Welfare reform, one of the hardy perennials of American politics, has been revived in Washington. Since President Reagan announced his intention to reform welfare two years ago, proposals have come from all sides, and bills are now pending in Congress. But the politics of welfare has altered: where in the past controversy centered on the issue of expanded benefits, today debate has shifted mostly to “workfare”—i.e., proposals requiring that adult welfare recipients work or otherwise better themselves in return for support.
Today, as formerly, the main object of reform is Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC), the program that supports poor single mothers and their children, using both federal and state funds. There are other important federal welfare programs, such as Medicaid and Food Stamps, which finance health care and food for the poor, yet AFDC is the focus because dependency on this program seems the most intractable. In fact, what is now known as the “welfare crisis” goes back to the late 1960’s and the early 1970’s, when the AFDC rolls more than doubled, from around five million to over eleven million people, a level that has since changed little.
In those years, AFDC became entangled with the issues of race and the inner city. Growing welfarism coincided with other signs of urban disarray—a rising incidence of female-headed families, illegitimacy, joblessness, troubled schools, and crime. Just when formalized racial discrimination was fading away, thanks to civil-rights reforms, the growing welfare class raised the specter of unresolvable racial inequality.
Did welfare cause urban disarray? AFDC originally covered only single-parent, not two-parent, families, on the argument that the father, if present, should be supporting the family. This restriction seemed to generate an incentive for fathers to abandon their families in order to qualify them for aid. To some observers it also seemed that one reason work effort was low on welfare was that anything a welfare mother earned would be deducted from her grant.
To liberal reformers, these problems could be cured by changing the incentives in welfare. In order to reduce family breakup, coverage should be extended to two-parent as well as single-parent families. To promote employment, recipients should be given an incentive to work by being allowed to keep at least part of their earnings. On such reasoning, Congress in 1961 allowed (but did not require) states to cover two-parent families in AFDC, provided the father was unemployed, and in 1967 it instituted a mild work incentive. Both features were included in the comprehensive reform schemes proposed by Presidents Nixon and Carter. Along with other proposals, these plans would have guaranteed an income to all Americans.
Unfortunately, however, liberal reforms did nothing to reduce dependency. Covering intact families did not stem the tide of illegitimacy in the ghetto, nor did work incentives raise work levels. Instead, the new rules themselves became a factor in the welfare boom, as they made eligible for aid many families who previously had incomes too high for welfare. Partly on these grounds, many in government eventually lost patience with liberal reform; the Nixon and Carter plans were both defeated in Congress.
Since the mid 1970’s a more conservative brand of welfare reform has taken hold. This approach regards the abuses in welfare as moral problems, not just as technicalities, and it applies to them stronger medicine than incentives. In the last ten years, Congress has become much tougher about requiring state AFDC programs to reduce waste and fraud, and to make fathers who abandon families help pay the cost of supporting them. In 1981, the Reagan administration cut eligibility for AFDC and revoked most of the work incentives granted in 1967. Also in 1981, Congress allowed states to experiment more widely with work programs of their own; for the first time workfare was permitted—requiring the employable to “work off” their AFDC grants in unpaid jobs in local government agencies.
Since then, new work programs have proliferated at the state and local level, although the definition of workfare has expanded to include not just working off grants but education or training for work as well. Evaluations have made the new programs look reasonably successful. They seem to raise earnings and reduce dependency somewhat, and at little or no net cost to the government since the expense of the new services is defrayed by savings in welfare as recipients go to work.
The current reform debate in Washington is mostly about how federal policy-makers should respond. The main proposals are to spend more on child care and training services in work programs, and to institute more definite requirements that employable clients participate in these programs. Essentially, the first has become the liberal, the second the conservative, meaning of welfare reform.
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There are, to be sure, still those on the Left who attribute the vogue for work-fare to the turning of the political climate: the nation, they say, is simply more conservative—i.e., stingy—than in the age of liberal reform plans. But that is a superficial explanation. The fact is that research has made the welfare problem look much tougher than it once did. Experts, even liberals, no longer believe that merely offering new benefits to the dependent can overcome their problems.
The earlier reform plans were promoted on the supposition that welfare recipients and poor people were not very different from other Americans. It was claimed that few were dependent or poor for long, and that the adults among them worked at levels fairly typical of the population at large. Nonwork could be attributed to high unemployment rates or other economic troubles.
