Bernice Neugarten - Social Welfare in Western Society

In 1996, the United States Congress passed and President Bill Clinton (19932001) signed into law the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA). Ron Haskins, who played an important part in shaping the law as a staff member on the Ways and Means Committee of the House of Representatives, has called it a revolution in federal social policy (Haskins 2006:1). What was this revolution and what are its consequences?

This new law overturned a public welfare program begun in 1935, known first as Aid to Dependent Children (ADC) and then as Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) (see ), This is the program that everybody referred to as welfare. It was by far the most widely controversial program in the American social welfare field and was under attack by critics for much of its sixty-one-year existence. It provided aid to very poor people who could pass a means test, that is could show that they had insufficient means (money) to provide necessities for their families. There was no time limit for receiving welfare benefits, as long as income from work or other sources stayed below the cut-off level. Most of the recipients were single mothers with one or more children whose fathers generally did not live with them and contributed little or no financial support. Criticisms escalated over die years because the numbers of people receiving welfare grew enormously, because many children and grandchildren of welfare recipients continued to receive welfare payments when they became adults, and because there was widespread belief that many recipients were committing fraud. All of these generated increasing anger from taxpayers whose taxes paid for this program. In addition, the mothers were stigmatized for violating mainstream moral values by bearing children without being married and often with different men. There was fraud, as there is in many government programs that disburse money, but its magnitude was inflated when President Ronald Reagan (19811989) told an exaggerated story of an African-American woman whom he called a welfare queen who supposedly drove a Cadillac to the welfare office to pick up her checks (Hays 2003: 23). In other speeches he railed against a woman in Chicago who has eighty names, thirty addresses, twelve Social Security cards and is collecting veterans benefits on four nonexistent deceased husbands. Shes got Medicaid, food stamps, and she is collecting welfare under each of her names. Her tax-free cash alone is over $150,000 (Reese 2005: 173174.) Evidence indicates that the woman he was demonizing had used two aliases to collect $8,000 in over payments (Currie 2006: 11.) His exaggeration took advantage of the widespread dislike of welfare and probably further inflamed it.

The major social policy problem with AFDC was not fraud but the ever-growing number of recipients, the unlimited time that they could receive benefits, and the distressing transmission of welfare dependency from generation to generation. The 1996 law changed all this. It replaced AFDC with Temporary Aid to Needy Families (TANF) which had three major differences from AFDC (Haskins 2003), (1) TANF breaks welfare dependency by ending open-ended cash payments to poor families with children. It sets a five-year time limit for receiving benefits, but receiving benefits at all requires the parent to make an effort to find paid work or train for work. (2) The federal government sends the money to each state in a lump sum called a block grant so each state can design its own program tailored to local circumstances and traditions, States are required, however, to make an effort to reduce out-of-wedlock births and to increase the percentage of children raised in two-parent married homes. (3) States are required to have 50 percent of their cases in some approved work activity for at least thirty hours a week. A state is allowed to exempt from this requirement mothers of children who are under one year old.