Ain't No Trust. Judith Levine
Читать онлайн книгу.
A BRIEF HISTORY OF CASH ASSISTANCE FOR LOW-INCOME MOTHERS AND THEIR CHILDREN
PRWORA was not the first time the United States attempted to reform the way it delivers cash assistance to low-income families. In fact, just a mere eight years earlier, the Family Support Act of 1988 had made similar, though smaller, changes. Both pieces of legislation echo themes that run throughout the history of the American welfare state. Since the beginning of this history, politicians and the public have been concerned that “handouts” in the form of cash assistance would create a dependent population and undermine the value of work.1 Additionally, policy makers have resisted rewarding the “wrong” sorts of people—those deemed undeserving or unworthy of help either because they are able-bodied but are not employed or because their moral character is considered lacking in other ways.2 Those deemed deserving benefit from more generous social programs and those deemed undeserving receive less generous benefits or, sometimes, none at all.3 Popular resentment of welfare recipients, considered undeserving by many citizens, has played an important role throughout this history. This theme continues in the most recent reforms. In fact, one can interpret the welfare reform of 1996 as an aggressive attempt to promote “deserving” behavior (welfare exit, employment, marriage) and to transform the welfare population from an “irresponsible” and “undeserving” crowd to a responsible and deserving one.4 After all, the words “Personal Responsibility” appear in the name of the legislation that ushered in welfare reform.
While all forms of government social spending can be considered “welfare,” when people refer to welfare they typically mean cash assistance to low-income families. These families usually, but not always, consist of single mothers and their children. At the time the 1996 changes were being debated, the program that issued such assistance was called Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC). The earliest precursors of AFDC, which were instituted even before the United States had a federal system of social welfare policies, were the Widows’ Pensions, a set of state-level pensions designed to support Civil War widows, enabling them to continue raising their children rather than losing the children to orphanages. Widows, especially those who had lost their husbands in wartime military service, were considered a group particularly deserving of government assistance. Furthermore, staying home to raise their children was accepted as the appropriate role for women. This sympathy for war widows supplied the needed political will to pass the Widows’ Pensions. In doing so, state governments were willing to act as a substitute for an absent breadwinner in the family by replacing his earnings, at least in part.5
The concept behind Widows’ Pensions became the basis for a national program of cash assistance to low-income families when Franklin Delano Roosevelt passed his main New Deal legislation, the Social Security Act of 1935, in response to the Great Depression.6 The Social Security Act created a two-tiered national welfare state in which employed Americans receive social welfare benefits, such as disability and retirement payments, through a set of universal, employment-based, contributory social insurance programs, while those out of the labor market whose income falls under a defined eligibility level receive benefits through noncontributory public assistance programs. Roosevelt initially conceived of cash assistance to low-income families and similar public assistance programs as equal in importance to employment-based social insurance programs, but they quickly became less favored and less generous. Even Roosevelt feared that cash relief without work requirements would become a “habit with the country.”7
The two-tiered welfare state not only resulted in an uneven welfare state in terms of generosity but also divided the population into those eligible for the more generous programs and those shuttled into the less generous ones. Since women, racial minorities, and members of the lower classes have had less stable attachments to the labor force, the division has largely been based on gender, race, and class lines.8
These lines became even clearer in the 1960s when civil rights legislation and President Johnson’s “War on Poverty” and “Great Society” programs (inspired by President Kennedy’s antipoverty efforts cut short by his assassination) gave political voice and equal access to welfare benefits to many African Americans for the first time. Suddenly the welfare rolls swelled and those receiving cash assistance benefits were increasingly African American. In addition, the single-mother recipients of benefits were increasingly never-married women rather than widows. Coupled with the 1960s’ racial unrest in many cities, these changes made middle-class Americans less likely to view single mothers as a group deserving of government aid. While African Americans still constituted a minority of those on the welfare rolls, a public perception of welfare recipients as primarily African American probably decreased support for social welfare spending.9 Welfare served as a convenient focal point for white America’s anger at and judgment of African Americans. As Jill Quadagno writes in her book The Color of Welfare: How Racism Undermined the War on Poverty, “No program better exemplifies the racially divisive character of the American welfare state than Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC). Conservatives attack AFDC for discouraging work and family formation and for rewarding laziness. Such comments are really subtly veiled messages about family structures and employment patterns among African Americans. However, often the attacks are neither veiled nor subtle.”10 These racially tinged reactions to welfare largely spelled the end of the Great Society efforts to eradicate poverty.
As time wore on through the feminist movement of the 1970s and the increasing labor market participation of mothers in the 1980s, the idea that women should be home with children, and that those without a husband’s paycheck to enable them to do so should be paid by the government instead, lost support.11 Cash assistance to low-income mothers and their children was no longer seen as a benefit that appropriately replaced an absent male breadwinner’s earnings so that women could fulfill their duties as mothers and children’s basic needs could be met; instead, it was viewed as one that rewarded recipients who were undeserving on account of their lack of a work ethic and their sexual immorality. Attitudes gradually shifted from a “maternalist” welfare state, or one designed to support women’s roles as mothers, to a “universal worker” welfare state, or one that encouraged men and women alike to provide for children not through stay-at-home care but through paid employment.12 Some argued that the cash assistance program created perverted incentives that discouraged both work and marriage, creating a pathological “dependency.”13
The 1980s ushered in the transition from the “War on Poverty” to the “War on Welfare.” President Reagan used the image of the “Welfare Queen,” always depicted as an African American woman and often as one who picked up her welfare check in her Cadillac and fur coat, to drum up (or tap into) animosity toward welfare spending. In Reagan’s view, the biggest problem with welfare was the fraud it bred, and he used racial tensions to add fuel to the public’s anger over paying taxes for a program that, in many people’s eyes, benefited only the undeserving. In 1981, he passed the Omnibus Reconciliation Act, which began to chip away at welfare benefits. The Family Support Act of 1988 mandated that each state institute a welfare-to-work training program for welfare recipients and allowed states to require recipient participation, created work supports for recipients transitioning to work, and stepped up efforts to establish the paternity of children receiving benefits in order to increase enforcement of child support payments to reimburse the state for welfare expenditures.
But it was the Democratic president Bill Clinton who took welfare reform across the finish line. Polling during his 1992 presidential campaign bid indicated that his line promising to “end welfare as we know it,” which was written by a young aide the night before he first used it, was one of the most popular phrases he uttered on the campaign trail.14 Once elected, he set out to make good on that campaign promise. He brought top social policy experts from Harvard University and Washington, D.C., think tanks to help develop the right mix of programming. Then the Republican-led Congress drafted its own versions of a bill. Twice President Clinton vetoed these versions, arguing that they placed too much burden on recipients without enough support. When the third version came to his desk in August 1996, he signed. Mary Jo Bane and Peter Edelman, two of the experts he had brought to his administration to work on welfare reform, resigned in protest, claiming the new law would drive many additional families into poverty.15