It's rare that a distinguished group of academics, experts, and policymakers
is as wrong as opponents of the 1996 welfare reform seem to have been.
The '96 law was going to send a million children into poverty, start a
"race to the bottom" among states, and cause a dramatic rise
in child abuse and domestic violence. There would be "a third of
a million children in the streets," said Daniel Patrick Moynihan,
who predicted "something approaching an Apocalypse." None of
these things has happened. They are highly unlikely to happen, even if
the current recession proves deeper than expected.
Instead, about 2 million welfare recipients have become workers, cutting
caseloads in half. That's a major accomplishment whether or not they have
gained a cent in income. The main purpose of welfare reform, after all,
was not to immediately reduce poverty or boost income. It was to replace
a welfare culture -- whole communities without fathers or breadwinners
-- with a working culture, in which children had employed parents as role
models, in which the discipline of work shaped home life, in which the
natural incentives favoring marriage were restored.
Of course, the dramatic increase in work among poor women did
help reduce poverty. Child poverty -- especially black child poverty --
has plummeted. The percentage of children in so-called "deep poverty"
has fallen significantly as well. Would poverty have fallen faster, in
the strong 1990s economy, without welfare reform? That's impossible
to disprove. But in the '80s boom child poverty fell less than half as
much. Welfare reform appears to have pushed poor single mothers into the
work force just when it was a good time to be in the work force. Between
1993 and 2000, income in the bottom quintile of female-headed families
rose 28 percent. Earnings more than doubled. If the War on Poverty had
put those numbers on the board, Ronald Reagan would be an obscure ex-actor.
Most important, welfare reform appears to be provoking the sort of long-term
cultural change that was its primary purpose. The decades-long trend toward
single-motherhood and out-of-wedlock births, thought unstoppable, was
in fact stopped in the '90s. For African-Americans, the trend has actually
been reversed: According to Wendell Primus' own calculations, 2000 was
the first year in decades in which a black child was more likely to live
in a two-parent home than a single-mother home.
Ron Haskins, an architect of the 1996 bill, was justified, then, when
he called it "the most successful large social reform since the New
Deal." It would be foolish to make major changes absent evidence
of major problems. But another of welfare reform's achievements was to
enable a new consensus in favor of helping poor Americans who work.
Broadening unemployment insurance, ending the marriage penalty within
the Earned Income Tax Credit, raising the minimum wage, and expanding
health insurance are all ways to aid the working poor by building on the
work-ethic principles of the '96 reform.
We could also do more to correct the greatest disappointment of welfare
reform so far, which is the general failure of states to emulate Wisconsin's
successful public jobs plan. Instead of cutting welfare recipients off
after five years (the conservatives' idea), or relaxing time limits to
let them off the hook (the liberals' idea), let's put them to the test
by offering them a public job. If they show up and work, they keep getting
a check.
My worry is that instead of building on these popular work-ethic principles,
liberals will again try to fudge them by promoting food stamps, a welfare
program that gives aid to people who work hard every day -- but also to
never-married mothers who stay home watching "Jerry Springer."
That's a good way to alienate the voters, who've shown they are willing
to pay taxes to help poor Americans as long as those poor Americans are
willing to work.
When welfare reform passed in 1996, Congressional Budget Office estimated
that it would save $54 billion over the period from 1997 to 2002. Welfare
reform went much further than revamping the Aid to Families with Dependent
Children program: The major savings in the bill were the immigrant and
food stamps provisions. The immigrant provisions were so onerous that
some of the worst of those changes were modified one year later, restoring
about $13 billion of the budget reductions. Most of the food stamps changes
were budget reductions, not well-designed policies to put families to
work. Since 1996, food stamps outlays have declined by an even greater
amount than was projected because participation has fallen significantly
among those families who are eligible for benefits.
Mickey Kaus seems to have forgotten these provisions. He certainly does
not succeed in justifying denying all benefits to immigrants. Sponsors
of immigrant families do have an obligation to help their relatives get
established in this country, but they fulfill this obligation. Immigrant
families work hard and pay taxes. There is no reason immigrant families
should be denied health care or the work supports they need to move into
the labor force.
Kaus is 100 percent correct that Americans believe in work, but Americans
also believe that people should be economically better off when they work.
The food stamp and immigrant cuts were not essential to reducing TANF
caseloads or increasing the work participation of never-married mothers.
Those provisions were the primary reasons that we projected back in 1996
that there would be more poor children as a result of welfare reform.
And there is plenty of recent evidence that the effectiveness of TANF
and food stamps in combating poverty has been greatly reduced.
Poverty reduction, reducing dependency, and increasing work effort are
not inconsistent goals. In our free market economy, there is no guarantee
that wages can pull a mother and her children out of poverty. Work is
essential, but so are work supports. I agree with Kaus that child care,
health insurance, and increases in the minimum wage are all very important.
But some working families also need monthly assistance like TANF and food
stamps. The annual Earned Income Tax Credit cannot be the only source
of assistance for working families.
Food stamps, like child care assistance and Medicaid, are a way to supplement
a family's earnings so that working poor families can escape poverty.
Kaus' innuendo that food stamps go to "never-married mothers who
stay home watching 'Jerry Springer,'" or that relaxing TANF time
limits lets them off the hook, is facetious and misleading. Time limits
would only be relaxed for working families. Kaus fails to mention that
close to 39 percent of food stamps go to households where all of
the adults are either elderly or disabled, and that of recipient households
with an able-bodied, non-elderly adult, most are either subject to the
work requirements or are working.
In reauthorizing the TANF program, let's help all parents, including
fathers, get work so they can support their children. And when they do
work, let's ensure they receive work supports including food stamps, child
care, and health insurance that help them escape poverty. Americans support
work and reducing poverty. Kaus is right: The public supports helping
the working poor. We need to find a way to do that despite the fact that
we no longer have budget surpluses.
