The State of Welfare - United States 2003 - Tony Platt - Monthly Review

8/30/2017 The State of Welfare: United States 2003 | Tony Platt | Monthly Review
Navigation
Custom Search Search
MONTHLY REVIEW
AN INDEPENDENT SOCIALIST MAGAZINE
Home 2003 Volume 55, Issue 05 (October) The State of Welfare: United States 2003
Dear Reader, we make this and other articles available for free online to serve those unable to a ord or
access the print edition of Monthly Review. If you read the magazine online and can a ord a print
subscription, we hope you will consider purchasing one. Please visit the MR store for subscription
options. Thank you very much. EDS.
The State of Welfare: United States 2003

by Tony Platt
Topics: Political Economy
The United States has the most regressive

TONYPLATTisontheeditorialboard
system of welfare for poor people among
ofSocialJusticeandisemeritus
developed nations in the twenty- rst century, professorofsocialworkatCalifornia
and in recent years it has become even more StateUniversity,Sacramento,
punitive. The worlds self-professed leading California.
democracy lacks a national health care policy, a Thisessayisbasedonatalk
universal right to health care, and a preparedforaconference,Social
WelfareinTimeofEconomic
comprehensive family policy. Welfare applicants
Stagnation,cohostedbythe
are subjected to personal intrusions, arcane
FoundationforEuropeanCultural
regulations, and constant surveillance, all ExchangeandtheUniversityof
designed to humiliate recipients and deter Salzburg,attheUniversityof
potential applicants. In recent years there has Salzburg,Austria,March2729,
been a signi cant decrease in cash grants to the 2003.
unemployed and underemployed who do not
qualify for unemployment insurance. The
reorganization of the welfare state began under the Clinton administration with the
devolution of federal policies to the states and massive cutting of welfare rolls. The Bush
administration, while distracted by September 11 and imperial ambitions, has deepened
the cuts and introduced important new policies facilitating access of private organizations
to federal grants. The quickly changing economic and geopolitical climate has also
https://monthlyreview.org/2003/10/01/the-state-of-welfare-united-states-2003/ 1/17
generated a profound crisis in the ability of state and local agencies to provide adequate
human services to the unemployed and growing ranks of impoverished citizens and
immigrants.
Meanwhile, the middle and upper classes enjoy one of the most privileged systems of
welfare in the West: a regressive system of taxation; generous government subsidies to
business; and employer- and state-subsidized pension and health plans. About two-thirds
of the populationsome 170 million Americansare covered by employment-based
health plans and over one-third bene t from occupational pensions. In no other nation,
observes political scientist Jacob Hacker, do citizens rely so heavily on private bene ts for
protection against the fundamental risks of modern life. This massive system of private
welfare depends extensively on government interventions in the form of tax breaks, credit
subsidies, and legislative regulations.1
Historical Context
From its earliest days, drawing upon the model of the European poor laws in the sixteenth
century, U.S. welfare policy has been essentially intimidating and begrudging, designed to
teach a broader lesson to all who observed [its] rituals, notes Frances Fox Piven, a lesson
about the moral imperative of work and the fate that would befall those who shirked. The
welfare system draws upon racialized and gendered criteria to make distinctions between
worthy recipients of aid and compassion and unworthy exploiters of the public trust.2
There have been three main stages in the development of welfare for poor and working
people. During the period from the Civil War to the 1920s, the federal government created
a postwar pension system that reached more than a quarter of the nations elderly men.
The short-lived, federal Freedmens Bureau (18651872) implemented programs in the
South to reverse the ravages of slavery. And in the 1910s and 1920s, states authorized
mothers pensions bene ts for some fty thousand widows with children. But these
e orts were sporadic and selective, bene ting only a small section of the unemployed and
poor.3
The creation and expansion of a national welfare system took place between the 1930s
and the 1970s, initially as a result of a convergence of interests between a militant labor
movement and reform-minded capitalism during the depression, and later as a
consequence of the civil rights movement. The New Deal inaugurated old-age insurance,
unemployment insurance, workers compensation, and a variety of public initiatives to
alleviate poverty. In the aftermath of the Second World War, millions of returning soldiers
bene ted from a GI Bill that subsidized education, job training, and housing and family
subsidies. In the 1960s, the War on Poverty introduced Medicare, Medicaid, community-
based anti-poverty initiatives, and a rmative action programs designed to redress the
damage done by decades of racist and sexist employment and educational policies.
Despite all these hard-won reforms, the U.S. welfare state never matched up to its social
democratic counterparts in Europe.
From the early 1980s to the present, we have witnessed a contraction and reorganization
of welfare services to the poor, a reversal of many New Deal and War on Poverty policies
that were achieved as a result of intense political struggle. The collapse of the left and the
liberal wing within the Democratic Party left a vacuum that was quickly lled by neo-
conservative ideologues and by welfare reformers within both parties. I will focus on this
recent period in this essay.
Legacies of 19962000
In August 1996, President Clinton signed into law the Personal Opportunity and Work
Responsibility Act, which replaced Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) with
Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF). This legislation limited aid to sixty
months in a lifetime; required work activities; prohibited legal immigrants from receiving
Food Stamps and Social Security Insurance (SSI); required teen parents to live at home or
with adult supervision; and limited food stamps for able bodied, single, unemployed
adults to three months every thirty-six months.4
The passage of TANF in 1996 demonstrated a bipartisan commitment to attacking the

