Welfare "reform"

Few things anger me like welfare "reform" in the United States does. The story of welfare reform is the story of invisible victims, many of them children, and I'm just glad it doesn't seem to have spread into Canada. And I remember how it started. Back in 1988 Rolling Stone magazine did a big poll of the baby-boom generation, then in their late twenties and thirties. (Their biggest hero, Martin Luther King, was on the cover of that issue.) One thing I noticed was that the social issue that concerned them most, even higher than drunk driving, was catching welfare cheats. Politicians studied and learned.

Some Americans have a tendency to reduce problems to a moral issue. They don't want to admit that poverty is a complex problem that won't be solved any time soon. They want to believe it's a simple matter of people on welfare being lazy bums who need a kick in the behind. So you have a politician like Ronald Reagan (pray for his worthless soul) talking about a "young buck"--code word for Negro--buying steak with food stamps. Just recently the landlocked state of Kansas introduced a law preventing welfare recipients from spending money on cruise ships. (Cruise ships??) Of course, Republican politicians are playing a spin game: they want to give the impression that welfare recipients are leading the easy life!

Back in the '90s, I recall 60 Minutes doing a report about a black legislator in New Jersey introducing a law capping welfare payments to single mothers. If a single mother has another baby she'll get no additional money, and tough luck for her kids. The report introduced him by saying, "He has all the liberal credentials." (Ha! Liberal is as liberal does.) You can learn something about a society from how it views children, and in parts of the United States of America the well-being of children is viewed as the weak link.

Back in the mid-'90s Newt Gingrich and the Republicans introduced the "Contract with America." Welfare reform was its only major legislation that became law, and that's because Bill Clinton stopped vetoing it in the defining moment of his presidency. Some people said he had to sign it to get re-elected, but that excuse doesn't hold water: he already had a second term in the bag. Rather, he essentially betrayed his own constituency to be on the safe side. Clinton was the kind of "triangulating" leader who was in the business of receiving loyalty and not of giving it. (Think his wife will be any different if she gets elected?)

Don't listen to the people who claim that welfare reform proved successful. It's the "post hoc ergo propter hoc" fallacy. In fact, most of the former welfare recipients who found work would have done so anyway, because the American economy was prospering and producing jobs in the late 1990s, unlike today. A large number of people who were cut off did not learn to function without their financial dependence, and millions of children have been raised in destitution. And today we're seeing the ugly results.

Twenty years ago, liberal "realist" Michael Tomasky was saying, "Welfare reform is going to happen, and it's up to the left to humanize it." So how do you "humanize" the "two years and you're off" rule? By changing it to "three years and you're off"? The only way to humanize welfare reform is by removing the coercive element, which means removing the central element, which means defeating it.