Recent research confirms, however, what casual observation always suggested, that there is a long-term welfare class. About half of AFDC cases stay on the rolls more than two years, 38 percent for five years or longer. Moreover, a much lower proportion work today than did a generation ago. The “working poor,” beloved of liberal reformers, have largely been lifted above the poverty line by economic growth. Of poor adults heading families in 1984, only 17 percent worked full-time, while 51 percent did not work at all; in 1959, both figures were about a third. Today, only about 5 percent of AFDC mothers—as compared with well over half of divorced or separated women in the population at large—work at a given time. Many single men who father welfare children also work erratically at best.
The trends are adverse even though the chance to work seems widely available. The argument that lack of jobs or other “barriers” prevent the poor from working is no longer credible. The nation has become heavily dependent on illegal immigrants to do “dirty” jobs that poor Americans decline. In most areas, jobs are plentiful, at least at low wages, and in the last two decades mothers have flooded to take them, despite low skills and the difficulties of securing child care. As the success of many recent Asian immigrants proves, the economic opportunities in this society are great, even for the unskilled. In failing to respond to these chances, welfare mothers and poor men are distinctly out of step.
In addition, experience and research have undercut the liberal hope that government can raise work levels by measures short of requirements. A succession of training and public-employment programs, virtually all voluntary, poured forth from Washington during the 1960’s and 1970’s. But, as with work incentives, none of them caused disadvantaged or dependent adults to work more consistently in the low-skilled jobs they could already get in the private sector, with or without the programs. Clients might accept the benefits eagerly, but this did not mean they worked more steadily thereafter.
The reason for low work effort is seldom that the poor lack opportunities, nor is it that they do not want to work in principle. While some reject low-paid work as too menial, more simply lack confidence. They hope to work, but they do not feel they can succeed at it. Nor, under current policy, do they usually have to try.
Lacking confidence, the seriously poor do not respond to economic incentives in the “rational” way that liberal reformers presumed. How, then, to overcome their passivity? That is the great question in antipoverty policy today. Increasingly, the solution seems to lie with public authority. To the extent that the new work programs are successful, it is probably because they make more employable recipients take work seriously than did any predecessor programs. Just as Americans accept the duty to pay taxes, yet need the IRS to remind them, so many poor adults need to have their aspiration to work reinforced by obligation.
A number of books have appeared on the welfare problem recently, but they hardly reflect an adequate grasp of these realities. Most of the authors, whether on the Left or the Right, treat the long-term poor abstractly, and few offer practical policies for raising work levels.
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Such proclivities are most evident among hard-line radicals, those most disposed to blame poverty and dependency on “society.” Fred Block, Richard A, Cloward, Barbara Ehrenreich, and Frances Fox Piven, in The Mean Season: The Attack on the Welfare State,1 shed little light on the welfare problem, but their book helps explain why the Left has lost much of the influence on social policy it once had.
Piven and Cloward are well known for their radical interpretation of welfare. In Regulating the Poor and other works, they have contended that the purpose of welfare is not the promotion of a common humanity but appeasing unrest and regulating the labor supply according to the needs of the business cycle. Allegedly, welfare supports poor adults when there are no jobs for them, then withdraws aid when business needs them to perform menial labor. The current book concedes that benefit programs inevitably reduce work effort among the poor, but the authors see this as a plus, for it strengthens the “bargaining position of working people” against business. Rather than having to do just any “dirty” work offered to them, they can hold out for jobs with decent pay, and for conditions compatible with child-care responsibilities.
Cloward was one of the thinkers behind the original antipoverty program of the 1960’s, which emphasized the claims rather than the responsibilities of the poor. He and Piven have also asserted that gains in social policy come not when the poor organize as an interest group but when they threaten the system with disorder. This theory did much to inspire the welfare-rights movement of the later 1960’s, which mobilized militant welfare mothers to demand extra benefits.
As other historians have recognized, the Piven-Cloward interpretation is a caricature of the motives, often well-meaning, that have inspired American welfare policy. But in the 1960’s and 1970’s it was widely believed. It did much to make federal social planners feel guilty about the past. It entrenched the view that welfare should be an entitlement, the giving of benefits without asking anything in return. Like an angel with a flaming sword, that conviction prevented federal policymakers from even discussing the behavioral problems that plagued the ghetto.
Since the late 1970’s, however, the atmosphere has been transformed. When Ronald Reagan cut welfare and many other social programs, hardly a dog barked. Welfare recipients were quiescent, as was organized labor, which had mobilized effectively for the social reforms of the 1930’s and 1960’s. Even the wholesale loss of unionized factory jobs to foreign competition has not provoked anything like the mass movement of the poor and unemployed that Piven and Cloward say must be the basis for social change.
