Why we can't apply the lessons of welfare reform
Betsy's Page
Robert Samuelson looks back on welfare reform now that it has been in effect for ten years. Despite all the dire predictions of poor children on the street and starving, welfare reform has been an extraordinary success.
<<< A decade later, it stands as a rarity: a Washington success story. It did not succeed in the utopian sense of eliminating all poverty or family breakdown. It succeeded in a more practical way. It improved life modestly for millions of people and showed that government could orchestrate constructive change. There are small and large lessons in this. The small lessons involve poverty; the large lessons involve politics.
One little-known fact is that we have made gains against poverty in recent decades -- and welfare reform deserves some credit. The poverty rate among blacks has fallen sharply, though it's still discouragingly high. From 1968 to 1994, it barely budged, averaging 32.4 percent. By 2000 it was 22.5 percent. (The poverty rate is the share of people living below the government's poverty line, about $19,500 for a family of four in 2004.) Similarly, there have been big drops in child poverty. Since 1989 the number of children in poverty has fallen 12 percent for non-Hispanic whites and 14 percent for blacks.
The economic boom of the 1990s explains much of this improvement. But it is not the whole explanation, because even after the 2001 recession, many poverty rates stayed well below previous levels. For all blacks, it was 24.7 percent in 2004.
....Welfare caseloads have plunged. From August 1996 to June 2005, the number of people on welfare dropped from 12.2 million to 4.5 million. About 60 percent of mothers who left welfare got work. Their incomes generally rose. Many qualified for the federal Earned Income Tax Credit, which subsidizes low-income workers. Finally, there were intangible benefits: work connections, self-respect. >>>
In addition, teens having babies have decreased by a third. Sure, there are still poor people out there, but the problem has become more manageable. Also, having more and more poor immigrants, legal or otherwise, keeps the poverty rate low.
Samuelson tries to draw a more general conclusion from reflecting on this successful reform. He sees it as an example of the parties working together to rise above partisanship and wishes the parties would apply the same attitude towards Social Security or Medicare reform. Well, I have two answers for Mr. Samuelson. First, welfare reform was not a bipartisan issue. The new Republican congress passed it two times and it was vetoed by Bill Clinton twice until he followed Dick Morris's advice to sign it in 1996 to take the issue off the table in an election year.
Secondly, tackling welfare reform is a totally different project than Social Security or Medicare. In welfare you had a program whose costs were shared by everyone who pays taxes but whose benefits were targeted to a relative few people. And those people had lost some of their image of deserving of aid. They were also not a population known for their voter turnout.
With Social Security and Medicare, you again have programs whose costs are shared by everyone, but whose benefits are shared by a much larger chunk of the population than welfare. We all see ourselves as gaining the benefits of those programs one day. And those people are seen mostly as deserving - they paid in all their lives with the implicit bargain of what they were going to get back. And, perhaps most importantly, they vote. And they're well known as voting based on these issues.
So, I'm afraid we're not going to be able to follow Mr. Samuelson's recommendations and all come together and work in a bipartisan fashion to fix these programs. I wish we could. But when you have those ingredients of programs whose benefits are widely shared by a politically active population, you're never going to find reform easy. Unfortunately, the politicians will keep dithering and appointing blue ribbon commissions, but not following the advice of those commissions.
My daughter has some more on welfare reform.
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