meager gains achieved by poor and working families by the 1970s. Between 1994 and
2001, the nations welfare caseload was reduced from 5 million to 2.1 million families.5 In
addition to cutting welfare rolls, expanding work requirements, and imposing time limits,
the legislation provides block grants to the states, which can determine how the funds are
to be used and who is eligible for various bene ts and services. Moreover, TANF provides
economic incentives for state welfare systems to promote marriage and heterosexual two-
parent families, and reduce pregnancies in single women.
Long-Term Trends
These changes in the regulation of working-class welfare, which repeal signi cant aspects
of the New Deal, represent a codi cation and consolidation of trends, which have been
under way for a long time. In 1965, the United States ranked twenty- rst out of twenty-two
Western nations in per capita welfare expenditures. Even in the 1970s, after the expansion
of welfare via President Johnsons War on Poverty, the United States still lagged far behind
most of the West. In the late 1970s, the United States spent about 14 percent of the total
federal budget on welfare, compared to 24 percent for comparable nations in the West. By
1995, U.S. public social expenditures represented about 17.1 percent of the gross national
product, the lowest of ten comparable nations and a little more than half the other nations
average level.6
During the Reagan and Bush senior administrations, major cuts were made by Congress
and state legislatures in programs that primarily serve the unemployed poor, the working
poor, single parents, and children: SSI, Medicaid, Food Stamps, school food programs,
nutrition programs for women, AFDC, energy assistance grants, public service jobs and
training, community development grants, and low-income housing subsidies. At the same
time, pro t-making human service corporations (especially nursing homes, hospitals, and
childcare facilities) dramatically increased their share of public funds through the use of
contracting out by local and state governments.
Even before new federal rules limiting welfare were passed in October 1996, all states had
decreased their maximum grants to welfare recipients and cut their welfare rolls. Between
1970 and 1996, welfare bene ts were drastically reduced throughout the country: for
example, by 18 percent in California, by 48 percent in New York City, by 58 percent in
Tennessee, and by 68 percent in Texas. Between March 1994 and October 1996, the
number of recipients of AFDC dropped 18 percent, from 14.3 to 11.8 millions. From 1993 to
1997, welfare caseloads nationwide had dropped by 25 percent. This trend accelerated
throughout the 1990s. In the three years from 1995 to 1998, New York Citys welfare rolls
dropped by 30 percent, from 1.16 million to 797,000. And in California, from July 1997
through April 1998, the number of families on public assistance was reduced by more than
100,000 or 12.2 percent, the largest decrease in the states history. Los Angeles County
accounted for one-third of this decrease.7
These statistics mask more profound developments that have been taking place in the
organization, ideology, and programs of the welfare system.
Workfare
Requiring welfare participants to work in return for cash grantsa central feature of TANF
is not a new policy. Welfare grants were linked with work requirements in the federal
Work Incentive Program (WIN) in 1967. Workfare was also promoted in the Family
Support Act of 1988 under which, according to Eileen Boris, and job-search sessions
constituted the extent of training, childcare funding never matched need, and the wages of
welfare lagged behind rises in the cost of living.8
TANF increased work requirements without providing more funds to implement them.
From 1995 to 1998, in New York City, which has the countrys largest urban welfare
program, some 200,000 people were processed through the citys workfare program. Less
than one-third have been able to nd full-time or part-time work since leaving the
program. Much of the work in the program is so menial, notes the New York Times, that it
o ers few, if any, skills that employers demand. Many programs that previously allowed
welfare clients to undergo training and education while on welfare have been either
eliminated or drastically cut.9
Contemporary welfare policies largely ignore the needs of unemployed men for education
and job training. Workfare today serves primarily as a labor market regulator for hundreds
of thousands of poor women, who are pushed into an already saturated low-wage labor
market, thus decreasing the earning power of this whole sector of the labor force. The
1962 Community Work and Training Program (associated with the War on Poverty) was one
of few welfare programs aimed at the needs of unemployed fathers. In the last three
decades, policymakers have abandoned this kind of program. Ironically, one of the few
places that poor men can now nd workalbeit exploitative and grossly underpaidand
mental health counseling is in prison. With a daily count of over fteen hundred people
su ering from severe psychological illnesses, Los Angeles County Jail may be the countrys
largest mental institution.10
Imprisonment and welfare are not so much polarized opposites, as they are constitutive
elements of an interrelated policy. Similar to the poor houses of the past, which combined
work with imprisonment, todays welfare and criminal justice policies represent a division
of labor between di erent managerial agencies, with jails and prisons primarily containing
unemployed men, and welfare agencies primarily regulating unemployed women and their
children. Both sets of institutions disproportionately target the most exploited sectors of
African-American, Latino, American Indian, immigrant and poor Anglo communities. Some
12 percent of African-American men ages twenty to thirty-four are currently in jail or
prison, while African-American women are disproportionately on welfare. During the last
twenty years, poor women have su ered the double indignity of declining welfare services
and increased imprisonment rates. The number of incarcerated women in the United
States tripled between 1985 and 1997, representing ten times the number of women
imprisoned in Spain, England, France, Scotland, Germany, and Italy combined.11
Dividing the Workforce

