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Welfare Reform
Strengthening the Safety Net, Jobs for All and a Guaranteed Minimum Income |
Howie Hawkins supports a guaranteed minimum income for all Americans – a proposal that President Richard Nixon made decades ago. Instead of guaranteeing that all Americans share in the bounty of our country and have enough income to pay for basic necessities, America instead has the greatest income disparity among all the industrialized countries.
Welfare reform should also include a guaranteed job for all those who want to work.
Welfare is properly defined as the various government programs that improve the well-being of American citizens. While politicians often use welfare to refer to the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program that assists poor children and their parents, welfare also includes Social Security, farm subsidies, school loans, various corporate subsidies, tax deduction for home mortgage interest payments and many other programs.
TANF is our principal anti-poverty program for children. Its weaknesses results in the US having twice the rate of childhood poverty as compared to any other industrial democracy.
The TANF program should be reformed in a number of ways: more emphasis on job creation, including transitional jobs that include education and training; stronger support for those making the transition to work, such as universal child care and health care; expanded access to job and skills training; expanded access to both basic education (e.g., GED, English as Second Language, adult literacy) and college; and better assessment of individuals' barriers to employment. If work participation is to be mandated, the number of required hours must be dramatically scaled back to reflect the reality that almost all of the participants are engaged in child rearing activities. In addition, the safety net, starting with higher benefits, should be dramatically increased for those unable to work, starting with those who have disabilities and/or who are caregivers for other family members.
Welfare reform requires a much greater investment in public transportation. The US has about the worst public transportation system in the world, certainly worse than many third world countries. This is of course a conscious political decision to promote the automobile and oil industries. The lack of access to affordable, reliable transportation is one of the biggest barriers to low-income individuals obtaining work – especially work that pays more than a poverty level wage.
TANF should also be overhauled to stop the harassment of people with disabilities. The 1996 changes greatly increased the number of individuals with physical or mental health disabilities that became homeless, because they were often required to participate in work activities that they were not able to do and thus had their benefits terminated.
The repeal of ADC was predicated on the premise that we could put all Americans to work (i.e., create a full employment economy) merely by imposing time limits on welfare without investing in job creation. It hasn’t worked. While the number of welfare participants has dramatically declined since 1996, poverty has not, and the lines at food pantries and soup kitchens are now at record levels. Few individuals who leave welfare for work escape poverty – with one exception, those who were able to obtain a college education. Welfare however now makes it almost impossible to get more than one year of a college education.
When Newt Gingrich and Bill Clinton decided to end welfare as we know and replace the old Aid to Dependent Children (one of the last vestiges of the New Deal), they promised that TANF would help poor people obtain a job that would support their family. Once the law was signed however, the promise was forgotten and instead government focused primarily on the punishment / tough love approach to welfare: lets make the system so tough that people will accept any alternative. This reflects the historical role of welfare: expand benefits and access during times of social unrest as a safety valve, and toughen it when there is a need to force more people into the low-wage corporate economy.
We should recognize the racist and sexist nature of the “welfare reform” movement – even though most welfare participants are white. While politicians have also enjoyed publicly attacking welfare, the national movement that resulted in the 1996 repeal of ADC tremendously gained momentum after former KKK leader David Dukes used welfare as a code word for race in his successful effort to win the Louisiana Republican gubernatorial primary. Even so-called Democrat liberals such as former New York Governor Mario Cuomo markedly changed his rhetoric on welfare after Dukes success.
Ninety percent of welfare participants are moms and their children. It is a manifestation of the feminization of poverty and the fact that our society avoids paying for services traditionally performed by women, such as child rearing.
The changes made early this year to the TANF program – starting with a significant expansion of work participation requirements – should all be repealed. When TANF was up for renewal in 2001, there was a bipartisan consensus among the nation’s Governors that reforms were needed to provide more support to those seeking to transition from welfare to work. There was recognition that those left on welfare were those with the greatest barriers to employment. Unfortunately, at the last moment President Bush jumped in and reversed the direction of the discussions to focus instead on making the work requirements even more stringent while ignoring the need for increased support for transitional programs.
Value judgments that are made about “welfare” for the poor should of course be applied to the other welfare programs as well. Thus if it is important to society that poor parents engaged in “work” activities to “pay back” society for helping them, such rules should also be applied to CEOs, farmers, students, homeowners, etc.
In America, programs that are designed to assist poor people are invariably designed poorly. This is partially designed to discourage and prevent poor people from participating in such programs. Only welfare programs that are designed to help all Americans in a particular group – such as seniors with Social Security and Medicare – are designed to work well, because politicians are worried about a possible political backlash. So anti-poverty programs such as TANF and food stamps should be designed to help all Americans so that they would work better.
Outside of the military budget, the biggest welfare program is allowing a tax deduction on interest payments for home mortgages. The US is unique in utilizing this approach to promote home ownership; banks are the prime beneficiaries, along with upper middle class homeowners. Unfortunately, allowing the interest deduction artificially increases the price of housing for everyone, including tenants, by about 20%, since the interest deduction enables buyers to pay a higher price than they would otherwise be able to afford. A fairer and more cost-effective approach would be to provide all Americans with a housing subsidy – say $5,000 each – that could then be used to help with mortgage or rent payments. This would go a long way to reducing homelessness in the US and would help dampen the skyrocketing cost of housing. |
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 *Website by David Doonan, Labor Donated to Hawkins for Senate Campaign* |
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