Beyond Welfare Reform

EVERYONE IS doing their ten year anniversary pieces for the welfare reform act that President Clinton signed ten years ago today, August 22, in the summer of 1996.

And as he should, Bill Clinton writes today in The New York Times about his role in “ending welfare as we know it.”

The last 10 years have shown that we did in fact end welfare as we knew it, creating a new beginning for millions of Americans.

In the past decade, welfare rolls have dropped substantially, from 12.2 million in 1996 to 4.5 million today. At the same time, caseloads declined by 54 percent. Sixty percent of mothers who left welfare found work, far surpassing predictions of experts... [M]ore than 20,000 businesses hired 1.1 million former welfare recipients.

Bill Clinton does a good job of recounting the policy wonk details of all the government programs that were changed to help change the face of welfare. But what he does not really address is the societal question, of which welfare dependency is the tip of the iceberg.

It was over 40 years ago, as Robert Rector reminds us, that Professor Daniel Patrick Moynihan warned up about the collapse of the Negro family.

In 1965, Moynihan authored a report for the Johnson administration titled "The Negro Family: The Case for National Action." The... Moynihan report... looked at the state of the black family in America and argued that many of the problems commonly believed to be attributable to race and other factors were actually due to differences in family structure.

"Indices of dollars of income, standards of living and years of education deceive," reads the introduction to the Moynihan report. "The fundamental problem . . . is that of family structure."

The problem of welfare is not a problem of programs and benefits, but a problem of single parents, primarily single mothers.

But this is part of a much bigger problem, the source of which can be found in the culture of the educated middle class, the idea that the purpose of life is not to found a family and grow children into worthy, productive adults.

The educated middle class lives by the idea of creativity, of replacing the creativity of the loins with the creativity of the mind. The first idea is a family idea; it believes in creating children. The second idea is an individual idea; it believes in art and genius. It is not surprising that people who believe in individual creativity are people who don’t do much in the way of creating children.

That is the Big Problem that dare not speak its name. The problem is us: the educated middle class and our desire for individual fulfillment.

In the middle class we can afford a pathology or two, and a busted marriage or two. But the poor cannot. That is why they are poor. And we, the sophisticated middle class, have visited a murrain upon the poor of epic proportions.

The sad thing is that most of the middle class have no clue what we have done.

That is another thing about the middle class. We are clever enough and rich enough to be able to keep brutal reality far enough away to keep it from crashing in on us.

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