The myth that conservative welfare reform worked--Part 1

by: Paul Rosenberg

Sat Feb 27, 2010 at 13:30

In my recent 6-part take-down of Gerard Alexander's Washington Post commissioned op-ed,"Why are liberals so condescending", I dispensed with his somewhat opaque invocation of conservative welfare reform as a success with a simple observation:

Alexander is under the deluded impression that abolishing AFDC eliminated poverty.  He is wrong.

These reductions still left the US poverty rate (after taxes and transfers) well above the level of comparable Western European countries:

Although readily refuted by the relevant data, the myth that conservative welfare reform was a success remains a powerful Versailles shibboleth that deserves a full-dress take all its own, which is why I decided to write this multi-part diary.   Alexander's claim is actually quite vague.  In fact, he never really comes out and says, "conservative welfare reform worked." Rather his argument is that liberals were wrong not to listen to conservatives--without ever offering any actual proof that liberals weren't listening, as opposed to simply disagreeing:

Long-standing conservative concerns over the perils of long-term welfare dependency were similarly villainized as insincere and mean-spirited -- until public opinion insisted they be addressed by a Democratic president and a Republican Congress in the 1996 welfare reform law. But in the meantime, welfare policies that discouraged work, marriage and the development of skills remained in place, with devastating effects.

This narrative is fundamental untrue.  To pick the low-hanging fruit first, conservatives were insincere and mean-spirited, most obviously because at that time they were still vigorously pushing the notion that women not on welfare should stop working, go home, and care for their kids... conveniently overlooking the fact that if they did so, millions of them would inevitably become dependent on welfare as a direct result, along with the kids they were caring for.  Still, conservatives might have been right on the merits, despite their questionable motives... if only they'd been relying on actual data, instead of made-up racist anecdotes like Reagan's infamous "welfare queen," or Charles Murray's outright lying with his data in Losing Ground, which was mercilessly exposed by Robert Greenstein in his March 25, 1985, New Republic article, "Losing Faith in 'Losing Ground,'" unfortunately no longer available online that I could find.

Because more and more women were working outside the home, there was a broad shift in attitudes toward welfare, but this included liberal ideas about how to ensure that work would lead to a way out of poverty as well as conservative ideas about character, dependency, etc. that were ultimately utterly indifferent to poverty reduction.  The myth of conservative welfare reform's "success" servers to utterly obliterate the existence of alternative, reality-based liberal approaches--some of which managed to find their ways into practice despite the core provisions of conservative welfare reform.

Real history is never as neat and simple as the myths made up to hide it, but Diana Zuckerman's artlce, "Welfare Reform in America: A Clash of Politics and Research ", published in the Journal of Social Issues, Winter 2000 (pp587-599) provides a concise recounting that amply refutes the myth as Alexander repeats it. To begin with, Clinton had been deeply involved in earlier welfare reform efforts, both as a sitting governor and as an official in the National Governors Association--efforts that resulted in legislation that could not be adequately implemented because of the souring economy as the 80s ended:

As a presidential candidate, Bill Clinton made it clear that he would not defend the welfare system but instead would work to change it. As governor of Arkansas and an officer of the National Governors' Association, he had already staked out a position aimed at moving families off welfare. As President, he quickly appointed experts to work on welfare reform, with particular focus on toughening child support laws and requiring welfare recipients to prepare for self-sufficiency (Koppelman, 1993).

Although the public and policymakers were ready for major changes in the welfare system, many did not realize that a law passed in 1988, the Family Support Act, already had strengthened child support collection and ordered states to require able-bodied recipients to enter remedial education or job training projects. President Clinton had been instrumental in negotiating that legislation as an officer of the National Governors' Association, and the bill was expected to help single mothers and to encourage more women to move from welfare to work.

However, the weakened economy of the late 1980s led to a surge in the welfare rolls instead, with the size of those rolls increasing 25% from 1989 to 1992. As a result of the recession, states were unable to provide matching funds to claim their full share of the federal funding for Job Opportunities and Basic Skills (JOBS), a training program. The law did not seem to be working, and the pressure to "do something about welfare" grew.

