Bury it. (Welfare: Where Do We Go From Here?)(Cover Story) Theda Skocpol.
Abstract:
Liberals should give up fighting current welfare reform, and instead turn
to a fight for family policy
that provides help for all poor working parents. Part of the backlash against
the AFDC program is that in most
taxpaying families both parents have jobs.
Full Text: COPYRIGHT 1996 The New Republic Inc. Bury It:
The
last thing Bill Clinton wants as the 1996 presidential campaign enters
the home stretch is a bunch of
television ads featuring his 1992 pledge to "end welfare as we know it,"
followed by Republican commentators
intoning that he blew "three chances" to do just that. So the president
will probably endorse whatever the House
and Senate plop on his desk.
But
"welfare as we know it" will not end when Clinton signs. Ever since the
Social Security Act of 1935, public
assistance has been a patchwork of partial subsidies and mild oversight
from Washington, channeled through
widely varying state administrative arrangements and eligibility rules.
If the current "reform" passes, the federal
"guarantee" to contribute some aid to all eligible children will end.
That
matters. But more consequential will be the dynamics set in motion in the
states. Many states won't pay for
much job training, and the new rules won't require them to do so. The new
legislation will also encourage
costconscious state governments to substitute federal funds, which they'll
continue to receive, for monies of their
own they must currently contribute to qualify for federal subsidies.
So
the impending welfare changes should be called the "Shirk Responsibility
for the Poor Act of 1996."
Congress will proclaim that the federal government has ended the "failed
welfare programs" of the past, while
the states will save money on the poor. The federal-state patchwork will
remain, but with less money. Anyone
who supposes the new legislation will produce large numbers of new intact
working families is welcome to
check the data in a few years.
Many
Democratic Party progressives swear to battle these welfare transformations
to the end. But I find myself
unwilling to woman the barricades. Whether or not Clinton signs this summer,
the Democrats have signaled their
willingness to dismantle federal welfare guarantees. The death knell for
Aid to Families with Dependent Children
is tolling. It is time to bury the corpse and move on.
afdc
started--not in 1935, as many people think, but in the 1910s--when forty
states passed mothers' pensions,
allowing local governments to make payments to impoverished widows so they
could care for children in their
own homes (rather than surrendering them to orphanages or foster care).
When mothers' pensions became
federally subsidized with Aid to Dependent Children in 1935, Americans
still presumed a mother's place was in
the home. But in the late twentieth century, they no longer do. Across
the class structure, fathers and mothers
alike hold paid employment. People will no longer accept a welfare system
that ostensibly pays poor mothers to
stay home. But the states are unlikely to turn afdc into an effective work
program.
Progressives
should give up defending an outmoded and terribly inadequate welfare system
centered on afdc.
They should call instead for work and family policies applicable to everyone,
yet structured to give extra help to
the least privileged working parents. Conservatives say they want work
and responsible parenthood? Let's take
them up on it--and try to create social policies that make it possible
for all Americans, poor or not, to work
while caring for children. Only when progressives adopt such an approach
will welfare reform as we know it
come, blessedly, to an end.
Theda Skocpol
Theda
Skocpol is author of Boomerang: Clinton's Health Security Effort and the
Turn Against Government in
U.S. Politics (W.W. Norton).
Article A18539239