Charles Baker is right that welfare needs fixing, and he’s right that states (on average) are better innovators than Washington. If that ended the story, block grants might indeed beat the recent alternative of state experimentation within national guidelines. But there’s more to it than he concedes. “Things can’t get worse” is a testable hypothesis. We’re about to test it.
Baker says flatly that the poor don’t migrate to more generous states. That stretches the point. Scholars (including Paul Peterson and Ed Gramlich) have found that states often make welfare policy with an eye to what the neighbors are doing, and that some people have moved in search of higher grants. It’s true, that most didn’t; the anchors of family and culture generally defeated the pull of better benefits.
But that was then. Poor folks could count on some support whatever their home state. The feds set minimum rules and (more important) shared the cost. A dollar spent on welfare, or a dollar saved by tougher rules, had less (sometimes much less) than a dollar’s impact on the state budget. There wasn’t much reason for the needy to migrate, or for states to “race to the bottom.”
The new legislation changes all that. Block grants are the same whatever states spend. So every extra dime devoted to poor kids now means less for roads, schools, prisons, and economic development. There’s a much bigger bottom-line payoff to cutting benefits (and a bigger penalty to keeping them high). States are free to be as flexible, innovative, and generous as they want to be. They’re also free to make life miserable enough for poor families to motivate migration.
Imagine it’s 2001. Inflation has shriveled the real value of welfare block grants, and Congress is in no mood to bail out the governors. A stubborn recession has swollen benefit claims, while unskilled jobs have evaporated. The evening news is full of stories about the ragged families arriving from out of state for a chance at job training and the kind of support (including child care) that boosts the odds of getting and keeping a decent job. On Beacon Hill–or the statehouse in Wisconsin, Michigan, New Jersey or wherever–a grim-faced official takes the podium: “We don’t want to be brutal. In a better world, we could continue our experiments with training, job-search help, and child care. But work-based reforms would be expensive even if we only had our own poor citizens to worry about. Massachusetts can’t solve the problem of American poverty alone. It would be unfair to our kids, our courts, and our businesses if we let the Commonwealth go broke trying. The only responsible choice is to match what other states offer–no more, and maybe even a little less.”
It’s easy to picture a lot of decent politicians making that speech–even Charlie Baker. What I can’t imagine is states raising tax money (year after year, in good times and bad) to pay for costly welfare-to-work experiments, when the prize for success is a higher share of the nation’s poor. I sure hope I’m wrong.
John D. Donahue is an associate professor at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government and a member of MassINC’s board of policy advisors. His book on devolution, Disunited States, will be published by Basic Books next spring.
The problem isn’t welfare, it’s poverty
I couldn’t disagree more with Charles Baker’s argument that block grants and increased state control over the welfare programs will help people in poverty. His argument represents the classical conservative view of welfare, a view that ignores the fact that it’s not the welfare system that hurts people, it’s poverty. The welfare reform bill signed by President Clinton is neither “wise,” nor “compassionate;” it is political. It will fail, just like the 50 plus programs Baker euphorically fantasizes about, because they are, and will likely continue to be, based on false and inflammatory stereotypes that mask the root causes of poverty.
Baker incorrectly assumes there is a job for everyone, and if the states just had more control over making poor people look for them we wouldn’t need welfare. But the most offensive flaw in Baker’s argument is his assumption that poor people, and especially poor women with children, are incapable of making reasonable decisions about work and family, which leads him to conclude that “nobody really knows what approach works best.” On the contrary, there are millions of women just like me who know exactly what worked and didn’t work for us in the welfare system. But few think to ask us, and those who do most often don’t take us seriously because, after all, we lack the proper credentials to qualify as “policy and management theorist.” A good friend of mine once noted that when we want business to do something, we ask them what they need to get it done, and then we pay them to do it. But when we want poor people to do something, we take money away from them and give them a good swift kick in the pants.
Baker also fails to acknowledge that the majority of people on welfare have some work history. Many cycle in and out of the work force, not because they don’t know how to get out of bed in the morning and “cope” with the stresses of balancing work and family, but because they simply cannot afford the high cost of child care. And those who are lucky enough to find care they can afford run into trouble when their children are too sick to go to school or the child care center. Baker’s “compassionate” welfare reform bill does absolutely nothing to address the child care needs of low-income families.
