Welfare: Trying to End the Nightmare
THE U.S. welfare system is a living nightmare that has reached the point of the involuntary scream and chill awakening. The nation spent about $14.2 billion on welfare last year, more than twice the outlay of only five years ago. Yet the 13.5 million Americans--6.3% of the population--who received that aid are only half the estimated number of the needy and eligible. Increased by the recession and the growing activism of welfare rights groups, the rolls continue to grow in every part of the country. After 35 years of legislation and programs, the world's wealthiest nation seems caught in a paradoxical trap: the more the U.S. spends on its poor, the greater the need seems to be to spend more still.
The need to pay for welfare has stretched some cities to the edge of bankruptcy; some states are being forced to choose between the poor and the public schools or other essential services. Moreover, the U.S. is distributing aid through an administrative system that might have been designed in a demented collaboration between Franz Kafka and Rube Goldberg. Federal, state and local regulations regularly overlap, producing a punch-card maze from which escape seems impossible. The situation is, as the President said in his State of the Union address, "a monstrous, consuming outrage."
The outrage affects Americans in opposite ways, resulting in an antiphonal chorus of anger. On one side, in helpless dependence, welfare recipients complain that they do not get enough to sustain a decent life. Welfare Organizer Mrs. Johnnie Tillmon vehemently attacks the Administration's proposed Family Assistance Plan as "inadequate and ridiculous. You don't give people dirt to encourage them to work. There's not much incentive in that." On the other side, in the grip of inflation and rising taxes, those who pay the bill complain that too much is being given away to millions who are probably shiftless and lazy. In that view, welfare money means, as Ronald Reagan puts it: "A tax increase next year, the year after and the year after that, and on into the future as far as we can see." Thus the worst thing about the price tag of $14 billion is that it satisfies no one; under the system it is unblessed both to give and to receive.
The Somber Count
So great are the numbers that they numb: no mind can do the sums of individual anguish, privation and frustration that make up the whole. In Chicago, Welfare Director David L. Daniel says that the Cook County rolls will increase from 485,000 at the end of 1970 to 625,000 this year. In Newark, 25% of the population is getting aid, and Essex County Welfare Director Philip K. Lazaro says: "We are on the brink of financial disaster." In Los Angeles, the case load is now above 800,000 and rising by 10,000 to 15,000 a month.
The drastic rise is almost uniform across the states, regardless of geography and size. In the Northeast, Pennsylvania's welfare costs have gone from $314 million in 1967 to an estimated billion dollars this year, and its welfare population has more than doubled; in Massachusetts, 3.9% of the population received help five years ago, while 8.6% get it now. In the Southwest, Texas saw its welfare rolls grow 67% in one year after a change in the laws. In the Midwest, Michigan expects to have one citizen in seven on welfare by 1972; last month Governor William Milliken proposed a cut in school funds of $15 million to help pay the current bill.
Last month Governor Deane C. Davis of Vermont could have been speaking for many Governors when he froze education spending in order to raise welfare aid: "If we are to break the cycle of poverty and its resulting human and social costs, we must address ourselves to the treatment of causes rather than symptoms. A high quality of education for every Vermont child is part of the long-range solution. But the tragedy is, a long-term solution is of little help to a child who is hungry, sick or cold this winter. We must have, and we must give them short-term relief."
In the current crisis, frustration and anger have brought federal officials and the states and localities into open warfare over welfare budgets. Leading examples: California and New York. Together, the two largest states have 3,000,000 people receiving aid and distribute almost 37% of the nation's welfare money. Reagan is a conservative, budget-minded administrator confronted by a geometric rise in costs for a program that is in part a philosophical anathema to him. For months he fought to dispense smaller checks than those mandated under federal rules. HEW came within a day of announcing a cutoff of $684 million in aid to California, most of it destined for children and their unemployed mothers. Only last-minute negotiations averted the stop order. In New York, Governor Nelson Rockefeller, just re-elected to his fourth term, is preparing to ask higher taxes to meet the deficit created in large part by Federal Government programs requiring another $1.5 billion in state spending. A leading state senator has proposed Las Vegas-type gambling casinos in New York to help raise revenues.