The tone of The Mean Season, accordingly, is defensive, bemoaning the cuts but helpless to do much about them. The authors ridicule Charles Murray and other conservative theorists who have provided the arguments for the Reagan assault, but they admit that they have lost the intellectual initiative to the Right. The same defeatism is evident in other recent tracts from the Left, such as The New American Poverty (1984) by Michael Harrington, another progenitor of the War on Poverty, and Michael Katz’s In the Shadow of the Poor house (1986).
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Why is no one listening to the Left any more? The reason has to do with more than the shifting of the political winds. The best-known radicals in social policy have also lost authority because they are no longer doing much research. Harrington’s book is an essay written about other people’s research; The Mean Season is much the same.2 These authors have collected no fresh data about the welfare problem, and in an age when most social-policy analysis is highly quantitative, that is disqualifying. A purely literary Left can no longer claim the influence it once did on issues of social policy.
But the fundamental problem with the Left’s analysis is that it is no longer persuasive. These authors write out of a progressive tradition, stretching back to the origins of democratic politics, that interprets social reform as a mass struggle for equality, in which “the people,” defined ever more broadly, organize to demand greater social standing from the rich and powerful. “The people” want to get ahead on their own, but also and above all they want government to protect them from the marketplace. They want “free” services, such as education and health, regulation of wages and working conditions, and welfare, pensions, and other benefits for those who cannot support themselves.
In any democratic society, that is a compelling vision. But unfortunately the last reforms that could be called progressive in this sense were the civil-rights acts of the 1960’s. The last major social program serving a broad public was Medicare, which finances health care for the aged, enacted in 1965. Since then, federal social programming has been driven by concern for less inclusive groups, especially disadvantaged minorities and the underclass. These groups may be needy, but they are too disordered to demand change on their own behalf. It has been provided for them, but largely at the behest of government planners, not in response to pressure from below. And when Reagan cut these programs, he did so mainly because they were ineffective, not, as The Mean Season suggests, as part of some generalized offensive by business against “the people.”
The authors of The Mean Season hark back to a vanished society in which the underdogs were personally competent, yet lacked opportunity. They complain that current opponents of welfare do not give enough credit to “the efforts of the unemployed” in the 1930’s and of the “black protesters” of the 1960’s. To cast our current social problem in such terms is nostalgic. Today’s long-term poor and dependent seldom make such “efforts,” nor do they display the discipline of the civil-rights marchers. They are seldom “working people” forced to rely on welfare as a form of temporary unemployment insurance until the right job comes along; in fact, they rarely work consistently at all. Mass-based reform is possible on behalf of the competent poor, but not on behalf of the passive poor, who do little to help themselves.
One might suppose that radical authors would support firm measures to transform inert recipients of welfare into workers who would have more capacity to press for change. But The Mean Season opposes workfare as just another conservative device to restrict access to aid. The authors are no longer pursuing the Left’s traditional goal of equality. They are simply rationalizing dependency.
A glimmer of positive thinking occurs only in Barbara Ehrenreich’s chapter, which challenges radicals to offer an “alternative vision” to conservatism, one based on the “republican values of active citizenship.” But what could such citizenship mean if it does not, first of all, expect the dependent to do more to help themselves? Those who merely make demands on others are not fully citizens. In eschewing that conclusion, The Mean Season offers no solutions to the social problem, and expresses a radicalism no longer worthy of the name.
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The more effective spokesmen for today’s Left do their own research, and they focus precisely on the employment issue that has become the Achilles heel of traditional reformism. How can one argue for an expanded government when many of its beneficiaries, even if employable, no longer work?
The trick is to show in some manner that they cannot work, despite what seems like plentiful opportunity. One contention is that work effort has declined due to the “deindustrialization of America.” Thus, according to Barry Bluestone and Bennett Harrison, the economy no longer produces as many well-paying jobs as it once did. Employment may be growing, but, allowing for inflation, most of the jobs are low-paid by the standards of the 1960’s and early 1970’s. Unskilled young workers who used to be able to get decent jobs in manufacturing today can only flip hamburgers at McDonald’s. This reflects the destruction of unionized factory jobs by imports, a tougher stance by business and government toward unions, and faltering productivity.
The case is overstated. Wages were only recently depressed (mainly by the recession of the early 1980’s), and what auto and steel workers used to earn cannot be a realistic norm for today’s economy. Moreover, even if the wage depression were permanent, it could not explain why the poor and dependent fail to work. To the contrary, in the face of lower wages one might expect people to work more rather than less, in order to maintain their incomes. That is just what most Americans did during the 1970’s as incomes failed to keep pace with inflation: many husbands worked longer hours and innumerable wives took jobs for the first time. Only among the poor and needy did work effort fail to rise.