Once elected, Clinton decided to tackle healthcare reform first, since that would provide a piece of the needed foundation for comprehensive welfare reform:

As a candidate, Clinton had promised to reform health care as well as welfare, and as President, he decided to focus on health care reform legislation first. This was a logical choice, because the lack of affordable health care was a major disincentive for single mothers who wanted to move from welfare to work. The Clinton administration strategy was to first pass a law that would make health care affordable for the working poor, so that it would be easier to make the other legislative changes necessary to reduce the welfare rolls. Improving access to health care would help those families that would lose Medicaid when they left welfare for low-level jobs that did not offer health insurance as a benefit.

That didn't mean the Clinton Administration stopped thinking about welfare reform however--as the conservative narrative would have it:

While health care reform took center stage in the public eye, a welfare reform plan was being quietly developed by Clinton administration officials. As Assistant Secretary for Children and Families at HHS, Mary Jo Bane wanted to refocus the welfare system on work and to give states more flexibility regarding welfare policies (Bane, 1997). States were already submitting welfare reform proposals to the federal government to request waivers from the federal requirements. As these requests came in, however, Bane became concerned about the "race to the bottom" as each state offered more stringent criteria for welfare benefits, perhaps in an effort to encourage poor people to move to other states.

There was popular political pressure, but the Clinton officials wanted to respond to it responsibly, not punitively:

Meanwhile, polls were showing tremendous public support for requiring all "able-bodied" welfare recipients, including mothers with young children, to get education or training for up to 2 years and then to work (Ellwood, 1996). Assistant HHS Secretaries Bane and David Ellwood wanted the federal law to set consistent national criteria and restrictions, in order to avoid a race to the bottom by the states. According to Ellwood, their proposal to reform welfare had four major goals:

1. Make work pay. Low-income workers need a living wage, health care, and child care to make working make sense instead of welfare.
2. Two-year limits. Transform the welfare system from a handout to a hand up, with clear requirements to work after 2 years of training or education.
3. Child support enforcement. Require absent parents to pay, whether or not they were married.
4. Fight teen pregnancy. The plan offered grants to high-risk schools that proposed innovative initiatives to lower rates of teen pregnancy and also supported a national clearinghouse and a few intensive demonstration projects.

There was a hitch, however, and the hitch was cost--never a concern when conservative Republicans want to start a war or otherwise waste tens, even hundreds of billions of dollars, or more:

The public seemed ready for these kinds of changes, but the Clinton administration was concerned about the cost. In order to move single mothers from welfare to work, it would be necessary to provide job training, child care, and other services for many of them. The cost of those programs and services would initially be high, and it was expected that the savings as families moved off welfare would not be great enough to make up for those extra costs. Since President Clinton had also promised to cut the country's enormous budget deficit, and since a major goal of welfare reform was to save money and make the federal government smaller, it did not seem politically feasible to expect taxpayers to pay more for welfare reform than they were paying for the existing welfare system, even in the short term. To save money, the Clinton plan included a slow phase-in of the program, which caused some conservative critics to accuse the administration of not being serious about reform (Ellwood, 1996).

There were a number of different reasons the Clinton effort failed, but Zuckerman identifies several of the most pertinent in the following passage:

Why did the Clinton plan fail? Ellwood (1996) speculates that they should have tried to pass welfare reform before health care reform instead of afterward. Ellwood points out that the Clinton welfare reform plan got little attention because it was introduced during the summer of 1994, when health care reform was on center stage. As someone involved in health care reform legislation in the Senate at the time, I believe that the problem with the timing was not lack of attention but rather the weakened credibility of the Clinton administration because of the barrage of criticism aimed at its health care proposal. Ellwood also speculates that the President's promise to "end welfare as we know it" was a potent sound bite but did not address the concerns of many Democrats about whether the new system would be better than the old. Ellwood believes that the phrase "2 years and you're off" was even more destructive, because it implied no help at all after 2 years, which he says is "never what was intended." I agree that these were problems, and in addition, the tension and lack of trust between the congressional Democrats and the Clinton administration contributed to the view of many Democrats that the Clinton welfare plan was too controversial and would make them politically vulnerable.