New York City Mayor John Lindsay faces perhaps the most staggering crisis of all. His welfare population--1,100,000, every seventh New Yorker--could constitute the seventh largest municipality in the U.S. The aid bill for that doomed city within the city last year: $1.7 billion, a sixfold increase in a decade. As is the case with so much of the welfare nightmare, Lindsay's problems mix the pathetic and the bizarre; to his horror welfare officials recently lodged an indigent family at the Waldorf Astoria for a day, claiming absurdly that there was no room elsewhere. Many others on relief, unable to find homes, live in exorbitantly priced but squalid hotels overrun with vice and drug addiction.
Nor is the problem confined within city limits. In Westchester and Nassau, two of the richest counties in the nation, the suburban welfare rolls are growing at a rate faster than that of the city itself. Now Lindsay is attempting to bring down the whole haphazard welfare structure, the better to build it anew. He is preparing a legal attack contending that HEW mandates resulting in automatic increases in his welfare budget amount to an illegal, destructive tax by the Federal Government on the city. He says: "Poverty and welfare are national problems; their solution cannot be found at the local level."
New Plan, Old Failure
So urgent is the welfare crisis that Richard Nixon has been driven to unlikely activity for a Republican President: the espousal of Daniel Patrick Moynihan's unprecedented Family Assistance Plan, which amounts to a guaranteed annual income for the families of both the unemployed and the working poor (see box, page 23). Nixon has also proposed substantial revenue sharing with the states and cities. There is considerable doubt whether even immediate enactment of these measures would permit the nation to do much more than run very rapidly in place.
The failure of the U.S. welfare system is also, in large measure, a defeat for liberalism--not for its goal or faith but for its methods. The system was begun as an absolute necessity and did stave off disaster in the Depression. In 1935, when unemployment had reached 11.11% of the population. Congress passed Franklin Roosevelt's Social Security Act. It included aid to the unemployed, the old, the blind, and children dependent on adults who could no longer care for even themselves. Unemployment-insurance benefits were, and still are, a dismal way station for many on the road to total dependence. When the temporary payments stop, the only recourse is welfare.
Since the 1935 legislation, additions were made in an unending series, from food distribution to public housing and rent supplements, until the whole began to seem like a giant jigsaw puzzle with parts that would not fit together. Several of the programs have been successful, and are almost universally accepted. Few today would question Social Security retirement benefits; while Medicare had a troubled beginning, it helped establish the principle of national health insurance, which is now substantially backed by both Republicans and Democrats. Yet the whole vast structure remains patched, haphazard and almost impossible to grasp, let alone control--a disorganized welfare state within a state.
Even now there is no universally accepted definition of the programs that actually constitute the welfare system. But there are six basic elements that HEW considers the core of welfare: Medicaid; Old Age Assistance (OAA); Aid to the Blind (AB); Aid to the Permanently and Totally Disabled (APTD); the fastest growing, Aid for Dependent Children (AFDC) and General Assistance, a locally used catchall category.
For none of these programs has there ever been a national, uniform standard. Though the Federal Government pays approximately half the cost of all the basic programs except General Assistance, how much an individual receives is determined by what his state is willing to spend. In Mississippi, a mother and three children under AFDC must live on $840 a year; in New Jersey, the same family would receive $4,164, with no other circumstances of their lives changed. Washington sets some of the rules. To get at the funds, the states and localities meet the rules, often grudgingly, and then set some of their own. Rarely is bureaucracy flexible enough to encompass complex human situations. Often regulations that were sensibly written to prevent abuses end up strangling the system. A collage of the absurdities the rules have wrought:
> In New York, one category of assistance that might be expected to remain relatively constant, aid to the permanently disabled, has more than doubled in the past ten years. The explanation: under state rules, heroin addicts are considered permanently disabled, a judgment with which it is difficult to argue. To get aid, the addict must register for treatment, but--catch-22--everyone knows that treatment is hard to get, and of questionable effectiveness. The money goes largely for heroin.
> In Hartford, Conn., the state is responsible for aid to unwed mothers between the ages of 16 and 21; the city cares for all others. Thus a 20-year-old gets a state check while she is carrying her baby: if she gives birth after her 21 st birthday, the checks come from the city.
> In Berkeley, Calif., a young husband and father, unemployed but trying to improve his future by attending college at night, is receiving aid. His caseworker informs him that by going to school he is violating the rules: he must be available for employment at all times. He quits school and is still on welfare.