The new welfare policies have aggravated divisions between workers and aspiring workers
who have much to gain by joining forces to struggle for decent jobs, wages, and bene ts
for all that need work. These tensions will continue as long as welfare workers are denied
the right to a minimum wage, excluded from unemployment insurance, and unprotected
by federal occupational health and safety standards. The new workfare requirements have
created a new stratum of indentured workers who have lost previously held welfare rights
without gaining any of the basic rights of free workers.12
Many workfare participants are taking jobs typically done by public employees. In 1998, for
example, some thirty-four thousand welfare recipients did community service in New
Yorks Work Experience Program, while the citys workforce was reduced by about twenty
thousand employees, or 10 percent. Patricia Williams eloquently captures the dynamics of
this process: In New York City, the poormany of whom are the descendants of hard-
working slaves, or the grandchildren of hard-working sharecroppers, or the children of coal
miners, dirt farmers and sweatshop laborersare to be uplifted from their purportedly
lazy ways through the rehabilitative e ort of cleaning the subways. Subways in which some
of them are living. Their instructors will be unionized workers who have spent decades
organizing to improve their own lot, yet whose livelihoods are threatened by workfares
non-unionized, below-minimum-wage pools of labor.13
Double Standard of Morality

Current welfare policies limit womens ability to get nancial grants and force most
recipients to work outside the home under strict morality regulations. Whereas middle-
class women can choose to mix work and family responsibilities, to practice their own
sexual orientation, and to seek an abortion, poor women on welfare have no control over
these decisions. Dependency has come to be associated, in the words of Rickie Solinger,
with the dangerous, pathological behavior of poor women who make wrong choices.14
The political intent of the new welfare legislation is to force more and more poor women
into low paid drudgery with few or no bene ts. Most states will use their new discretion to
force or cajole women o welfare and into work irrespective of their personal wishes or
family needs. Substituting work outside the home for family labor, observes Eileen Boris,
workfare denies the value to the labor that poor single mothers already perform for their
families and demands that they leave their children as a condition of welfare.15
Under the 1996 legislation, states that reduce illegitimate births without increasing
abortion will receive a monetary bonus; teenagers on welfare have to live with their
families or relatives. This social engineering from the political Right, notes Boris,
intervenes in the lives of the poor to a degree equal to the therapeutic regimes of the
Charity Organization Societies and welfare caseworkers of the past.16 The tax bene ts
received by the middle class for owning property are not dependent on their sexual
behavior meeting the standards of monogamous, heterosexual marriage. Similarly,
employer-subsidized health care does not require its bene ciaries to sign pledges that they
do not use illegal drugs. We subject poor people to morality tests that are not required of
any other class-based entitlement programs.
The Racial Divide
Communities of color bear the brunt of poverty and economic devastation in this country.
American Indians, Southeast Asians, urban African Americans, and rural Latinos have the
highest poverty rates. In South Dakota, for example, Indians made up 7.4 percent of the
population, but 53 percent of welfare recipients in 1997. Prior to the 1960s, the limited
bene ciaries of social insurance, public assistance and other entitlement programs were
typically a small sector of Anglo, working- and lower-middle-class men. It was this group
that primarily bene ted from pension programs after the Civil War, New Deal public works
projects in the 1930s, and the GI Bills educational subsidies after the Second World War.17
Until the 1960s, racism denied most poor women and men of color access to entitlement
programs. For example, mothers aid programs, established by states between 1910 and
1920 for single mothers with children, gave Anglos more money than African Americans
and excluded Mexican Americans. In the 1930s, thousands of Chicanos were forcibly
repatriated to Mexico in order to save welfare costs and many African Americans were
kicked o welfare to meet local demands for agricultural and domestic labor. When
Congress authorized grants for single women in 1949, many states used racialized criteria,
such as excluding employable women, demanding suitable homes, and searching for