Regardless of what other factors played a role, and which were more important, once the GOP took over Congress in 1995, they took charge of writing the law, and Democratic concerns to craft a program that helped the poor were largely swept aside.  Conservatives simply assumed that the problem was "welfare dependency" and that once dependency was done away with, that would solve the problem.

The differences in liberal and conservative perspectives were multifaceted, but the clearest distinction is captured when Zuckerman writes:

Charles Murray's book Losing Ground was a rallying cry for many conservatives throughout the welfare debate because it argued that government welfare programs had encouraged high unemployment rates and served as a disincentive to marriage (Koppelman, 1996). On the other side, progressive advocates quoted researchers like William Julius Wilson, who concluded that the decline in well-paying manufacturing jobs and a rise in lower paying service jobs has been disastrous for inner-city Black men and was the root of ghetto problems such as crime, low marriage rates, and drug use (Koppelman, 1996).

It's clearly much easier to lecture and punish welfare mothers than it is to actively restructure an economy to provide more opportunity for those on the bottom to work their ways upward. The very ease of the conservative prescription was part of its selling point.  The fact that it didn't address the basic underlying problem was, politically, a feature, not a bug.

If one accepts Murray's flawed framework, it's then possible to selectively add some data to the mix, so as not to appear totally arbitrary.  But the basic underlying causes are still being ignored, and it should surprise no one that US poverty rates remained higher than other comparable countries as indicate at the beginning of this diary.  As Zuckerman explains:

The bill that Congress eventually passed is lengthy and complicated, but the introductory section includes "findings" that explicitly show the ideology behind the legislation. There are 10 findings, and the first three set the tone:

1. Marriage is the foundation of a successful society.
2. Marriage is an essential institution of a successful society which promotes the interests of children.
3. Promotion of responsible fatherhood and motherhood is integral to successful child rearing and the well-being of children.

The bill's focus on marriage and responsible parenthood reflects the Republican Party's ties to the Christian right as well as the growing disenchantment with government programs throughout the country in the early and mid-1990s. The rest of the findings, however, use research data to support this focus, and many of the statistics are ones that have been employed by experts across the ideological spectrum to support public policies aimed at reducing teen pregnancy, reducing poverty, and other goals that are as popular among liberal Democrats as conservative Republicans, as well as everything in between.

In the end, Zuckerman concludes, the bill was not as disastrous as had been feared, in part because of factors outside its text.  The "race to the bottom" by states that had been seen in the early 1990s, before the bill passed, did not materialize, in part because a growing economy alleviated budget pressures and reduced pre-tax and transfer poverty, and in part because welfare funds were provided as block grants to the states, so that more could be spent on declining welfare rolls.  But this said nothing about what might happen when the economy turned sour again. The Clinton Administration also implemented regulations that provided additional flexibility for the states that further mitigated some of the restrictions Congress had imposed (Described by Center on Budget and Policy Priorities here).

However, if the results were not as disastrous as many feared, neither were they a resounding success, as America's continued higher poverty rate attests.  The fact that "not an immediate unmitigated disaster" qualifies as an epoch conservative "success" should tell you everything you need to know about the larger subject of conservative "successes."  

What's Next: Parts 2-4

The rest of this series will consist of five sections delivered in three additional parts.  Part 2 (running tomorrow) will include two sections. Section 1 is a look at the broader rightwing hegemonic framing that allows them to claim that "welfare reform worked" despite not actually doing anything of the sort.  Section two presents a brief example of a very sensible push-back against the myth, which will show just how much overkill I've engaged in. Part 3 (running next Saturday) will consist solely of Section 3, which will look at national data that shows how beside the point welfare reform has actually been in terms of the larger problem of poverty.  Part 4 will conclude with two sections.  Section 4 will examine international data underscoring just how much of a failure conservative welfare reform has been.  Section 5 will look at some state-level data that further underscores the limited impact of conservative welfare reform.

It's my hope that this sort of multi-level examination will stand in sharp contrast to the simplistic Versailles myth it is intended to deconstruct.