> In Oakland, Calif., a middle-aged man, after receiving aid for 13 months, gets a post at last as a security guard. There is one problem: he needs $40 for a deposit on the uniform he will have to wear. Sorry, no money in the rule book. A caseworker deliberately breaks the law to advance the money. The man repays it within a month.
> In New York's Puerto Rican barrio, a 32-year-old woman, born into a welfare family, has lived through an unremitting succession of misfortunes to herself and her five children. She takes some pride in having manipulated public and private welfare agencies to produce benefits of $368 a month. She has never had a stable family life with a man. She finally finds one: a neighbor with a steady job who wants to marry her. But he cannot: she and her children would lose all aid, and they are beyond his means of support.
> She and many others are victims of the "notch effect" that diminishes the impact of America's welfare programs by diminishing incentives for self-improvement. A realistic example: a family receives benefits of $350 a month. The mother gets a $450-a-month job, but it involves expenses such as travel and baby sitters. The salary, however, puts her over the allowable income--the notch--and because the family loses all benefits there is no incentive to work.
Caseworkers and Patchwork
An administrative machine with such unique qualities is not purchased cheaply. Ellis Murphy, 53, soft-spoken but increasingly bitter, runs one of the biggest welfare departments in the country in Los Angeles County. He has the doubtful guidance of the county welfare regulations, which he dutifully keeps just outside his office. They make a pile exactly 5 ft. 2 in. high. "If something isn't done soon," he says, "the whole idiotic patchwork will fall of its own weight. It's a disaster. At all levels of state and Federal Government, it's disgraceful that we have no master plan to direct this monumental spending."
A toll is taken on the people who tend the machine. Welfare supervisors and caseworkers typically begin with the purest will to help and end up either leaving or fighting to remember why they enlisted in what ought to be a noble enterprise. Some workers in welfare offices issue checks bigger than their own take-home pay to families like their own. A high turnover among caseworkers is typical.
Chicago's turnover rate is 55% a year. Most of those who stay handle 150 or more cases each; the federally recommended maximum is 60. One young caseworker, speaking for thousands like her in urban areas, says: "The paper work is just amazing. There are copies and copies of everything, dozens of forms to fill out. And it's like pulling teeth just to get the forms. You want to issue some furniture because the family needs it desperately. But you can't get anyone to sign the authorization. All we have time to do is move paper. I have yet to solve any social problems." Tom Lambert, dressed in blue jeans and a sports shirt, is a veteran after 2 1/2 years. He says: "The directives would be hard for a lawyer to figure out, so everyone ends up making his own interpretations." Another worker says: "You learn to sign other people's names if necessary."
It takes more than ingenuity for caseworkers to survive the system. Lambert says: "You see so many emergencies that you have to build a shell around yourself to maintain your sanity." In Alameda County, Calif., Dion Lerch, 25, caseworker No. E-165, says: "Look, after a while you become immune to all the misery you see; you become an animal. I can tell someone I'm cutting off his check, you're damn straight I can. With 125 cases it's hard to remember that they're all human beings. Sometimes they're just a number." But she stays because she does remember, and Lambert stays because his shell is soft.
At the receiving end of it all--on the long lines at welfare centers and at supermarkets, food stamps in hand--are the people the system is designed to help. It is they who have been its chief victims. To be poor in 20th century America is to suffer the heightened frustration and deeper bitterness of watching the trillion-dollar gross national product paraded on a television set standing in a barren room. It is also to endure a dehumanization that only serves to make welfare clients even less able to care, or want to care, for themselves. The audit of public expenditures is necessary, but in no other area of government is human dignity so perishable an asset. A Brooklyn woman--in the late stages of pregnancy, injured and confined to bed--was left that way, without a "homemaker" to help her, until her toilet was repaired. Under the rules, no homemaker may stay where there is no functioning toilet; the unavoidable implication is that the client needs it less.
Last year a freelance writer, Mrs. June Bingham, tried to live on a welfare food budget. She learned about flash hunger pains and biscuits to assuage them, but even more about the debilitating effect of a lack of protein and vitamins. "I began to understand why poor children fall asleep in class." she reported. At the end of her welfare week, she had an egg for breakfast. "It gave me indigestion. I think perhaps it always will. If the occupational hazard of poverty is a chip on the shoulder, then the occupational hazard of affluence is insensitivity."
