"Ending Welfare As We Know It"--Wrong for Welfare, Wrong for Poverty

Joel F. Handler

Professor of Law at University of California-Los Angeles Law School

Welfare reform is back on the public agenda. Liberals now join conservatives in calling for more responsibility from welfare recipients. In his 1992 campaign, President Clinton promised to end "welfare as we know it." However, many of his proposed approaches, like "workfare," fail to define the problem accurately and tend to blame the victims: poor single mothers and their children.

A fear of re-enforcing immoral behavior pervades the history of welfare. This fear culminated in the shift of liberal thought in the late 1980s toward a new demand of responsibility from welfare recipients. The resultant debate centers around family values, the work ethic, and the inability of welfare to encourage either ideal. The welfare to work proposals are rooted in stereotypical assumptions which paint a false picture of the recipients. The reality is that most recipients are on welfare for relatively short periods of time; most are working and will work their way off welfare; most are not African American; few are teenagers. Inaccurate assessments of the problem will result in frustrated reform efforts which make symbols and targets out of the people welfare is supposed to help.

While there is widespread support for welfare reform, the principal proposals seem doomed to fail. The main components of the Welfare Reform Act are a two-year limit on AFDC benefits and a subsequent subsidized work requirement. It seems likely that a substantial number of recipients will exhaust their two years of benefits without securing an unsubsidized job. States will experience a push to create massive numbers of subsidized jobs with little growth potential, but none of the welfare programs will do anything to change the labor markets. The working poor will be unable to receive any long-term training or education and will be unlikely to leave subsidized work. Unless we can create jobs that pay more income, we will have done nothing to lessen poverty or reduce the need for welfare.

Vol. II, No. 1, p. 3 (1994)

Revised July 17, 2003 (MD)