men in the house.18
In the 1960s, as a result of the civil rights movement and liberal federal programs, for the
rst time poor women and men of color began to gain access to entitlement programs that
gave people some chance of getting out of poverty and into work. The expansion of welfare
rolls in the 1960s was in large part due to the e ectiveness of the civil rights movement in
demanding that welfare be made a right irrespective of race or morality tests.19 At about
the same time, there was also a momentary increase in community-based programs for
rst-time o enders and ex-prisoners. But by the late 1970s, liberal social policies had been
defeated: welfare programs contracted, and jails and prisons expanded at an
unprecedented rate.
As welfare and criminal justice policies have became more punitive and vindictive, the
incarcerated and welfare populations increasingly resemble a system of apartheid.
Following recent changes in welfare policies, African Americans and Latino welfare
recipients now outnumber Anglos by about two to one. In New York, for example, by 1998
the citys welfare rolls were 5 percent white, 33 percent black, and 59 percent Latino. As
Eileen Boris puts it, we need to understand reform in the 1990s as the triumph of a 30-
year reaction against the gains of the 1960s, after African American women nally shared
in AFDC and welfare nally became a right or entitlement.20
Bush Initiatives
The new century has ushered in profound changes in the Pax Americana, both in the global
aspirations of the American Empire and the realignment of political and ideological power
within the United States. Half way through the Bush administrations term, rightwing
internationalists now play a decisive role within government and public discourse over
foreign policy doctrines. The ascendancy of hawks is complemented by the decisive shift to
the right in domestic policy. The conservative program, initiated in the Reagan years,
emphasizes lowering the cost of labor, regressive tax cuts, reductions in environmental
regulations, gutting of a rmative action and welfare bene ts, and expansion of the
military and criminal justice system.21
The Bush administration, strengthened by decisive Republican victories in the mid-term

elections (November 2002), promises to ful ll these policy goals, with the right now
occupying signi cant positions of power in Congress, the Department of Justice, and key
government departments. With respect to welfare policy, the government has relied on the
perspective and advice of Marvin Olasky, a rightwing, born-again historian; John DiIulio, a
conservative, born-again political scientist; Attorney General John Ashcroft, who as Senator
Ashcroft lobbied to broaden the role of religious organizations in the provision of welfare
services; and James Towey, a former legal counsel to Mother Teresa and a government
o cial in Florida, who currently advises the Bush administration on how to get welfare
grants to religious groups.22
The TANF law came up for reauthorization in 2002, but Congress has not acted on various
proposals due to the mobilization for war and reorganization of government to combat
terrorism. The Bush administration has introduced legislation that would make eligibility
for welfare even more stringent, as well as require most individuals on welfare to work for
at least forty hours per week in order to receive cash bene ts. The Democratic Party, for
the most part, is supporting Republican proposals to make welfare more restrictive and
punitive.
The Bush administration and Congress are also proposing major changes in the countrys
federal health care programs, established in 1965. Currently, 4547 million low-income
Americans receive bene ts under Medicaid and 40 million elderly and disabled people
under Medicare. The governments plan includes giving the states more power to reduce,
eliminate, or expand health bene ts for the poor; encouraging Medicare recipients to shift
to private health plans; and putting caps on health care bene ts to the elderly, poor, and
disabled. Under such a plan, notes Senator Edward Kennedy, public health care would
become a pro t center for HMOs and other private insurance plans. Reductions in
Medicaid would signi cantly increase the number of people who are uninsuredcurrently
42 millionas well as cut back services (such as prescription drugs, eyeglasses, and
nursing-home care) to the poor. The Bush plan, notes Jonathan Cohn, would force many
states to cut back a vital and e ective health insurance program at the very moment their
citizens need it most. As many as 15 million low income people could be dropped from the
Medicaid program and join the ranks of the uninsured.23
Cultural Politics of Welfare