Insensitive or otherwise, many, if not most Americans, hold certain beliefs about welfare that are largely myths. In the harshest possible montage of these myths, the composite picture of a welfare family would be something like this: black, recently arrived from the Deep South to get higher benefits, a woman who stops conceiving babies only long enough to have them, an able-bodied man who drives to the welfare office in a pink Cadillac, and a dozen children who cannot wait to head their own welfare families; with even minimal guile, they can cheat their way onto the rolls and live better under welfare than if they had jobs.
Only a Few Can Be Helped
There are enough who fit each aspect of the composite to unfairly tar all the needy, but the reality of poverty in the U.S. is not what myth would have it. A majority of the welfare recipients in the country are white (58%), and thousands of them--many from high-paying jobs, especially in engineering--are now discovering the shock of poverty for the first time. Forty-two percent are nonwhite, more than three times their proportion of the population--testimony to the dislocation and discrimination in American society. Hundreds of thousands of blacks left the Deep South in the two decades following World War II. But a number of studies indicate that by and large they went north (and still go, though in smaller numbers) looking for work, not welfare. Most do not seek public aid until several years after they arrive.
Very few live better on welfare than they would with full-time jobs at adequate wages. Obviously, cheating does happen. Item: In California, a man combined a secret job and welfare for an annual income of $16,800. Item: a regulation-wise hippie commune in Berkeley reconstituted itself into eight paper "households" and collected $1,000 a month in aid. Item: a group of middle-class suburbanites in Piedmont, Calif., where county rules require only identification and a statement of need before aid is issued, dramatized their displeasure with the system by easily getting onto the rolls at several offices. But the fact is that chicanery accounts for a very small part of welfare's cost. The last HEW study estimates that only four out of every 1,000 of those on welfare actually cheat.
Contrary to common belief, only a tiny number of people who may not really need it get aid. As HEW reports flatly: "Even with the best possible services, only about 5% at most [of welfare recipients] can be helped to self-sufficiency within a reasonable length of time." A more realistic figure is probably closer to 2%. The rest are children too young to work, the aged and hopelessly disabled who cannot work, and mothers who have nowhere to leave their children in order to take a job--if one exists.
In AFDC, the typical applicant stays on the rolls for only 23 months, according to HEW figures, though four out of ten return a second time. Moreover, AFDC families are not all large. Their average is four persons, compared with 4.2 in the general population. In two-thirds of the welfare families, all the children had the same parents; an estimated 31% of all children getting aid were born illegitimately.*
Although they do not live the myth, welfare clients ironically share a belief in it. In a study by Dr. Scott Briar, professor in the school of social welfare at Berkeley, nearly half of a sampling of recipients thought that cheating was much more frequent than it is, 58% thought that many people stayed on welfare too long, and most thought that welfare departments had a right to check on clients and end aid if they found improprieties such as unreported income. Said Briar: "Welfare clients in general share the mores of the wider middle-class society about work and the shame of going on welfare."
Needed: One Miracle
Even when some of the myths are cleared away, however, the fact remains that AFDC is at the heart of the problem. The crisis in welfare today is essentially the crisis of maintaining an ever-growing number of impoverished families with small children; most other categories of the needy have remained relatively stable in numbers.
According to Brookings Institution's Gilbert Steiner, a leading student of welfare policies: "If a great miracle could take place, and all actual and potential AFDC recipients were to disappear from the ranks of the needy, the remaining categories would not constitute a public problem of major magnitude."
Miracle is not too extreme a hypothesis. In the ten years from 1960 to 1970, the number of people AFDC covers has risen from 3,023,000 to 9,500,000; the cost has gone from $1,056,000,000 to $4,800,000,000.
The burgeoning of AFDC cases over a decade has a variety of explanations. Federal and state eligibility rules have been liberalized. One Supreme Court ruling has ended residency requirements for applicants. Another--recently modified--forbade unannounced "raids" to see if a man in the home of an AFDC mother made her ineligible for aid. Before the ruling, such raids, particularly in the South in the homes of black mothers, were common. Investigations are still conducted, but less harshly. The change has allowed at least 100,000 families to get assistance--people who previously would not have applied for aid or would have been dropped.