Low wages cause difficulty for middle- and working-class Americans, but they seldom cause poverty or dependency by themselves. Even at the minimum wage, only a fifth of workers are poor, because typically they are young and can count on earnings from other family members. Despite low wages, a single mother can usually avoid welfare if she works. Only 7 percent of such mothers working full-time are on welfare, compared with two-thirds of those who do not work at all.
If the poor typically were working, they could be hurt by low wages, and their poverty would then take the worthy form it did in the 1930’s and before—of parents laboring but unable to support their families. Because today’s poor work so much less, the wage problem is largely beside the point. It might explain rising inequality among those who are working, but not why we have a nonworking underclass.
It is true that some people, poor and nonpoor, decline to work because of poor wages or working conditions. Some liberal analysts suggest that failure to find a “good” job is as valid a reason not to work as inability to find any job at all. They believe it is government’s responsibility to assure a “good” job even to the least-skilled worker. But the public clearly disagrees. Polls suggest that most Americans regard refusal to work as a form of private judgment akin to breaking the law, a rejection of the established terms of membership in this society.
This is not to say that the poor must accept any jobs the market offers. Job standards are a political question, and government legitimately sets a minimum wage and regulates working conditions. The point is only that “good” jobs cannot be guaranteed just for the poor, if only out of fairness to the many other workers who do “dirty” jobs every day. If the minimum wage and other standards are to be raised for the poor, they must be raised for all workers. And, as the experience of the 1930’s proves, higher standards can be effectively demanded only by those who have a work history under the old standards, not by those who seldom work at all.
Critics of the labor market also contend that, even if jobs exist, there is a “mismatch” between them and the location or skills of the poor. John Kasarda has shown that much employment opportunity has migrated to the Sunbelt or overseas from the Eastern and Midwestern cities where most poor and dependent people live. Jobs have left the inner city for the suburbs, where urban job-seekers find it difficult to follow because of inadequate public transportation and costly housing. The shifts have been greatest among manufacturing employers whose jobs—manual but well-paid—once offered the best opportunity to the low-skilled. Of course, a “high-tech” economy based on finance, information, and computing has grown up in many of the areas abandoned by manufacturing, but its jobs require more education than most poor adults have.
In his much-noted The Truly Disadvantaged: The Inner City, the Underclass, and Public Policy,3 William Julius Wilson argues that such shifts go far to explain the extraordinary dysfunction of today’s inner city. The decline in the manufacturing economy, he writes, means that unskilled black men can no longer get good jobs, which means they cannot support families. That in turn causes black women to go on welfare rather than marry, and from this fracture of the family the disorders of the ghetto follow.
The thesis is imaginative. It makes a connection between America’s two most serious social problems—the declining factory and the inner city. But as we have seen, the atrophy of well-paid jobs properly explains falling incomes among working people, not the failure of so many poor adults to work at all. Even low-paying jobs suffice to keep the vast majority of families out of poverty if both parents work. To account for nonwork, Wilson would have to show that no jobs exist for the inner-city poor. He does not claim this, nor would it be plausible to do so when the labor market is already so tight, and so dependent on foreign labor for “dirty” jobs.
Research has undercut the argument that jobs are inaccessible to the poor because of distance or skill requirements. It turns out that blacks work at much lower levels than whites and Hispanics even when they face the same commuting distances. Nor has the share of jobs available to the low-skilled declined very much since the advent of “high-tech.” The problem for poor blacks is that they commonly fail to acquire even elementary literacy and work discipline in school, and seldom work consistently even in available jobs. Many would be unemployable even in a manufacturing economy.
But if Wilson’s economic theory is unconvincing, he is at least brutally realistic in describing the ghetto. Where most discourse about welfare concentrates on women, he correctly calls attention to the plight of poor men. He does not hesitate to call the entrenched poor an “underclass.” He describes bluntly how crime and illegitimacy have escalated in the inner city. He calls liberals squeamish for refusing to admit such problems. As a black himself, Wilson may enjoy unusual freedom to be honest, but his candor is still courageous.
Wilson also stipulates that racial discrimination has sharply declined, and should not be invoked as a present cause of poverty. In fact, fairer opportunity has in some ways worsened the situation, for it has allowed better-off blacks, who used to uphold social mores in the ghetto, to depart for the suburbs. Deprived of their influence and resources, the remaining poor have succumbed more readily to their worst impulses.