Welfare policy is an important feature of the conservative ideological agenda, a project that
can be traced to President Reagans e ort to use the religious right to discipline the
morality of the nation.24 The discourse of welfare plays an important role in articulating
and transmitting cultural messages about race and gender, in particular to justify the
bene ts of free market economic policies and to warn of the dangers of dependency
and class struggle. The Clinton administrations assault on welfare programs (to change
welfare as we have known it) was motivated primarily by the Democratic Partys desire to
capture the White House by repudiating its liberal past and repositioning itself as an
advocate of third way neo-liberalism, especially on matters relating to race (crime,
welfare, and a rmative action). With the fall from grace of the Clinton presidency, the
George W. Bush administration has successfully re-appropriated the politics of welfare
from the Democratic Party.
The 1996 TANF legislation included a statutory innovation called charitable choice that
enabled states to delegate welfare programs to religious programs. There is nothing new
about federal support of religious organizations that provide social services: Catholic,
Jewish, and Lutheran charities have long relied on federal grants to operate homeless
shelters, soup kitchens, and other programs. But prior to 1996, religious organizations
were required to set up separate, secular agencies to administer federally funded
programs and to ensure the separation of church and state. Under TANF, notes Gwendolyn
Mink, religious groups are given the right to maintain and express their religious identities,
symbols, and philosophies in programs supported by federal dollars.25
During the Clinton administration, only four states (including Texas under then Governor
Bushs leadership) aggressively implemented the charitable choice provision. But President
Bush made religiosity the centerpiece of his compassionate conservatism by establishing
the White House O ce of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives and centers in ve
cabinet departments (Health and Human Services, Housing and Urban Development,
Labor, Justice, and Education) to facilitate church-state cooperation. Bush also advocates
raising the cap on corporate charitable donations from 10 to 15 percent and expanding
federal grants to religious groups.26
The language of welfare policy is now saturated with the sanctimonious imagery of
religiosity, a tendency described by historian Simon Schama as the habit of dressing the
business of power in the garb of piety. The emphasis on charitable choice is primarily
driven by an ideological politics, though it also has economic and policy implications. Faith-
based policies accelerate the trend towards the privatization of welfare by expanding tax
breaks for charitable donations and promoting spiritual, personal solutions to material,
public problems. Moreover, under the cover of religious freedom, the Bush administration
enables rightwing religious organizations to receive federal funds while practicing
employment discrimination, for example against gay and lesbian employees. In sum, notes
Gwendolyn Mink, charitable choice represents a fusion of the neoliberal urge to privatize
and the hard Rights urge to moralize.27
Crisis in Welfare
While the Clinton administration changed the federal governments relationship to welfare,
a changing world and new Bush policy initiatives have fundamentally altered the landscape
of welfare. An expanding economy in the mid-1990s absorbed many former welfare clients
as many as 60 percent by some accountsinto low-paying jobs. Moreover, most states
were able to use their growing tax revenues to maintain a pre-1996 level of services and
programs. But in the last three years, economic and political changes in the United States
have generated an unprecedented crisis in the welfare system.
First, according to Princeton economist Paul Krugman, We are now living in a new Gilded
Age.Income inequality has now returned to the levels of the 1920s. The United States
has more poverty and economic inequality, and lower life expectancy than most developed
capitalist nations (it rates just above Portugal in life expectancy). By 1998, the thirteen
thousand richest families had almost as much income as earned by the twenty million
poorest households. The number of Americans with million-dollar incomes doubled from
1995 to 1999, while the percentage of their income that went to federal taxes dropped by
11 percent. Cuts in capital gains, income, and estate taxes enabled the wealthiest
Americans to increase their after-tax income. According to New York University economist
Edward N. Wol , wealth is more concentrated in fewer hands today than at any time since
1929.28
Secondly, the recession and growth of unemployment and underemployment have both
increased the ranks of people seeking social services and put additional pressure on the
states, not the federal government, to respond to increased demand for services. With
time limits running out on the 1996 TANF legislation and the completion of prison
sentences handed out to drug o enders in the 1980s, we can anticipate hundreds of
thousands of former welfare recipients and state prisoners ooding the job market and
service agencies.
Millions of unemployed men and single women with children are now living on or below
the poverty line. According to the Childrens Defense Fund, the number of black American
children who live in extreme povertyde ned as a family of three living on $7,060 or less
annuallyhas increased to one million, the highest level since the government began
collecting data in 1980. In California, one in ve children in California is growing up poor,
with the child poverty rate higher today than it was twenty years ago. The number of
working poor families in California reached a new high of two million in 2001, with Latinos
carrying the heaviest burden.29
Moreover, declining tax revenues have plunged state governments into the worst scal
crisis since the Second World War, according to the National Governors Association. Faced
with a $35 billion budget de cit in California in 2003, Governor Gray Davis has proposed
$8.3 billion in tax increases and more than $20 billion in spending reduction. Cuts are
expected in Medi-Cal bene ts, cash grants to recipients of SSI, and local mental health
programs.30
Thirdly, the Bush response to a faltering economy has been tax cuts for the wealthy, plus
increased spending on military and military-related industries. To combat the growing
de cit, the Bush plan is to cut back nonmilitary spending, including bailouts to state
governments and welfare programs. Key elements of the Bush tax plan include reductions
in the rate of taxation on incomes in the highest bracket, abolition of tax on dividends, and
repealing the estate tax. The assumption presumably is that the wealthiest investors will
take their tax refunds and reinvest in the stock market. Almost unbelievably, says
historian Robert Brenner, the way being charted to revive the economy is to rein ate the
bubble.31
Meanwhile, the war on terrorism and war on Iraq have required an extraordinary
increase in military and security-related spending. In 2001 and 2002, the military budget
increased 6 and 10 percent respectively. The U.S.-Iraq war and the subsequent occupation
are projected to have cost $100 billion through next year.32 The Bush administration
justi es this budgetary increase in terms of the need to combat terrorism and defend the
United States, despite the fact that the U.S. military budget is larger than the next twenty-
ve countries combined.
It is this conjuncture of geopolitical and national developments, as well as deepening crisis

