The remaining programs food stamps, SSI, housing assistance, Medicaid, and EITC are about as inflexible as ever and generally ignore what is going on in the rest of the system. Future policy initiatives are likely to alter these programs toward the direction set for TANF in the s welfare reform, with the two above trends continuing to influence new reforms. Economists believe that people tend to make decisions that benefit themselves, so the answer to the above question seems obvious.
If welfare did not help the poor, then why would so many of them go on welfare? This self-interest among the poor could also explain a phenomenon noted by those who study welfare, namely that only about one-half to two-thirds of those who qualify for welfare programs are enrolled in them.
Presumably, the others have decided that it is in their self-interest to refuse the money and keep the government from meddling in their lives. So, while it seems clear that welfare helps the poor who accept welfare, that does not mean that welfare helps the poor generally. Two groups of poor people, not counted in the welfare statistics, are hurt by welfare. The first group consists of the future poor. If the annual growth rate of GDP in the United States had been just one percentage point lower between and , then the United States today would be no richer than Mexico.
The main thing that helps all poor people in the long run is economic growth. Economic growth made almost all Americans richer than their counterparts of the s.
A reduction in economic growth, even a slight one, if compounded, causes more future poverty than would otherwise have been the case. The second group hurt by U. The welfare state acts as a magnet for poor immigrants to the United States. Because of this, there are various domestic pressures to limit immigration. Without the welfare state, the number of immigrants would likely rise substantially, meaning that many previously poor foreigners would become much richer.
The welfare state limits this improvement. He is a member of standing committees that advise the Congressional Budget Office, the U. Bureau of Labor Statistics, and the U.
Jeffrey M. Jones is a research fellow at the Hoover Institution. He was previously executive director of Promised Land Employment Service. To qualify for low-income assistance, the family must have less than two thousand dollars in financial and housing assets. For the calculation of housing benefits, Table 1 assumes that the family pays nine hundred dollars in rent per month.
In some circumstances, eligible benefit levels may be affected by dual-enrollment restrictions e. In the calculation of food stamps and housing benefits, payments from TANF count as income: this lowers payments below the amounts listed in the table for the program. The program benefits listed in the first set of columns assume that the family participates only in that particular program. Economic Regulation, Government Policy, Labor.
Welfare By Jeffrey M. Jones and Thomas MaCurdy. By Jeffrey M. Does Welfare Help the Poor? David Henderson Economists believe that people tend to make decisions that benefit themselves, so the answer to the above question seems obvious. Further Reading DeParle, Jason. New York: Viking Books, Jones, Jeffrey, and Thomas MaCurdy. Stanford, Calif. Cash relief to the poor depended on local property taxes, which were limited.
Also, not only did a general prejudice exist against the poor on relief, but local officials commonly discriminated against individuals applying for aid because of their race, nationality, or religion. Single mothers often found themselves in an impossible situation. If they applied for relief, they were frequently branded as morally unfit by the community.
If they worked, they were criticized for neglecting their children. In , President Theodore Roosevelt called a White House conference on how to best deal with the problem of poor single mothers and their children. The conference declared that preserving the family in the home was preferable to placing the poor in institutions, which were widely criticized as costly failures. Starting with Illinois in , the "mother's pension" movement sought to provide state aid for poor fatherless children who would remain in their own homes cared for by their mothers.
In effect, poor single mothers would be excused from working outside the home. Welfare reformers argued that the state pensions would also prevent juvenile delinquency since mothers would be able to supervise their children full-time. By , mother's pension programs were operating in all but two states. They varied greatly from state to state and even from county to county within a state.
Administered in most cases by state juvenile courts, mother's pensions mainly benefitted families headed by white widows. These programs excluded large numbers of divorced, deserted, and minority mothers and their children. Few private and government retirement pensions existed in the United States before the Great Depression. The prevailing view was that individuals should save for their old age or be supported by their children. About 30 states provided some welfare aid to poor elderly persons without any source of income.
Local officials generally decided who deserved old-age assistance in their community. The emphasis during the first two years of President Franklin Roosevelt's "New Deal" was to provide work relief for the millions of unemployed Americans.
Federal money flowed to the states to pay for public works projects, which employed the jobless. Some federal aid also directly assisted needy victims of the Depression. The states, however, remained mainly responsible for taking care of the so-called "unemployables" widows, poor children, the elderly poor, and the disabled.
During these decades, blacks typically worked in menial jobs. Nor did blacks fare much better under ADC during these years. Jim Crow Laws and the separate but equal doctrine resulted in the creation of a two-track service delivery system in both law and custom, one for whites and one for blacks that were anything but equal. This happened when states stepped up efforts to reduce ADC enrollment and costs.
As I examined in my book, residency requirements were proposed so as to bar blacks migrating from the South to qualify for the program. As the quality of life did indeed improve for whites, the number of white widows and their children on the AFDC rolls declined.
At the same time, the easing of racial discrimination widened eligibility to more blacks, increasing the number of never-married women of color and their children who were born out of wedlock.
One point, however, to note here is that there has always been a public misconception about race and welfare. It is true that over the years blacks became disproportionately represented. But given that whites constitute a majority of the population , numerically they have always been the largest users of the AFDC program.
The retreat from the safety net philosophy can be dated to the presidencies of Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan. On the one hand, politicians wanted to reduce the cost of welfare. Conservatives were unimpressed by Nixon's goal of reducing the welfare bureaucracy through a program that appeared to expand public assistance.
The program died in Congress in Instead of reform, welfare programs underwent major expansions during the Nixon administration. The Earned Income Credit provided the working poor with direct cash assistance in the form of tax credits.
As spending grew, so did the welfare rolls. During the s advocates of welfare reform promoted the theory of "workfare. By the s workfare had emerged as the future of welfare reform. During his first term, he helped secure deep cuts in AFDC spending, including the reduction of benefits to working recipients of public assistance. In addition, the states were given the option of requiring the majority of recipients to participate in workfare programs.
During the s the welfare system was subjected to many critical attacks, most notably in sociologist Charles Murray's book Losing Ground: American Social Policy, — Murray argued that welfare hurt the poor by making them less well off and discouraging them from working.
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