No one has put the predicament of the ghetto more starkly. Unfortunately, Wilson’s realism fails at the point of policy. One would expect him to endorse authoritative measures to restore order and effort to the ghetto, particularly law enforcement and workfare. But because of his belief in economic causes, his recommendations reduce to conventional collectivism. He would downplay remedies aimed specifically at minorities, such as affirmative action, as they favor better-off blacks over the poor. Instead, he would expand welfare and other benefits aimed at broad publics. Above all, he would use economic planning, to assure a “tight labor market,” and society-wide bargaining, as in European corporatist economies, to balance social and economic priorities in national policy.
But again, the labor market is already tight. Collectivist measures, although they might help working people, will not avail those who fail to work. Even someone so hardheaded as Wilson finally acquiesces in the orthodoxy among liberal analysts, which is to assign all the responsibility for social problems to society itself, none to the poor. From such reasonings, government derives a mandate only to manipulate surrounding conditions, but not to govern the poor themselves so as to enforce civility.
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We turn finally to recent conservative writings on welfare. Where liberals and leftists usually want to expand what government does for the poor, especially at the federal level, conservatives usually want to restrict it. The reason is that they blame poverty not on society, but on government itself.
But there is more resemblance between the two camps than one might think. As observers from Tocqueville to Louis Hartz have noticed, even the Right in America is liberal, at least in the sense that it believes in a society of free and energetic individuals who have little need for public authority. In the name of that vision, conservatives no less than liberals have tended to evade the dilemma posed by the dysfunction of today’s poor.
A number of recent writings, however, show progress toward a comprehensive conservative social policy. Most earlier conservative analysts cared little about social policy and much more about economics and defense; those who did care asked mainly if the welfare state was good for the economy, not whether it was good for the poor. In his pathbreaking Losing Ground, published in 1984, Charles Murray set aside economic issues and accepted the liberal criterion for judging social policy—whether it reduced poverty. He found that, to the contrary, it increased poverty. The culprit was the welfare system itself, which tempted the poor to avoid marriage and work in favor of dependency. To resolve the problem, Murray wrote, the “rules of the game” had to be changed. Government should spend more on education but abolish welfare for the working-aged, and end all preferences for minorities. Only then would the economic prospects facing the poor be such as to favor marriage and work. Less government would mean less poverty.
Murray is all too close to someone like William Julius Wilson in his understanding of the social problem. Murray’s poor are imprisoned by government, just as Wilson’s are by the economy. Murray wants less government, where Wilson wants more, but both assume the poor will respond constructively if conditions are changed. As we have noted, however, the behavior of the seriously poor does not seem economic in the first place. The distressing ways of their lives, especially illegitimacy and crime, do not serve their own interests, let alone society’s. It is doubtful that even abolishing welfare, as Murray wants, would transform them into dutiful citizens.
Government cannot merely offer “freedom” to the poor; it must do something to ensure that they will do more to help themselves. One might think that conservatives, sensitive to the moral issues raised by welfare, would be more open than liberals to such a prospect. To entertain it, however, they would have to get over their hereditary suspicion of government. They would need a properly conservative doctrine of the uses of power.
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The beginning of such a doctrine can be glimpsed in Out of the Poverty Trap: A Conservative Strategy for Welfare Reform, by Stuart Butler and Anna Kondratas.4 This is undoubtedly the most sophisticated conservative study of social administration yet to appear. The authors are fierce critics of established policy, but unlike Murray they accept the need for national antipoverty programs, including welfare. And where Murray treats the poor mainly as economic actors and gives limited attention to moral issues, Butler and Kondratas speak constantly of the need to enforce “good behavior.”
Their criticism is aimed, rather, at the governance of antipoverty policy. They rightly dispute the liberal notion that social programs must be conceived in Washington, then imposed on the local level through federal funding and regulations. States and localities, they argue, can better design their own programs. The monopoly of public bureaucracies in delivering services should also be broken; local governments (through contracting) and clients (through vouchers) should force agencies to compete with private and nonprofit alternatives, especially in education. Local self-help organizations, created by the poor themselves, should be freed from inhibiting regulations. In short, the authors advocate the decentralized style of administration that Peter Berger and Richard John Neuhaus have dubbed “mediating structures.”
This is not to say, however, that national responsibility would be ended. Washington would continue to provide some funding and set a few national goals. It would require that states provide minimal welfare benefits and that working Americans see to their own catastrophic health and nursing-home insurance. In this conservative vision of social policy, such mandates take over much of the role played by federal grants in liberal conceptions. In other words, Butler and Kondratas retain a federal role, but redefine it for conservative ends.