in the economy and state budgets, that means not only the further lowering of the
American safety net, but also consolidation of the neo-liberal model of welfare reform.
Conclusion
There have been rare moments in this countrys history when working-class welfare
policies o ered poor and working people an opportunity to improve their lives without
social stigma or personal humiliation. The 1944 GI Bill is perhaps the best example of
welfare with dignity. Under this legislation, millions of mostly white, mostly male veterans
were encouraged to seek technical and higher education with the help of free tuition and
supplies, a living subsidy (including additional payments for children), and low-interest
loans for housing. Typically, however, welfare has meant regulated indignity, especially in
recent years as the line between imprisonment and welfare has become blurred.
During the last twenty- ve years, we have witnessed the transformation of American
welfare from a liberal, Keynesian model to a neoliberal, business-driven model. This
rupture with the past, engineered by the two leading political parties, was driven by policies
and cultural politics that are informed by a racialized and gendered worldview. The
resurrection of the warfare state and central role of the right in the Bush administration
have closed down for the moment political debate about the future of welfare, but the
countrys economic and racial polarization will eventually compel a reconsideration of
human service policies.
Meanwhile, it will be an enormous challenge for progressive forces in the United States to
develop alternative policies to the rightist discourse. Our task is to envision a program of
welfare that does the following:
articulates most peoples desire to work, be productive and creative

