioning their effects. Is it merely coincidence that these commentators emphasize causal factors which suggest solutions that mirror their political agenda (smaller government, budget cuts) and preferred social theory (rugged individualism, laissez-faire economics)?

After years of listening to the claims and counterclaims of would-be welfare reformers, Americans now show signs of rejecting such false choices. By seeing through these smokescreens, the welfare reform debate can move to a more constructive emphasis on what it might take truly to improve the untidy lives of poor families. To be sure, it is well and good to recommend the moral renewal of family values and the work ethic (as do Newt Gingrich, William Bennett, Murray, Mead, Marvin Oulasky, Gertrude Himmelfarb, and a host of others on the right). But the practical measures necessary to actually improve the lot of the poor must include improvements in at least four specific areas: (1) the child-support enforcement system; (2) job training; (3) health-care benefits for low-wage workers; and (4) day-care programs for single mothers. Government can make a positive contribution in all these cases.

Improvements in these social supports may sound like a mere wish list of expensive proposals unless we realize that each item on the list is a good investment--spending a bit now will realize much larger long-term gains. The first two items require start-up costs (already pioneered under provisions of the Family Support Act of (1988) that promise to repay themselves many times over. They encourage income (from absent fathers and earnings from single mothers) that in many cases may replace welfare checks. The final two items may have similar cost-saving effects. Each encourages work by making work logistically possible and potentially more attractive than staying on welfare

Clinton's original 1994 welfare reform proposal included versions of these four positive measures, but was unfairly criticized as just another costly social program. Actually, no one is seriously arguing that we can simply spend our way out of the welfare mess. The challenge is to recognize when certain investments in enabling people or preventing dependency are prudent. The "how" becomes as important as the "what," for these measures work best when implemented and managed on a flexible and perhaps local basis, as several recent state welfare experiments have demonstrated. While it is true that there are no "silver bullets" that solve all our welfare problems at low cost, it is possible to alleviate the burdens of poor families in ways consistent with the American values of freedom, limited government, the work ethic, and personal responsibility.

3. Pay attention to the many different ways welfare is used and might better be used. New evidence about the recipients of income support reveals that there is no single pattern of how families make use of AFDC. Ronald Reagan's "welfare queen" may have cheated the system and confirmed our fears of widespread intergenerational dependency, but she seems to be mostly the stuff of convenient myth. Most welfare families take advantage of their first realistic opportunity to leave the AFDC rolls. The frequent "recycling" of single mothers back into the welfare system is caused by the labor market's inability to provide a living wage (and adequate benefits, including health care) for low-skilled workers. If poor mothers lie to caseworkers by not reporting outside income while collecting AFDC, it is because benefit levels in most states are too low (and declining in real terms) to pay for even the barest necessities.

The nearly 5 million adults collecting AFDC are mostly low-skilled single mothers struggling to support their 9 million children, who represent a significant percentage of America's next generation. Even the most cursory glance at the social location of these families reveals that any of the solely work-based and largely punitive solutions to dependency proposed by many Republicans cannot succeed. Barriers to employment for this population of single mothers include declining prospects in a deteriorating job market, poor health, frequent depression, child-care responsibilities, and limited transportation to inaccessible work sites.

Workfare, the principle of "income by work effort alone," which replaces "income by entitlement" (where cash grants are received as longs as a family fits the proper categories and means-tests), is the centerpiece of most current welfare-reform proposals. But to adopt workfare as a universal norm would commit our nation to a needlessly inflexible policy. Under the banner of "getting tough on work," many types of parents with vastly different needs and capabilities are lumped together to face the same enforced work requirements. Upon entering a workfare program, a single mother faces a choice between finding employment in the private sector or "working off" her welfare grant in public-sector service, often in tasks of the, "make-work" variety. Failure to comply with these provisions means eventual loss of benefits and the likely break-up of the family, the very outcome which the original welfare provisions of the 1935 Social Security Act were intended to prevent. The public's wholesale rejection of Speaker Gingrich's proposal last year to make widespread use of orphanages as an alternative to welfare suggests that Americans do not consider low earning ability alone a sufficient reason to judge someone an incompetent parent.

