[In its issue with the cover date Dec. 15, 2005, the New York Review of Books published a review written by Christopher Jencks of Jason DeParle’s book on welfare reform, American Dream. Betty Reid Mandell wrote this letter to the New York Review, which was not published.]

 

December 3, 2005

 

Dear Editor:

 

      In his review of Jason DeParle’s American Dream, Christopher Jencks says that welfare reform turned out to be not so bad after all (12/15/05). While he originally thought that President Clinton should not have signed the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act in 1996, he has changed his mind. But Jencks is selective in his choice of data. He uses statistics about poverty and unemployment for all single-mother families to show that poverty rates went down since the passage of the welfare bill. But that doesn’t tell us what happened to welfare recipients. He admits that we don’t know anything about the millions who have left the rolls, but he doesn’t mention why that is. Although most new initiatives that Congress has passed contain provisions to study the effect of the bill, there was no provision to study the effects of the welfare bill. In other words, officials didn’t want to know what happened. Could the poverty rate have gone down because more mothers entered high paying professional jobs? Jencks doesn’t say. He also doesn’t break down his statistics by race. White welfare recipients left the rolls faster than black ones and poverty rates for blacks and Hispanics are far higher than for whites. Probably more white than black or Hispanic recipients got out of poverty, and fewer whites were unemployed.

 

      As further proof that welfare reform wasn’t so bad, Jencks cites statistics showing less hunger and homelessness since the bill was passed. But he minimizes statistics showing a recent rise in hunger and homelessness. To buttress his argument that homelessness is decreasing, he even cites a study entitled, “2004 City of Boston Homeless Census: Homeless Families Increase Dramatically.” His rosy view is contradicted by the mayors of 25 big cities in their 2003 report. They said that soup kitchens and food pantries were swamped. Forty percent of cities were unable to provide an adequate supply of food. More than 12 million families either did not have enough food or worried about someone in the family going hungry. Requests for emergency assistance increased 88 percent. Average demand for emergency shelter increased by 13 percent in a year and requests for shelter by homeless families increased by 15 percent. An average of 30 percent of requests for emergency shelter by homeless families were unmet in the past year. People were homeless longer.

 

      Jencks also doesn’t mention that there has been a steady increase in the number of abused and neglected children referred to foster care between 1995 and 2001.

 

      Jencks ignores or downplays data that reveal the real political purpose of welfare reform. Reducing poverty and unemployment was not a goal of welfare reform. The goals of conservatives were to slash social spending, to privatize the social spending that remains, to lower wages, to break public sector unions, and to police the behavior of low-income people, especially women, and most especially black women.

 

      Even if Jencks doesn’t, DeParle understood that the main goal of welfare reform was to get people off the rolls. He believes that much of the decline in the rolls was due to the message effect. He says, “From the TV news to waiting-room came the same strident message: ‘Get off the rolls!’ Scared, angry, or simply confused all kinds of families simply stopped thinking of the welfare office as a place to get help.” Errors in bureaucratic paper work threw many off the rolls. A Congressional investigation found that 44 percent of the penalties imposed on people were in error. The dramatic slashing of the welfare rolls has been heralded by officials as proof of the success of reform.

 

      Not once does Jencks mention privatization of welfare programs, even though deParle discussed this at length. The W-2 program in Wisconsin that DeParle studied was largely privatized. Both the private corporation, Maximus, and the non-profit, Goodwill, were rife with corruption. DeParle comments, “Like a gang-ridden school, Wisconsin‘s largest welfare agency was being run with a cop in the hall.” William D. Eggers of the Reason Foundation, a libertarian think-tank that exists to promote the privatization of government services, said that welfare privatization is now “probably the hottest area of privatization in the country.” Lockheed Martin, Electronic Data Systems, Andersen Consulting, Unisys, and a host of smaller companies were proposing to take over welfare programs. Does Jencks think this is the way to go?

 

      Jencks does not discuss the effect that welfare reform has on wages and unions. Privatizing welfare programs often results in weakening public service unions and lowering wages. When welfare recipients are unable to find a job, they are often placed in community service programs (called “workfare”). In Baltimore, a thousand workers had lost jobs to welfare trainees by mid-1997, despite the fact that city workers had only two years before won a city ordinance guaranteeing a living wage to anyone employed under contracts with the city. In New York City, thousands of workfare participants now do the work once done by higher paid city workers.