appreciates that taking care of families is real work
does not tie economic entitlements to morality tests
does not pit women against men, or poor whites against communities of color, or the
employed against the unemployed in competition for scarce economic resources
provides people out of work with an infrastructure of economic development (education,
training, health care, childcare), enabling them to make the transition out of poverty into
jobs
provides poor people with access to the same kinds of quality human services that are
available to the employed and wealthy
ensures that recipients of welfare services play an important role in the governance and
distribution of resources
gives budgetary priority to human services (education, health, welfare, and childcare)
over institutions that criminalize and degrade the poor
In sum, we need to be politically engaged in constructing, once again, a vision of the general
welfare that resonates in the public imagination. And as economic disparities and the social
reverberations of the new imperialism increasingly divide the nation, we will have
opportunities to do so.
Notes
1. Jacob S. Hacker, The Divided Welfare State (Cambridge University Press, 2002), 6, 910.
2. Frances Fox Piven, Welfare and Work, Social Justice 25, no. 1, (1998): 74.
3. Theda Skocpol, Protecting Soldiers and Mothers (Cambridge: Harvard University Press,
1992). Hacker, 92.
4. Under Californias version of TANFknown as California Work Opportunity and
Responsibility to Kids (CalWORKS)all able-bodied welfare recipients are required to
earn their grants through job training, job-searching, or community service. Recipients,
with a few exemptions, are limited to tweny-four consecutive months of welfare or a
lifetime total of ve years. New applicants are limited to eighteen months. CalWORKS
requires twenty hours of work per week for single parent families, thirty- ve hours for
two-parent families.
5. The analysis of TANF is based on Martha Coven, An Introduction to TANF, Center on
Budget and Policy Priorities, February 14, 2002; Janice Peterson, Feminist Perspectives on
TANF Reauthorization, Institute for Womens Policy Research, February 2002; Mark
Greenberg and Hedieh Rahmanou, Imposing a 40-Hour Requirement Would Hurt State
Welfare Reform E orts, Center for Law and Social Policy, February 12, 2003; and Martha
Fineman, Gwendolyn Mink, and Anna Marie Smith, No Promotion of Marriage in TANF!,
unpublished position paper, 2003.
6. Hacker, 1315.
7. The Tough-Love Index, New York Times, December 8, 1996. A Closer Look at the
Decline, New York Times, February 2, 1997. Piven, 70. Vivian Toy, Tough Welfare Rules
Used as Way to Cut Welfare Rolls, New York Times, April 15, 1998. Drop in State Welfare
Load Sets Record, San Francisco Chronicle, July 27, 1998.
8. Eileen Boris, When Work Is Slavery, Social Justice 25, no. 1, (1998): 30.
9. Alan Finder, Evidence is Scant that Workfare Leads to Full-Time Jobs, New York Times,
April 12, 1998. Piven, 72.
10. Men are eligible for and receive General Assistance cash grants from local governments,
but they are usually small and temporary. Piven, 71. Boris, 30. Fox Butter eld, Prisons
Replace Hospitals for the Nations Mentally Ill, New York Times, March 5, 1998.
11. Fox Butter eld, Prison Rates Among Blacks Reach a Peak, Report Finds, New York Times,
April 7, 2003. Joy James, ed., States of Con nement (New York: Palgrave, 2002), xi.
12. Piven, 72.
13. Steven Greenhouse, Many Participants in Workfare Take the Place of City Workers, New
York Times, April 13, 1998. Patricia Williams, The Saints of Servitude, New York Times,
October 13, 1996.
14. Rickie Solinger, Dependency and Choice, Social Justice 25, no. 1, (1998): 2.
15. Boris, 41.
16. Boris, 31.
17. Pam Belluck, A Window to Run Welfare is a Tight Squeeze for Many Tribes, New York
Times, September 9, 1997. Anthony M. Platt, End Game, Social Justice 24, no. 2, (1997):
104106.
18. Linda Gordon, Pitied But Not Entitled (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994), 3764.
Gordon, 192199. Boris, 29.
19. Boris, 30.
20. Tony Platt, Social Insecurity, Social Justice 28, no. 1, (2001). Jason DeParle, Shrinking
Welfare Rolls Leave Record High Share of Minorities, New York Times, July 27, 1998. Boris,
29.
21. This shift is re ected in the hard-line in uence of Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Richard
Perle, John Poindexter, and Paul Wolfowitz. On the rise to power of radical nationalists,
see Anatol Lieven, The Push for War and the Ascendancy of Radical Nationalism, London
Review of Books, October 3, 2002. Immanuel Wallerstein, The Eagle Has Crash Landed,
Foreign Policy, JulyAugust 2002.
22. Gwendolyn Mink, Faith in Government? Social Justice 28, no. 1, (2001): 510; Herb
Kutchins, Neither Alms Nor a Friend, Social Justice 28, no. 1, (2001): 1434; Roundtable
Interview with James Towey, June 4, 2002,
www.religionandsocialpolicy.org/interviews/interview.cfm?id=9.
23. Jacob S. Hacker, How Not To Fix Medicare, New York Times, July 2, 2003. Robin Toner and
Robert Pear, Bush Proposes Major Changes in Health Plans, New York Times, February
24, 2003. Jonathan Cohn, How Medicaid Was Set Adrift, New York Times, March 6, 2003.
Private health plans (HMOs) have been caring for some people on Medicare for 20 years.
Medicares costs are higher for patients in HMOs than for patients in the public Medicare
plan. Moreover, Medicare HMOs have been leaving cities and counties where they fail to
make a pro t, and have been charging elderly people premiums of up to $100 per month
while paying less and less of the cost of their prescription drugs. Personal
communication from Dr. Tom Bodenheimer, March 19, 2003.
24. Richard Slotkin, Gun ghter Nation (New York: Atheneum, 1992).
25. Mink, 6.
26. The White House blueprint for Rallying the Armies of Compassion, Bushs policy
statement on welfare released in January 2001, can be found at
www.dol.gov/cfbci/bush_plan.htm
27. Simon Schama, The Unloved American, The New Yorker, March 10, 2003, 35. Mink, p. 9.
28. Paul Krugman, For Richer, New York Times Magazine, October 20, 2002. David Cay
Johnston, More Get Rich and Pay Less in Taxes, New York Times, February 7, 2002.
29. Jodi Wilgoren, After Welfare, Working Poor Still Struggle, Report Finds, New York Times,
April 25, 2002. Tyche Hendricks, Increase in Child Poverty Found, San Francisco Chronicle
November 5, 2002. Information provided by California Budget Project, Sacramento,