I think the welfare system could be dramatically improved. To me, real reform means affordable, high quality child care in addition to job training and educational opportunities for anyone who needs it. If these services were provided to all low-income families, in conjunction with serious family-focused economic policy reforms, we could create a system of family support that would actually eliminate poverty among all children. However, punitive welfare reforms that focus on punishing and blaming parents is not the way to lift children safely out of poverty. It is unconscionable that Baker would rather use poor children as the subject of random social experiments, rather than listen to people’s needs and make carefully thought-out adjustments.
Sadly Jane and Joe Q. Public have been duped into believing that welfare reform will somehow benefit them. But what they don’t seem to know is that flooding the labor market with desperate job-seekers drives wages and benefits through the floor, hurting all workers. And if the safety net is summarily shredded, there will be nothing to catch them should they be tossed out of their jobs during a recession or a family crisis. Everyone should be asking: Who really benefits from welfare reform, as it has been perversely defined by the power elite and politicians looking for votes?
Linda Johnson, a former welfare recipient, is the Policy Coordinator for Connecting the Dots for Boston’s Tots, a project of the Family Nurturing Center at Boston Medical Center’s Pediatric Department.
Why not consider real welfare reform?
Charles Baker’s article misses the point. No one is arguing for “inflexible federal law and rule making.” No one is arguing that block grants are all bad or that state governments shouldn’t drive the search for better welfare policy. (In the past several years, the Clinton Administration has approved more than 40 waivers of federal policy to enable states to do just that.) Everyone agrees that the system is broke and needs fixing. And no one is more in favor of welfare reform than those in the system. The real debate centers on other issues entirely.
Baker asserts, correctly, that Washington is too far removed from the “actual impact of its policy making,” and that states and counties can do a better job. The problem is that most policy-makers, no matter where they are, have more in common with each other than they do with the people who have to live with their policies–in this case, primarily single, divorced, disabled, abandoned, battered or widowed women with children.
The current welfare system has “ravaged children and decimated families” because it is punitive and inflexible, with counterproductive rules that deduct earned income from welfare benefits, dollar for dollar, deduct child support payments from welfare benefits, dollar for dollar, and cut families’ Medicaid benefits as soon as a mother gets a job, regardless of whether the job includes health benefits.
In other words, there are enormous obstacles for people who try to transcend the system through their own resourcefulness, effort and will. The system also offers benefits to all according to standard formulas, without making a distinction, for instance, between an abandoned college-educated mother of a 5-year-old and a pregnant teen-ager in the 10th grade.
This one-size-fits-all approach to families who come in assorted shapes and sizes, and who are affected by varying work histories, cultural traditions, local resources and local economies, just doesn’t make sense. The trouble with most proposed state-level welfare policies, and certainly those in Massachusetts, is that they are even more formulaic. Cookie-cutter policies drafted by out-of-touch state bureaucrats rather than out-of-touch feds won’t solve anything. What is really needed is a different kind of welfare policy, not just a difference in degree of rigidity and punitiveness.
Real welfare reform would begin with serious discussions with the people who have the most expertise on the subject: those who are or have been in the system. It would take up the issue of building blocks for success in the transition from full-time child rearing to employment–issues such as affordable child care, before-and after-school programs, transportation, basic skills, job training, and the need for people supporting a family to make a decent wage with health benefits. Ask any working mother whether these things are essential. Why would women on welfare be any different?
What is different, too often, in the lives of women on welfare is the context in which they must raise their children. They often live in overcrowded or substandard housing, where drug-dealing, noise, and environmental hazards go unchecked, where playgrounds are unsafe and children cannot play outside, where schools are substandard and expectations for children low, where extracurricular activities taken for granted in wealthier communities are nonexistent, where the daily tasks of child rearing are very time-consuming for those who wash their clothes at laundromats and use public transportation, where families are forced to pay more for less at local food stores. And despite all of that, many women who have had to turn to welfare for a time have raised their children to contribute as much as anyone we know–as students, neighbors, parents, workers and citizens.
What is really needed in the welfare debate is not evasion, grandstanding and mudslinging but thoughtful, responsive policy formulation that includes the people with the most experience and the most to gain. Charlie Baker got it partially right. Policy making is too far removed from its impact. Let’s see whether Massachusetts is prepared to engage in real welfare reform.
Geraldine David and Charlotte Kahn run the Boston Persistent Poverty Project at the Boston Foundation.