One might hence suppose the authors would endorse the workfare movement, which has been based on just the kind of locally-developed programs they espouse. But, surprisingly, they accept only that experimentation should continue. They resist the notion that it is time to add definite work requirements to welfare nationwide. They warn that workfare might be oppressive and cost more than it saves.
Their doubt reflects more than the conservative fear of federal power. Like liberals, they want government only to play a “supporting role,” not to tell the poor what to do. Like liberals, they yearn to take for granted what they actually must create—the motivation of the poor to help themselves. They delight in discovering in self-help bodies the energy of poor people who have already asserted responsibilty for themselves.
But there are too few such organizations, just as there are too few Americans who are simultaneously poor and self-reliant. Those who accept responsibility for themselves are seldom poor for long, and those who remain poor seldom feel they can control their fate. To lean as heavily as Butler and Kondratas do on local organization is to repeat the vain liberal hopes of the 1960’s that the poor could progress through “community action.” People must deal with their personal problems before they can tackle political ones. How to overcome the passivity of the poor on their own behalf remains the great question.
A more confident and realistic conservatism appears in The New Consensus on Family and Welfare, the report of the Working Seminar on the Family and American Welfare Policy, a group of experts led by Michael Novak of the American Enterprise Institute.5 This study is perhaps the widest-ranging of the many issued by organizations in the year after the Reagan administration announced its intention to reform welfare. It is as concerned for values as Butler and Kondratas and as blunt about dysfunction as Wilson. It covers the entire poverty problem, but concentrates especially on the “behavioral dependency” that the entrenched poor bring on themselves. It stresses the role that the private sector must play in solutions, and it endorses social administration via “mediating structures.” But it is also readier than conventional conservatives have been to change federal rules to enforce norms. There is a realization that the dependent poor already live under government, and that without action by public authority no other suasions can be effective. Alongside appeals to nonprofit institutions to uphold mores, the report advocates tougher law enforcement and school standards at the local level plus stricter child-support enforcement and stronger work or education requirements for welfare recipients, backed up by sanctions. Much of this would entail changes in federal law.
We have here a vision of how public and private authorities might operate in tandem to reinforce the civilities essential to American freedom. The great divide between the public and private sectors, which so exercises American politics, is here deemphasized, so that both sectors may instead address the problems of disorder. Society’s needs, not ideology, set the terms for action. What is conserved is social values rather than, as in conventional conservatism, freedom from government itself.
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So much for the state of the intellectual debate. The residue of all these reasonings can be seen in the current fight in Congress over workfare. At first glance, there appears to be broad agreement that welfare should do more to promote work effort by the poor. But differences over the nature of work programs show that older partisan divisions persist and that requiring work remains intensely controversial.
Welfare policy-makers no longer speak from the political extremes. They are too alarmed about dysfunction among the poor to be shamed any longer by the arguments of the Left. Few now believe that a further redistribution of income or benefits would do much of itself to stanch the plague of crime and illegitimacy in the inner city. On the other hand, few propose to instill responsibility à la Charles Murray, simply by cutting back welfare benefits or eligibility.
Within the shrunken spectrum of congressional politics, the Left is represented by irresolute liberals who grudgingly recognize the problems of welfare but who can imagine no new response. They want to spend more on the essentially voluntary kind of work programs that have already failed to raise work levels. Their rhetoric speaks of “investment” in people in order to spur productivity, but as in the past they take for granted precisely what is at issue—the commitment of the poor to make good use of such opportunities.
Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan of New York is the unquestioned leader of this group. He has great credibility on welfare because, more than twenty years ago, he was one of the first to speak candidly about disorders among the poor. In his controversial policy paper, “The Negro Family: The Case for National Action” (1965), which became known as the Moynihan Report, he pointed out that the decay of the black family would impede the ability of many blacks to make use of the new opportunities they had won through civil rights. He was shouted down by liberals and black spokesmen, but the black family went on decaying until even black leaders were forced to acknowledge it. Today, bloodied but unbowed, he leads a chorus of liberal commentators who pride themselves on a new honesty about the social problem.
But what are they going to do about it? That is the rub. In 1986, Moynihan published his own treatise, Family and Nation.6 One searches its pages in vain for innovative proposals. In large measure the book updates the report. With copious statistics, it bemoans the trends toward social dissolution among black and white families alike. But it can suggest little response other than a minimum welfare benefit and more money spent on employment programs for the young. Moynihan would also crack down on child support—a welcome move, but one that would do little to promote effort by adults on welfare. For Democrats, then, social reform still means essentially spending money on problems without sharing responsibility for solutions with the receipients.