California, www.cbp.org.
30. Robert Pear, States Are Facing Big Fiscal Crises, Governors Report, New York Times,
January 26, 2002. Davis budget, however, includes a $40 million increase in the states
$5.3 billion prison budget and $220 million to build a new death row at San Quentin. John
Broder, Californians Hear Grim Budget News, New York Times January 11, 2003; John
Broder, No Hard Time for Prison Budgets, New York Times, January 19, 2003. California
Budget Project, www.cbp.org.
31. Robert Brenner, Towards the Precipice, London Review of Books, February 6, 2003, 23.
32. Washington Post, July 13, 2003.
Like 0 Tweet
Connect
Subscribe to our e-mail newsletter to receive updates.
E-mail
SUBMIT
Leo Huberman: Radical Agitator, Socialist Teacher World Poverty, Pauperization and Capital Accumulation
Also in this issue
October 2003 (Volume 55, Number 5) , The Editors

World Poverty, Pauperization and Capital Accumulation , Samir Amin
Leo Huberman: Radical Agitator, Socialist Teacher , John J. Simon
Latin America and Underdevelopment , Leo Huberman

Background Notes to Fanshen , William Hinton
New books from MR Press
The Age of Monopoly Capital: Selected Correspondence of Paul A. Baran and Paul M. Sweezy,
1949-1964
A Redder Shade of Green: Intersections of Science and Socialism
The Politics of Immigration: Questions and Answers (Second Edition)
Creating an Ecological Society: Toward a Revolutionary Transformation
Harbors Rich in Ships: The Selected Revolutionary Writings of Miroslav Krlea, Radical Luminary
of Modern World Literature
Union Power: The United Electrical Workers in Erie, Pennsylvania
Subjects
Ecology
History
Imperialism
Inequality
Marxism
Media
Movements
Political Economy
Monthly Review Foundation. Tel: 212-691-2555

134 W. 29th Street, Suite 706, New York, NY 10001
2017 MONTHLY REVIEW FOUNDATION ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

The State of Welfare - United States 2003 - Tony Platt - Monthly Review

Enviado por

Dados do documento

Título original

Direitos autorais

Formatos disponíveis

Compartilhar este documento

Compartilhar ou incorporar documento

Opções de compartilhamento

Você considera este documento útil?

Este conteúdo é inapropriado?

Direitos autorais:

Formatos disponíveis

The State of Welfare - United States 2003 - Tony Platt - Monthly Review

Enviado por

Direitos autorais:

Formatos disponíveis

8/30/2017 The State of Welfare: United States 2003 | Tony Platt | Monthly Review

Custom Search Search

The State of Welfare: United States 2003

The United States has the most regressive

The passage of TANF in 1996 demonstrated a bipartisan commitment to attacking the

Dividing the Workforce

Double Standard of Morality

The Racial Divide

The Bush administration, strengthened by decisive Republican victories in the mid-term

Cultural Politics of Welfare

It is this conjuncture of geopolitical and national developments, as well as deepening crisis

articulates most peoples desire to work, be productive and creative

November 5, 2002. Information provided by California Budget Project, Sacramento,

Also in this issue

October 2003 (Volume 55, Number 5) , The Editors

Latin America and Underdevelopment , Leo Huberman

New books from MR Press

The Politics of Immigration: Questions and Answers (Second Edition)

Creating an Ecological Society: Toward a Revolutionary Transformation

Union Power: The United Electrical Workers in Erie, Pennsylvania

Monthly Review Foundation. Tel: 212-691-2555

2017 MONTHLY REVIEW FOUNDATION ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

Você também pode gostar