 

      Jencks does not discuss the influence of the religious right in policies that police welfare recipients’ behaviour. These include: the Family Cap (refusing to give cash assistance to a baby born while the mother receives assistance); “Learnfare” (reducing or ending assistance if a child is absent from school); “Shotfare” (reducing or ending assistance if a parent fails to get immunization shots for a child); marriage promotion programs; requiring teen parents to live either with an adult or in a special residential program. These punish children but are ineffective. Learnfare didn’t boost school attendance. A Rutgers University study of the Family Cap showed that it didn’t decrease pregnancies, but it did slightly increase the abortion rate. The state of New Jersey squelched the study, fearing the wrath of the Catholic church.

 

      Jencks says that the official poverty line has serious flaws in that it omits food stamps, free medical care, housing subsidies, and taxes. That argument has two flaws: the poverty line grossly understates how much it actually costs to live, and a majority of people don’t get those other benefits. Wider Opportunities for Women has done a study of how much income it takes for working families to meet their basic needs without public or private subsidies in specific locations, which they call the Self-Sufficiency Standard. They found that in all parts of the country, low-wage work alone is not enough to make ends meet. Across 10 communities, their sample family of a single working parent with an infant and preschool-age child needed $27,660 per year (or $13.10 per hour) in the lowest-cost location (New Orleans) and $59,544 per year (or $28.19 per hour) in the highest-cost location (Boston) just to meet its basic needs in 2003. With a full package of work supports in place (child care, medical insurance, housing subsidy, food stamps) nowhere in the 10 communities do average welfare-leaver earnings allow the sample parent to make ends meet; her earnings plus full work supports package cover on average only 83 percent of basic needs.

 

      Work supports are becoming increasingly inaccessible. Eligible families stopped applying for other programs, such as Medicaid and food stamps. Nationwide, about 2/3 of adults who left welfare lost Medicaid, as the number of uninsured grew to over 45 million in 2004. Wider Opportunities for Women points out that only 10 — 15 percent of eligible children receive child care assistance; only about 12 percent of eligible families receive housing aid or live in public housing; only 60 percent of those eligible for Food Stamps received benefits in 2000, and during 2002 and 2003, 36.7 percent of all children in the US went without health insurance.

 

      Wider Opportunities for Women recommends increasing the federal minimum wage from the present $5.15 an hour, creating jobs, increasing work supports, and expanding education and job training opportunities. The present TANF program does none of those, with its mantra of “Work First.” It allows only 12 months of vocational training, and the House of Representative’s proposal for reauthorization of the welfare bill proposes cutting that to 3 months. Officials do not want welfare recipients to have a college education, even though higher education is the surest route out of poverty. In Wisconsin by 1998 only one of six former recipients had a job that lifted her out of poverty, but the average salary of someone with a one or two year degree from Milwaukee Area Technical College ranged between $20,000 and $24,000. There has been a precipitous drop in college enrollment since the welfare bill was passed. Enrollment of welfare recipients in City College of New York dropped from 27,000 in 1994 to 14,000 in 1998; in Milwaukee Area technical College dropped from 6,455 to 274 in four years. If officials were serious about reducing teen pregnancy, they would encourage higher education. The most powerful factor in the decision to delay pregnancy until later in life is an adolescent’s commitment to education and a future career apart from motherhood.

 

      Jencks concludes that there is no going back. America will not revive welfare “as we knew it.” Gwendolyn Mink says, “We do indeed need to end welfare — but as poor mothers experience it, not as middle class moralizers imagine it.” There is, in fact, a better welfare program that has existed since 1935. It is called Social Security. In 1999 the Census Bureau showed there were 3,795,000 children, along with their parents, receiving Social Security. A widowed mother or father with 2 children would have received benefits totaling $20,712 a year. Who knew? This is one of the best kept secrets of the nation. The families just get their checks until the children grow up, with no caseworkers to pry into their private lives. The late great British welfare scholar Richard Titmuss said, “Programs for the poor are poor programs.” Poor people have little political clout. Social Security survives because it is politically protected by middle class people.

 

Sincerely,

Betty Reid Mandell

Professor Emerita, Bridgewater State College

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