A change in mores has added more. Says Mitchell I. Ginsberg, dean of the Columbia University School of Social Work and former head of the New York City human-resources administration: "There are more divorces now among all classes. Many values are breaking down--not just the family but religion, sex, illegitimacy. To blame this on welfare is nonsense."
A major new cause for the increase in AFDC applicants is the effective campaign to get more people on the rolls who have a right to be there. Chief organizer of that movement is George Wiley, 40, executive secretary of the National Welfare Rights Organization. A former leader of the Congress of Racial Equality and a Ph.D. in chemistry who still publishes in scholarly journals, Wiley now wears dashikis more often than business suits. In the four years since N.W.R.O. has been in operation, it has organized an estimated 100,000 welfare clients, almost all of them women, into a national force to raise benefits. Normally they use peaceful tactics, but there have been acts of violence. An N.W.R.O. invasion party once took over the office of the HEW Secretary Robert Finch. Says one HEW official: "I tell you, they've educated a lot of people. They've brought the problem right into this building, and believe me, it's had an impact."
The N.W.R.O. has absorbed much of the seemingly dissipated energy of the civil rights movement and has adopted the movement's militancy and some of its tactics. N.W.R.O. has had a significant effect upon the attitudes of the poor. Many now consider welfare aid a proper and legal claim and demand that it be satisfied. Says Mrs. Tillmon, N.W.R.O. president and a Watts mother of six: "We would like to see everybody get what's coming to them. Everybody is entitled to live in this country, regardless of race, creed, religion or sex. Do you expect people who can't make a living to go out and get hit by a car? It would cost a lot just to bury them."
The Protestant Ethic
That attitude is a far cry from the 1930s and Ben Isaacs in Studs Terkel's Hard Times: "Shame? You tellin' me? I would go stand on that relief line, I would look this way and that way and see if there's nobody around that knows me. I would bend my head low so nobody would recognize me. The only scar it left on me is my pride, my pride."
Despite the growing notion of welfare by right, the "work ethic" is not dead for either the poor or nonpoor; a stigma still attaches to the jobless, just as a "P" was once pinned to paupers in Philadelphia. The force of the concept comes through clearly in the view of Nicholas Kisburg, legislative director of the Teamsters Union Joint Council 16 and a self-made man. Despite his seventh-grade education, he now gives courses in labor and politics at Fordham University. "I'm a strong believer in the Protestant ethic," he says. "Work and discipline are necessary. One reason why blue-collar guys hate welfare so much is that they feel, psychologically, that it threatens them. Working, bringing home the check each week, is one way of establishing their supremacy to themselves and their families. Work is the one thing they have. When they see a guy getting a check for doing nothing, they go crazy."
The modern concept of state welfare is indeed drastically different, not only from private charity, however massive, but also from the largesse distributed by governments to appease a mob. In the past, sustenance by right existed in the tribe, the medieval church and between master and serf. The belief that the state owes each citizen care in times of distress, and ultimately a minimum living, is a byproduct of 19th century industrial society. The gradual accumulation of social legislation, beginning with Dickensian workhouses, was necessary not only to keep the new working class working amid the fearful uncertainties of early capitalism. It was also a kind of vaccination against socialism. Underlying it was the most radical faith of all, though unrecognized for a long time: that poverty was no longer inevitable as an act of God, that the industrial age could create universal plenty.
Paper Triumphs
The idea of welfare ran strongly against the American grain. During the early decades of the 19th century, many of the poor were virtual chattels. Under a system called "outdoor relief," they were auctioned into the service of those who would support them at the lowest cost to the community. But not all were that fortunate; only the "virtuous" unemployed entered the system. In the industrialization that followed, the poor became civic wards. Through it all, receiving was a stigma and giving was a personal or institutional act of grace and only grudgingly a community necessity. It could hardly be otherwise in a country with a strong Puritan heritage, a nation still conquering and transforming a new continent on sheer nerve, on a fierce faith in self-reliance, individualism and opportunity.
It was the Depression of the 1930s, the first great shock to America's nerve, that brought about the New Deal welfare legislation. Yet even this only established minimum safeguards. The original model was not designed to help the needy or their descendants off the floor by ending the conditions that had brought them there.
