Welfare State Dynamics

Welfare and Social Responsibility

Welfare. Read that word to yourself and ask what popular images surround it. The first thing is probably women and children. This one is correct, because 97% of AFDC (Aid to Families with Dependent Children, the federal "welfare" program) is made up of women and children. Young women? Not really-the average age of a mother receiving welfare is 29, and only 7.6% are under the age of 20. Is she black? Maybe, because the composition of the welfare roles is about the same percentage black and white. More kids than she can count? The average welfare family has 2.9 members. That means a single mom would have 1.9 children (fewer than the national average). Forever "dependent?"-the average length of a stay on welfare is 22 months. We certainly think that they don't work. Without bringing up the question of why raising children is not considered work, the average AFDC benefit plus food stamps still is only 69% of the poverty line. Women on welfare are constantly working to make up that difference. Do we think of welfare as expensive? AFDC represents just over 1% of the national budget. If welfare is not about young women having lots of babies and living their life off the generosity of the state, and if it's a minuscule part of the federal budget, why have Republicans chosen it as their pilot issue? Why, when our Federal Reserve is raising interest rates and attempting to maintain an unemployment rate of 6.2%, and when a job at minimum wage would still leave a mother with two children 23% below the poverty line, is entrance into the paid workforce being pushed as the panacea for poverty?

If we are serious about getting people to work we need relevant training programs, child care provisions, and efforts at job creation. These at least were discussed in the Clinton plan, if the plan was in many other ways as punitive and insubstantial as the Republican plan. The Republican ideology is particularly insidious because it shifts the entire frame of debate from the structural to the moral. It implies, even states, that if those people would just clean up their morals and stop being so lazy that they could have a place in the American Dream. Today welfare moms are understood to be the symbol for all that is morally wrong with America. They are "dependent" on the state, and they do not fit into the American norm for family structure. The Republican act proclaims that their poverty is their fault, and that they need to take responsibility and get themselves out. If they can't, that is their own problem. The goal of the Republican act is to "restore the American family, reduce illegitimacy, control welfare spending and reduce welfare dependence."

The American family has been the latest political fad since the Murphy Brown debate, and the democrats quickly jumped on the Republican bandwagon. With everyone rushing to show off their cookie-baking ability and to expound on their belief in discipline and family values, no one seems to be asking why, if it is the cure for all evils, the mythical American family doesn't seem to be all that popular with the American public. People are waiting longer to get married, and since 1965 the rate of out-of-wedlock births has risen from 10 to 30 percent. People are getting married later and less often than they used to, and "shotgun" marriages are out of vogue. We all know the statistics about how many people get divorced. Some say that these stats reflect the fact that people just don't have the will to 'stick it out' anymore, and bemoan the loss of family values, but the fact is, people get divorced or decide not to marry out of choice, albeit an often constrained choice. Maybe the problem is that marriage is not as beneficial, or as necessary as it once was.

I would argue that the people are getting divorced and not ever getting married in large part because now it is often economically feasible for a woman not to marry. Access to the workplace for women and the loss of high-paying manufacturing jobs has meant that women earn more compared to men, decreasing their economic need to marry. Being a single mother is more possible, and more accepted today than it ever has been. This doesn't mean that it is easy, however. Women can now work outside the home, but they still work most often in low-paying jobs and can't always make enough to raise a family on their own. Fifty percent of all female-headed households live in poverty.

Divorce and non-marriage are definitely corrolated with negative consequences for women and children, but is this something that can be fixed simply with a marriage license? The Republicans say so. Their proposal for welfare reform, the "Personal Responsibility Act," says that a child born to a woman under 18 (with state option to make the age 21) will never receive government assistance unless the mother marries the child's father or a man who will adopt the child.

The Republicans have it right in one respect-marriage rates have gone down in part because there are fewer coercive forces that push women to get married. The question is, can we make happy and functional marriages by legislating them? Considering that 50% of all people who willingly get married get divorced, it seems that forced marriages would be even less likely to stay together. This is especially true given the Cesus Bureau stat that poor couples are twice as likely to get divorced as non-poor couples.

This also raises the fundamental question of what we value about marriage. Is it the label, the license, or the quality of relationships and the partnership that it represents? Is marriage for its own sake a valid goal? One could argue that for poor women it is, because two-parent families are less likely to be poor. But who are these women going to marry that is going to pull them up out of poverty? The lack of jobs in high poverty areas makes ir unlikley that a woman will find a husband with a steady income, and I don't notice a lot of rich old men walking the streets of Chicago or Appalachia looking for a wife with a few kids. If marriage per se is so advantageous for these women, why don't they realize it? The bottom line is that the problems of poverty and the change in the American family structure run much deeper than something which can be fixed by a marriage license.

The Republican's have one other strategy to try to enforce the family norm. They want to prevent poor women from having children at all. They are not alone in this-the Democratic plan has a similar provision for "family caps," which say that any woman who has a child on welfare will not receive any extra benefits to pay