For their part, Republicans have abandoned the traditional conservative goal of getting welfare out of Washington. Early in its term, the Reagan administration proposed to devolve AFDC and other welfare programs (other than Medicaid) entirely to the states. Congress refused. In 1986 the administration advocated further experimentation with workfare at the local level, but accepted continuing federal funding, much along the lines Butler and Kondratas favor. It also proposed, in the spirit of the Working Seminar, to strengthen work and child-support requirements from the federal level.
The two sides then fielded their respective reform plans in Congress. The main Democratic bills were written in the Senate by Moynihan, in the House by Thomas Downey; the Moynihan plan has some Republican support. The leading Republican proposal was a House bill written by Hank Brown and Bob Michel and later endorsed by the administration. In many respects the proposals look similar, and this has led the press to overstate the degree of actual agreement. In fact, on the narrow subject of workfare, the plans perpetuate the differences that have separated the parties over social policy since the New Deal.
On December 16, 1987, the House adopted the Downey bill on a largely party-line vote; in the Senate, Moynihan’s bill will come to the floor some time in the spring. The final legislation, thus, will probably involve a compromise of the two Democratic bills. Republican ideas will have little influence unless a forceful threat of a veto comes from the White House, and that seems unlikely. The major battle appears already over. Yet much more was at stake in it than most commentators have realized.
The most visible issue is the scale of government effort—the traditional nub of partisan dispute. The Democratic bills are benefit-oriented. They require that state AFDC programs cover two-parent families where the father is unemployed (this is now an option), and they would spend more on training and child-care services for recipients seeking to work. As a result, according to estimates from the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO), the Moynihan bill would raise welfare costs by $2.3 billion over five years, the Downey bill by $5.7 billion. Those are small sums compared with the cost of past welfare-reform plans, but hardly negligible with the federal budget so severely in deficit. The defeated Republican bill, which avoided benefit increases, would have cost only $1.1 billion.
A second issue is federal control. The Democratic plans continue the tradition of setting even the details of welfare policy from Washington. The rejected Republican bill would have expanded the states’ freedom to experiment, to the point where there would less clearly be a national welfare policy.
A third issue is the quality of jobs the programs could ask receipients to take. The Democratic plans avoid forcing recipients to take jobs beneath their expectations. More training for “better” jobs is offered as an alternative to menial work. New restrictions make it harder to move clients toward work in available jobs. Recipients can demand better child care before accepting work, and they need not take jobs that, due to loss of benefits, would reduce their net income.
The Republicans were much readier to require work in available jobs, because they thought it fair and they doubted the capacity of training to raise skills and wages. They wanted welfare adults above all to become working, or “deserving,” poor, whether or not this raised incomes. Since when, they reasoned, did the working poor ever expect to go first-class? Rather, they expected to be working-class, and their children middle-class; no society has ever offered more.7
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These disputes over cost, federal control, and job standards have complicated the current debate in Congress, but they are extraneous to the central issue—whether reform should truly require adult recipients to work, as against just offering them the chance to do so. In theory, such a requirement has existed since 1967. All recipients are judged employable if they are sixteen or over, not in school, and without responsibilities in the home such as children under age six. (Those restrictions already exempt two-thirds of welfare mothers.) But usually the only thing an employable person must do is to register with the work program. The proportion of registrants who are summoned to participate actively is small, a third or less—federal rules set a minimum of only 15 percent. Typically work programs “cream”—serving only the most employable recipients and forgetting the rest. Since the clients chosen are those most likely to go to work anyway, such programs have little real effect on the welfare problem. Despite twenty years of “work requirements,” the work test remains a formality for most recipients.
The Democratic bills expand the employable pool by exempting only those mothers with children under three, a desirable step. But the change would have little impact because nothing would be done to raise participation in work programs. States could undertake to do so, with Washington paying most of the cost, but they would not have to. Even the existing 15-percent floor is deleted.
The Republicans, by contrast, would have raised participation levels sharply. States would have had to have 80 percent of teen-age recipients in school within three years, and would have had to raise the participation rate in work programs from 15 to 70 percent over nine years. Many local administrators blanched at the challenge, and this is one reason the Democratic bills omit any participation standards.
