How Could Welfare Reform Have Gone So Right - Road to the Middle Class

THIS YEAR IS the tenth anniversary of Welfare Reform, the Republican-passed Clinton-signed reform that put a cap on unlimited welfare benefits in the summer of 1996. How has the reform turned out?

It seems important to ask because the usual suspects have gone quiet on us.

Fortunately Kay S. Hymowitz at City Journal has written a report on the aftermath of welfare reform. And it really has been a stunning success. The number of people on welfare has plummeted from 14 million to 5 million (see graphic). There has never been anything like it.

What went right? And why were the �unreformed� so wrong, wrong enough that when Andrew Cherlin, family scholar addressed the American Sociological Association he said:

�[T]here may be something to the idea that long-term dependency on public assistance is detrimental,� he conceded, though he had always �rejected this idea out of hand prior to 1996.� Poor mothers �derive a basic dignity� from work. In fact, he continued, �as a result of what I have seen, I now think the term �dead-end job� is a label that often doesn�t fit the perceptions of low-income workers; and I will not use it again.�

Well now. So let�s look at what happened, so that we can remind ourselves when people forget about what was achieved in the Great Welfare Reform of 1996. We will remember; we were there.

There were four major �concerns� of opponents to reform, according to Hymowitz.

First, would welfare leavers find jobs?
Second, would they sink even deeper into poverty?
Third, would their children be harmed?
And fourth, would the states take advantage of the wide flexibility the bill gave them on implementation to join what many anticipated would be a �race to the bottom�?

The answer is no. No, No, No, and No. Welfare leavers did find jobs. And they did not sink deeper into poverty.

[F]our years off welfare, only 4 percent of working single mothers�and only 8 percent of high school dropouts who were single mothers�were earning minimum wage or less.

So welfare mothers found jobs, and are overwhelmingly doing better than minimum wage. What about the children? The result is amazing. Child poverty rates went down after reform and �by 2001, they hit all-time lows for black children.�

Finally, what about a �race to the bottom?� The news is good there too. States spent a lot of money on work support for the former welfare mothers instead of abandoning them to their fate.

Given how wrong the social services experts were about welfare reform, someone needs to do some serious thinking.

It is not simply that they were wrong in making a few isolated predictions; after all, there were bound to be legitimate questions about how to transform welfare and about what would happen afterward. It�s that those predictions rested on a scaffold of moldy assumptions not just about poverty but about what kind of country we live in, how human beings decide to live their lives, and what role government plays in those decisions�in other words, about our politics in the deepest sense.

Said Bill Clinton, who signed the welfare reform bill:

�I�ve always known poor folks... I�ve just never thought they were helpless.�

It�s good to know you were on the side of the angels, Mr President. But let Hymowitz have the last word.

Human beings tend to do pretty much what they are expected to do. When the culture expects self-sufficiency, people will try to achieve it. When the culture sends mixed messages about self-sufficiency, as it did during the old welfare regime�particularly to the minority poor�some will not try to become self-sufficient.

As helpless as some people may seem they are, after all, the survivors: descendents of people who struggled to survive since the dawn of life on this planet. It is well to keep that in mind.

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Christopher Chantrill blogs at www.roadtothemiddleclass.com. His Road to the Middle Class is forthcoming.

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