Stymied: The Failure of Welfare and its Reform

Welfare has been hanging around in one form or another since the Great Depression, when President Franklin Roosevelt launched the series of executive orders and laws known as the New Deal. Nearly all of the federal safety nets we now have in place were birthed from the widespread financial calamity that opened the American public’s eyes to the possibility of poverty and hunger touching them personally. Over the years, the programs designed both to keep disaster from striking and provide handholds to lift people from abject poverty have changed their names, shapes, and even their functions, but they have kept a disturbing similarity all along. Our welfare programs have never functioned well enough to keep one of the most prosperous nations on earth from generating a sizable underclass too far behind the rest of the citizenry to ever hope of catching up, and each move to reform the system has effectively ensured that they never will.
Welfare currently consists of the meager Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), the ticking clock of Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), Women, Infants and Children (WIC), and the doomed varieties of Social Security. SNAP and TANF have largely been lauded as the triumphant result of President Bill Clinton’s attempt to “end welfare as we know it”(Welfare 19) with the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA) of 1996. Before the PRWORA the needy had Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC), which was somewhat accurately seen as unsuccessful because families stayed on its rolls for years and rarely rose from their level of poverty. Welfare fraud was a factor too, the largely fictional luxury car driving “welfare queen” conjured by Ronald Reagan and his cronies never died in the collective mind of the American people. Actual fraud should play a role in this discussion, of course. Because AFDC benefits never came close to providing families with enough money to do much more than lessen the impact of their plight and had very strict rules, many families lied. And many of them continued to have children, which both extended the time they’d be on welfare rolls and the amount of assistance they’d receive. Perhaps sometimes this was done intentionally. It happens. But by and large, even liars and cheats weren’t walking away with overflowing pockets. These families were operating at a loss, so to speak. And they continue to do so.
Despite much smaller rolls of welfare recipients nationwide after the replacement of AFDC with TANF, the US Census Bureau reports that the number of US citizens in poverty has grown considerably. In 2009, 43.6 million people lived below the poverty line, an all-time high(Census). How is this possible? How do we tout the success of our welfare system when the figures are climbing? How do we ignore the fact that 20% of youth under 18 live in poverty, or that a quarter of both our Black and Hispanic populations do as well(Census)? Even immigrants seeking the American Dream are finding it has dissolved in their grasp: 10.8% of naturalized citizens are at poverty level, too(Census). So why are people under the mistaken impression that our welfare remix has been a smashing success? Four words: numbers, spin, and willful ignorance.
When Americans are told of the most recent welfare overhaul and its glorious impact on the lives of the nation’s poor, the figures being flashed aren’t the ones that count. Usually the number comes from the amount of people who are receiving welfare and the number of those who have successfully become employed during their welfare-to-work program(Lost Ground 4). Less than half the number of people who collected AFDC benefits are receiving TANF aid(Lost Ground 4). Pretty impressive, right? This is one of the most intentionally misleading arguments surrounding the welfare issue. TANF does not function the same way AFDC did, and it wasn’t ever meant to. First, the new time limit of five years means that there are people who have been cut from the rolls because they exceed that number, not because they are capable of supporting themselves and their families(Lost Ground 44). Also, the person getting the TANF benefits must be working within two years of the start of their claim, no matter what, which translates to single mothers spending a good chunk of their money on childcare with no change vertically in their social situation, among other inferred problems. And speaking of single mothers, the government chose to crack down on illegitimacy and single parenthood by tightening its purse to those who need the most support. Families with two parents require only one to work, regardless of the amount of benefits they collect, while single moms must find employment, no matter their circumstances. While this may sound like a great social deterrent to finding oneself in those circumstances, how is this helpful to the person already at the end of their rope? Also, TANF’s rules are much more strict than the rules of the AFDC, so many families find themselves booted from the program’s rosters for minor, unintentional infractions and oversights(Welfare 41), and where can they turn then?
Add to these problems the additional trouble of child poverty and the foster system(Welfare 62). Does anyone remember the late 1980’s and the social problem of “latchkey kids”, the children of parents whose work made them unavailable when the kids got home from school? Those tykes were ostracized and pitied, and the adults were chastised for their bad parenting. Special news reports aired about the so-called epidemic. Who talks about that now? When was the last time Diane Sawyer interviewed a second grader forced to make his own afterschool snacks? With employment now a requirement of TANF, we seem to have made peace as a busybody nation with the loss to a nurturing environment that this indicates. Even worse, our foster care system often rescues children from poverty only to deliver them to abusive homes or other material conditions worse than what they left behind. With the amount of money TANF provides even smaller than its predecessor it is unclear how we as a society expect these families to better their lot, or to provide a foundation from which to launch the next generation.
Isn’t the aim of welfare programs like TANF the betterment of the lives of the people who need this kind of support? Poverty is cyclical. Kids born poor tend to die poor after bringing up children who will themselves someday be poor too. They’ve done studies. And those studies show a host of social problems connected to this, from drug addiction to incarceration. These, along with poverty, are often dismissed or addressed as problems that arise from personal issues and fault lines in the individual psyches of the people who experience them. But the numbers indicate that there are factors that contribute greatly to these problems that are outside of these individual’s control and can only be changed by outside intervention. When does it end? If we don’t provide a way to see that it does indeed end, how can it? And if we decide that it isn’t our job to end these problems, what does that say about the character of America?
Many people get indignant, even filled with rage and rail against the subject of welfare and its recipients. Why is that? Don’t we have a responsibility to take care of the people that make up our nation? Why does our government exist if not to address our wellbeing, individually and collectively? If our country doesn’t address these needs, to whose needs is it attending? And if we plainly see that a section of our population lacks the skills and resources to pull themselves out of the ever-deepening hole they find themselves in, do we not owe it to them to assist them in their journey upward? No one is arguing for a financial free-for-all, a free ride for anyone who wants to opt-out of being a productive member of society. No one wants America to be a nation of deadbeats who have somehow conned the system into paying for their every expense. No one wants to see America become the Land of Opportunism. However, no one wants America to devolve into a spineless- yes-man for the corporate sector who views the individual citizen merely as a burden and a point of consumption, a liability to be overcome and a potential market. Do we?
The welfare system is broken. Speaking plainly, it was never all that good to begin with. But the intentions behind the creation of welfare were far more noble than the wishes of those who aim to raze all trace of publicly funded institutions designed to help the unfortunate in our society. We need to examine deeply the concept of welfare and approach the subject with fresh eyes. Most importantly, we need to be able to walk away from our handiwork with a clear conscience, with the knowledge that we have fulfilled our obligations to our fellow man. If we can’t do that in our own backyard, we have no business attempting it on the other side of the fence, and we must then learn to live with what that means about us.







Works Cited
Albelda, Randy, and Ann Withorn, eds. Lost Ground. Cambridge: South End 
Press, 2002. Print.
Haarens, Margaret, ed. Welfare. Farmington Hills: Greenhaven Press, 2012. Print
“Income, Poverty, and Health Insurance Coverage in the United States: 2009” Census.gov, US Census Bureau, September 2010. Web. 6 October 2012.