The difference in outcomes between the two approaches would have been stark. In a given year, over two million employable recipients are registered in work programs, but only about 700,000 participate actively. According to CBO estimates, the Downey bill, despite its cost, would over five years add only 210,000 more participants and cause only 15,000 families to leave welfare. The comparable figures for the Moynihan bill are even more modest—86,000 and 10,000. But the Republican bill would have raised participation by 935,000, or more than four times Downey, and would have ushered 50,000 families off the rolls. It would have done this at low net cost because the expense of serving the new participants would have been largely financed by savings to welfare as more clients entered jobs.
Clearly, it is the Republican plan that might over time have transformed the passive character of welfare, by establishing the effort to better oneself as the norm for dependent adults. True, everything would have depended on the implementation. Even were serious requirements enacted, Congress would have to support them over years, and localities would have to develop effective programs, before workfare became a reality “on the ground.” But the first step must be legislation.
The major liberal scruple about workfare remains the idea that the dependent should have to do anything to help themselves. On the Left, the poor above all still retain the identity of claimants for whom things are done. That idea is what welfare reform must change, as it has become a greater impediment to employment than all others. Whatever the amount spent on workfare, whatever the job standard proposed, no real progress in welfare is imaginable until government obligates needy adults to assume greater responsibility for their condition. The onus of achieving employment must be explicitly shared between them and government, with the latter providing needed benefits but the former contributing a commitment to work. Unfortunately, the defeat of the Republican bill pushes serious work obligations some years further off.
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Workfare involves immediate political risks for both liberals and conservatives, because the notion of using government to enforce norms is so sensitive an issue in each tradition. There are longer-term risks as well. Since the Great Society, all fundamental social reform has been blocked by the stubborn persistence of a nonfunctioning welfare class. In the face of that dilemma, neither Left nor Right has mustered the political support it would need to implement its prescription for the nation. The American people reject more redistribution as long as a major part of the poor appear undeserving, but neither will they permit major cutbacks in social benefits as long as so many people remain needy.
If a serious workfare policy were to succeed in reducing dependency, the poor would appear more functional. Which side then would inherit the initiative in social policy? By causing more poor adults to enter available jobs, workfare would diminish their need and, by that standard, their claims on government. The welfare nightmare would recede, and Americans would awake to find themselves again a nation of self-reliant citizens. Conservatives could then make stronger headway toward cutting income benefits and returning to a more free-market society.
But equally, workfare might lead to a more radical politics. With more adults working, the disadvantaged would become more able to demand things the way the middle class does—on the basis of desert rather than need. They would have greater power, both economic and political, to prosecute their claims. They could form stronger unions and shift electoral politics to the Left. We might finally see a self-conscious socialist movement in the United States.
Both Left and Right may wish to go on tinkering with welfare, preferring the devil they know to the daunting vistas opened by true reform. But this would be wrong. To restore civility to welfare would serve each side’s leading value. It would advance equality, as the poor would be better off. And it would recover for them the essence of freedom as Americans historically have known it, which is to participate as equivalent citizens in a common society.
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1 Pantheon, 205 pp., $16.95.
2 Piven and Cloward, in the chapters written by them, crib numbers and studies from my own Beyond Entitlement and other secondary sources. Fred Block's chapter on economic policy is the only one that seems based on the author's own studies.
3 University of Chicago Press, 254 pp., $19.95.
4 Free Press, 264 pp., $17.95. I reviewed this book in the Wall Street Journal, November 16, 1987.
5 University Press of America, 143 pp., $9.75. Both Kondratas and I were members of the Seminar.
6 See the article by Glenn C. Loury, “The Family, the Nation, and Senator Moynihan,” COMMENTARY, June 1986.
7 The desire to raise job quality has been the real agenda behind proposals by some liberal intellectuals to replace welfare with public employment. The idea is that needy mothers, rather than being given income, should be guaranteed jobs in government. Mickey Kaus proposed this in a widely-noted article in the New Republic in 1986, as did Irwin Garfinkel and Sarah McLanahan in Single Mothers and Their Children.
The idea sounds like workfare but raises many practical objections. It would encounter prohibitive opposition from government unions; it would be much more expensive than private-sector workfare; and there seems little need for it as long as private jobs are plentiful. Above all, it might not truly require work. Supposedly, public jobs, paying only the minimum wage or less, would act as a lever to persuade the dependent to move to the private sector. But whenever government jobs have been created on a large scale, they have usually paid more than this. Once public jobs are the norm, the pressure is irresistible to make them “good” jobs, which then discourage recipients from taking the private jobs they can get. Furthermore, too much emphasis on guaranteed employment makes work more secure than it can ever be in the private sector. It becomes a benefit and not an obligation, in truth just another form of welfare.