That became the stated purpose of the War on Poverty in the 1960s. Under the Office of Economic Opportunity, manpower-training programs and encouragement of the poor to organize on their own behalf were designed to help adults. A big investment in education generally, with emphasis on remedial and preventive programs like Head Start, was designed to help their children. Finally, programs like VISTA aimed at enlisting other Americans in the war. Michael Harrington, whose 1962 book The Other America did much to focus affluent America's attention on its underclass, charges that federal statistics claiming advances amount to no more than the celebration of "paper triumphs." The evidence is with Harrington. While innovative, a number of the programs were excessively costly, poorly administered and subject to failure because of the inability of federal, state and local officials to unite effectively. Even the better experiments made little headway because of the problem's enormity. The current crisis is evidence enough that Lyndon Johnson's domestic war did not end in victory or even a draw.
But even if Head Start has not raised average urban reading levels, who can evaluate the enhancement of life for those children who did, in fact, enter a new world of words and ideas? Moreover, at least one functioning arm of the OEO clearly has a continuing effect: lawyers for the agency have helped organize the poor in their demands for help. Above all, however ineptly, the War on Poverty pointed to the problem of pride: the fact that a measure of self-respect, as well as respect from society, has to go with welfare.
View from the Right
Though conservatives often lament the welfare mess in the harshest terms, they have offered few realistic and workable alternatives. Senator Barry Goldwater, in The Conscience of a Conservative, advocates turning all welfare over to private institutions--an 18th century solution for a 20th century problem. His onetime adviser, Economist Milton Friedman, and the Senate's newest prominent conservative, James Buckley of New York, both favor a modern concept, the negative income tax. But Friedman shackles the idea to what he calls, without being specific, a "modest" level of aid. Under the NIT, the tax scales would be continued downward past the zero-tax line; those with inadequate income would be given money through the internal revenue apparatus. The amount would be based on need and designed to encourage privately earned income. Friedman also would use NIT to replace all present welfare aid. (Ironically, Organizer Wiley also favors the NIT, but not at a modest level: N.W.R.O. seeks $5,500 a year for a family of four.)
Urban Affairs Expert Edward C. Banfield, author of The Unheavenly City, is reduced to musing on what he concedes are steps available only to an American dictator. Among other things, he would: repeal the minimum-wage laws; encourage "or perhaps even require" teen-agers who do not go to college either to take jobs that are low-paid and unattractive if they are the only ones available, or do military or volunteer service; encourage or even require institutionalization of the highly incompetent poor; and place lower-class "problem families" in closely supervised housing projects.
President Nixon's Family Assistance Plan thus has no practical, serious competitors as yet in filling the growing demand for welfare reform. The proposal has suffered from political and philosophical distortions, the President's as well as its critics'. Nevertheless, it remains a firm, if modest first step in the right direction.
The FAP would replace the AFDC program; each family would get $1,600 from the Federal Government. That would be only the floor. Through continuing state contributions atop that sum, most recipients would get approximately what they get now. But the change in much of the South would be dramatic. HEW estimates that there are 845,000 AFDC families in the South and Puerto Rico that would benefit to varying degrees. In Alabama, for instance, the maximum payment for an AFDC family of four is now $972; under FAP, it would be at least the federally guaranteed $1,600, even if Alabama decided to contribute nothing more. The maximum level now in effect in Arkansas is $ 1,140, Louisiana $1,248, South Carolina $1,236, and Puerto Rico $636.
The fundamental importance of the plan, however, lies less in the level of payment than the source. For the first time, the economic base would be federal and nationally uniform. The second major element of the FAP proposal, again a departure from the past, is that the $1,600 could go not only to fatherless families, or families with unemployed fathers, but to an estimated 10,571,000 people in families that make up the working poor. They are mostly intact families, headed by males, and now go largely unaided--in effect, the walking wounded. The Administration estimates the additional cost of FAP at $4.4 billion.
The Question of Incentives
FAP includes a requirement that the potentially employable seek work or job training to remain eligible for benefits, but such a condition already exists in most states and would serve more to assuage taxpayer irritation than substantially reduce the rolls.