Since American culture supports both work and family cohesion, I see two alternatives for upholding our shared values without submitting to the straitjacket of inflexible workfare arrangements.

First, we might emulate those European nations with highly developed "family policies" featuring income-support benefits such as family allowances. The operative principle remains one of entitlement, where income supplementation in the interest of providing security for poor families is seen as either an element of the national interest or as a social obligation. Although it is arguably the single most morally defensible approach to family poverty (and has been floated in Congress in various forms for decades), a proposal for an ambitious family policy is unlikely to win support amidst the present climate of budgetary restraint. Indeed, the U.S. program that most resembles a European-style family allowance, the Earned Income Tax Credit, is being scaled back in the ongoing federal budget deliberations.

A second possibility is the implementation of a flexible family support program modeled on that of Governor John Engler (R-Mich.). For Engler, welfare reform means more than simply cutting spending, but includes sensitivity to individual needs and capacities within a work-based program. Recipients sign personalized contracts that seek to move them gradually to self-sufficiency on reasonable terms that reflect not just the principle of personal responsibility in isolation, but also the availability of jobs and prevailing wage levels. Conservatives laud Engler for ending the entitlement status of benefits by making them conditional upon recipient cooperation, establishing a quid pro quo that promises to preserve the power of work incentives. Advocates of the poor remain nervous about the loss of income guarantees, especially for children who might be punished for the transgressions of their parents. Yet many liberals applaud Engler's exceptional commitment to providing substantial social-support services and his eschewal of strict time limits that might place some families in desperate situations. Engler's guiding principle is one of reciprocal responsibility between the recipients and providers, so that welfare mothers who do everything within their power to keep their contract will not be summarily denied benefits no matter how long it takes for their good-faith efforts to translate into economic self-sufficiency.

Engler's plan is currently being phased in throughout Michigan, a process made possible by a waiver from federal welfare rules granted by the Department of Health and Human Services. Thirty-eight states have received such waivers from the Clinton administration to implement rules changes, so that the states have indeed become welfare laboratories yielding important lessons about what works and what does not. Engler's plan is more ambitious than most state experiments, particularly in its commitment to the intensive case work necessitated by its eschewal of uniform workfare rules.

One of the attractive features of Engler's plan is something neither he nor any Republican probably intends. By being sensitive to barriers to employment and labor market conditions, the Michigan program opens a window to the possibility of viewing welfare as an ordinary mode of income supplementation for poor families facing difficult economic conditions. Among all the work-based proposals being offered, it alone responds with more than a shrug to the question: But what about those who cannot find jobs in this tight labor market? The welfare-reform debate moves light-years ahead when we grow more comfortable with the realization that, in the dawning post-industrial era, many families may require subsidies on top of what they can earn in increasingly contingent, low-wage jobs. The practice of combining work and welfare should become commonplace, not something forbidden by program rules.

4. Get the moral anthropology right. During the hiatus from welfare reform, the most fundamental question Americans should ponder is: Why did many of the arguments expounded in the last round of the welfare-reform debate fail to resonate with the American public? I suggest that it is because of our good common sense. Our culture's shared understanding of the human person refuses to accept caricatures, whether they come from the Left ("the poor are nothing but victims of vicious social forces") or the Right ("we should treat people as rugged individualists"). The "Contract with America" is especially egregious for promoting a two-dimensional view of humans as bloodless, rational calculators and maximizers of economic gain.

