Ending welfare as we know it.

• Author: Tanner, Michael

It is time to recognize that the system can't be reformed. Therefore, it should be ended without throwing any more money into the bottomless pit.

From across the political and ideological spectrum, there is almost universal acknowledgment that the American social welfare system has been a failure. Since the start of the War on Poverty in 1965, the U.S. has spent more than $3.5 trillion trying to ease the plight of the poor. The result of that massive investment is primarily, more poverty.

The welfare system is unfair to everyone: to taxpayers, who must pick up the bill for failed programs; to society, whose mediating institutions of community, church, and family increasingly are pushed aside; and, most of all, to the poor themselves, who are trapped in a system that destroys opportunity for them and hope for their children.

Pres. Clinton deserves credit for bringing this issue back to the forefront of the public policy debate. Yet, both liberals and conservatives seem unable to understand the fundamental structural failure of welfare. Liberals continue to believe that throwing more money at current (or new) programs will make them work, while conservatives search for a paternalistic set of "incentives," such as "workfare" and "LEARNfare." Neither of those approaches is likely to solve the problems of the American social welfare system.

It is time to recognize that welfare can not be reformed. It should be ended. There may be relatively little that can be done for people already on welfare. The key issue is to avoid bringing more people into the cycle of welfare, illegitimacy, fatherlessness, crime, more illegitimacy, and more welfare. The only way to prevent new people from entering the failed system is to abolish programs that insulate individuals from the consequences of their actions.

The origins of the modern social welfare system probably can be traced to the Social Security Act of 1935. Best known for establishing Social Security and unemployment insurance, that law, passed during the heart of the Depression, also contained a number of means-tested joint Federal-state programs to provide temporary assistance to certain categories of the poor. They included Old Age Assistance, Aid to the Blind, and--most important--Aid to Dependent Children, the forerunner of Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC).

Those initiatives were intended to have a very limited application. Aid to Dependent Children, for instance, was designed to assist a small number of widows and children whose fathers had died. Even those limited programs represented a significant change in social welfare policy. Previously, social welfare had been considered not a government responsibility--certainly not the Federal government's--but the domain of families, churches, fraternal organizations, and other private charitable entities. The Social Security Act, with its attendant programs, represented the first major step on the road transferring responsibility for helping the poor from the private to the public sector.

However limited their original purpose, government social welfare programs inexorably began to expand. By the mid 1950s, many of those receiving welfare benefits were not widows. Many never had been married. A new class of individuals dependent on government support had been created. Criticism mounted. By the early 1960s, The New York Times was editorializing that "the problem [of poverty] cannot be solved with a welfare check."

As a result, a shift began in the emphasis of social welfare programs, from cash payments designed to support people to those designed to lift people out of poverty. An entire new group of training, education, and other noncash programs was born.

Social welfare spending exploded, beginning with the Economic Opportunity Act of 1964. Pres. Lyndon Johnson introduced a new generation of public programs, including Medicaid and food stamps. By the end of the 1960s, virtually every low-income American was eligible for some sort of publicly funded assistance.

Also during the 1960s, a subtle shift in the public perception of social welfare developed. Public aid began to be seen not as a form of tax-supported charity, but as an "entitlement." That trend culminated with the 1970 U.S. Supreme Court decision in Kelly v. Goldberg, which held that welfare benefits were "an entitlement protected by the due process clause" of the Constitution.

There was little change in the growth of welfare until the Reagan Administration began to tighten eligibility requirements in the mid 1980s. Reagan attempted, on a program-by-program basis, to restrict eligibility to the "truly needy." States were required to set eligibility and income-verification standards. Nevertheless, total welfare spending continued to grow, and benefit levels remained relatively stable.

Promoting jobs instead of welfare

The last major attempt at welfare reform was the Family Support Act of 1988. The centerpiece of that effort was the Job Opportunities and Basic Skills (JOBS) Training Program, a combination job-training and job-search initiative. States were allowed to mandate that individuals participate in job-search and could require some participants to perform community-service work as a prerequisite for receiving benefits. The legislation's chief sponsor, Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D.-N.Y.), said of the legislation, "For 50 years the welfare system has been a maintenance program. It has now become a jobs program."

Despite the work requirements, the percentage of AFDC recipients participating in job-search, job-training, or community-service work ranges from a high of 30% in Utah to a low of less than one percent in Hawaii. Nationwide participation averages just 6.9%. Predictably, liberals contend that the failure is due to lack of funding, while conservatives claim the work requirements never have been enforced sufficiently.

Today, there are more than 100 overlapping Federal anti-poverty programs, including 59 major means-tested ones. For example, there are 12 different programs providing food, administered by five separate Federal departments and one independent agency. There are seven housing programs, administered by seven separate departments. That does not count state and local bureaucracies.

Approximately 5,000,000 families receive AFDC. Nearly one of every seven American children is in a family receiving such aid. More than 20% of all those born in the late 1960s have spent at least one year on welfare; over 70% of African-Americans born during the same period have done so. Moreover, the situation is growing worse. More than 30% of all children born in 1980 will spend a year on welfare, and in excess of 80% of African-Americans.

Sixty-four percent of welfare recipients are white; 31%, African-American; 14%, Hispanic; and five percent are classified as "other." Ninety-two percent of families on welfare have no father present. The average family size is 2.9 persons, down from four in 1969.

Welfare dependence is increasingly multi-generational. Although the majority of children raised in AFDC households will not receive AFDC themselves, the rate of AFDC dependence for those raised on that program is far higher than for their non-AFDC counterparts.

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