Nevertheless, much of the criticism of FAP has centered on the question of whether the plan provides the incentives and the means for those on welfare to work their way out of it. What solid evidence there is gives little support to the myth of the lazy poor. A study of 1,350 working-poor families in New Jersey and Pennsylvania, begun in 1968 and still going on, shows that those who receive federal payments to supplement their small earned incomes, and those who do not, both seek work with equal persistence. Says Dr. Harold Watts, one of the experiment's supervisors: "People simply do not take the money and sit on the porch and whittle."
Perhaps of equal importance is the question of how much the administration of welfare would be improved under FAP. The answer--which must remain unclear until the program is finally shaped by Congress--is, for the moment, depressing. In FAP's latest version, welfare would probably continue to be administered by the states under contract to the Federal Government.
What Decency Requires
FAP has also been attacked because it simply does not give the poor enough money to bring them above the poverty line (currently set at $3,967 for an urban family of four). By the Government's own standards, the proposal falls as short of the goal as the present system. And it has been attacked by others. Reagan among them, because what it does give amounts to a guaranteed income. FAP, as even less hostile critics have noted, is in fact a pilot guaranteed annual income or a negative income tax, though Nixon has wisely not heralded it as such. A more fundamental criticism is that FAP does not offer any broad attack on the structural causes of poverty, as many Great Society programs attempted to do.
Despite its limitations, FAP has the endorsement of many who have lived through the chaos of welfare administration. Robert Levine, who served as assistant director of research in OEO under the Johnson Administration, and is now with the Rand Corporation, is an enthusiastic supporter. He sees among FAP's chief advances its criterion of simple need rather than employability or "deservedness." Onetime HEW Secretary Wilbur J. Cohen and California Democratic Congressman Phillip Burton, experts in the field, both see the federal commitment to a minimum national standard as the plan's principal virtue. Even Banfield applauds FAP's certain effect in the South, where "the system is far below what decency requires."
In the new Congress, a real possibility exists for a major advance involving FAP. Congressional opposition to revenue sharing is strong, perhaps fatal. FAP stands a good chance in this session, however, and there has been little argument with the idea of a uniform federal income standard. Coincidentally, the state and local share of welfare is about $6 billion--the same amount of new money that Nixon wants to hand the states and cities under revenue sharing.
One possible alternative: the President could put aside his revenue-sharing plan and instead propose a full federal takeover of welfare. A number of benefits might result: the states and cities would have available for other programs the $6 billion they now spend on welfare --in effect, the no-strings money they would get under revenue sharing; with only the Federal Government financing welfare, one standard of aid would apply nationally, and one set of rules.
Even that major step would not do away with the dilemma of poverty. Measured against the rest of the world's major non-Communist industrialized nations, America, in fact, has never matched its generosity of spirit in its performance. The U.S. was the last to adopt Social Security legislation, and still devotes proportionately less of its resources to welfare than most. The problem is far greater in the U.S. than elsewhere, for several reasons. In a heavily heterogeneous society, economic differences are made more complex by racial and cultural distinctions. The movement of population within the country has damaged family stability. Moreover, in a real sense, the success of the economic system is a problem. The mechanization of agriculture displaced millions, and automation in industry has reduced the number of unskilled jobs. The process continues, and technological breakthroughs seem to happen faster than it is possible to educate and train people for skilled tasks. The remaining jobs, in the view of Sociologist Nathan Glazer, have become socially undesirable. He suggests that many of the able-bodied men who reject menial work--though relatively few are on welfare--are the same ones who father children but do not support them.
All this is happening just as several trends come together to produce a psychological crunch. The definition of what constitutes poverty keeps going up, in the advanced country's equivalent of the underdeveloped country's revolution of "rising expectations." Poverty, once accepted as part of the human condition, is increasingly seen as an intolerable affront. Yet, simultaneously, the suspicion dawns that poverty cannot be abolished, after all, at least not in relative terms: even in a wealthy society, someone will always be at the bottom. At the same moment, moreover, the faith in America's almost endlessly expanding wealth is weakening.
At the heart of the problem remain the casualties--of life itself and of the economic system that demands more than they have to give. They must be cared for by a system that keeps them from being internal aliens. This is necessary not only for the sake of decency (the requirements of decency are subjective and flexible), but to save America's view of itself.
* Compared with 6% (by rough estimate) of all U.S. children. There are no certain figures on illegitimacy among the middle and upper classes, or their abortions. That solution is rarely available to the poor and culturally depressed.
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