Republican welfare strategies would have us believe that the poor base their lifestyle decisions exclusively on economic motivations. "Deadbeat dads" flee responsibility solely for financial reasons. Welfare mothers deceive social workers and evade work in order to maximize their benefits. Teen-agers engage in sexual activity and bear children in order to collect welfare checks. From these premises, the authors of the "Personal Responsibility Act" proposed legislation that would overhaul U.S. social policy in ways that reflect their behavioristic anthropology. By means of the proper combination of carrots and sticks, their policies attempted to raise the cost of deviant behavior such as illegitimacy and nonwork, inducing the poor to conform to social values which they previously flouted.

This picture of human nature is flawed. Americans suspected this all along and now we are beginning to reject it openly. Yes, statecraft may include soulcraft, as there are moral dimensions of any public policy. Government programs can serve to "signal" social values. But a crass effort to coerce vulnerable segments of the population into desired behavior amounts to a denial of the dignity of free human persons. Workfare strategies are a case in point. Punitive enforcement of work requirements as a condition of receiving welfare benefits sends all the wrong messages. In the name of implementing a narrowly construed version of the value of personal responsibility, workfare stigmatizes and degrades those whose greatest fault is an inability to find private-sector employment. Strict workfare proposals ignore the deeper need for opportunities to boost skills (the key to long-range earnings potential) and to eliminate barriers to gainful employment--the very preconditions for greater self-sufficiency. While it is true that job-training programs have a mixed record of success, they at least represent an effort to address the causes of poverty (an "upstream" solution) before resorting to punitive ("downstream") measures to alter recipient behavior.

The American people by and large instinctively adhere to a more complex and adequate moral anthropology. If we wish to see such commonsensical views more fully articulated, we might look to John Paul II's encyclical on human work, Laborem exercens. The pope draws on the long tradition of Catholic social thought to advance not only a narrow claim about the dignity of the worker ("work is for man and not man for work" [sic]), but also a wider indictment of all forms of reductionism and economistic logic that threaten human dignity. The "is" and the "ought" are here linked. Because humans with our gift of freedom do not base our important life decisions (about work, marriage, procreation) solely on cost-benefit analysis, we ought not be treated as mere instruments of production by employers, nor as mere bundles of needs (to be neglected or at best "managed" in none but the most cost-efficient way) by government in its social policies.

Catholic moral anthropology explicitly endorses government action to establish the conditions necessary for legal and economic justice and respect for human rights (by promoting such measures as a "living wage" and trade unionism, for example). The documents of Catholic social teaching provide indisputable warrant for a comprehensive social safety net to protect poor families from want. Such state action is part of the legitimate role of government in protecting the social and economic rights of its citizens. The most direct way of shielding poor families from economic destitution is by guaranteeing income security to those who meet certain criteria. Such an entitlement principle pervades Catholic social teaching, whether in papal addresses, pastoral letters from the U.S. bishops, or policy recommendations from such groups as Catholic Charities USA.

Herein lies the rub. As the American political climate has grown more suspicious of government in recent years, attempts to champion any type of unconditional income guarantees for any category of citizens seem to be falling on deaf ears. Traditional American skepticism about government-administered economic rights and our current hypersensitivity to the destructive consequences of an entitlement mentality make it very difficult to defend income guarantees for poor families. The fact that a bill ending our sixty-year commitment to this principle passed both houses of Congress in 1995 should serve as a wake-up call to all concerned about the poorest Americans.

Those who argue that it is no longer politically feasible to defend a welfare entitlement may be right. But unless our basic obligations to the needy are acknowledged, legislation disastrous for poor families will be enacted before the end of 1997. Without a change of heart and thinking in Washington, D.C., any new national welfare law likely to emerge from Congress will make Engler's Michigan program appear generous by comparison. The hope for change rests squarely on whether the American public will put to good use some of the lessons learned over the past year. Catholic social thought, with the policy recommendations it implies, may serve as a helpful tutor. But even if Americans draw their wisdom from other sources, the electorate will have to muster up an uncommon measure of political will to nudge the welfare debate back from the precipice at which we find ourselves.