Dignity of self-sufficiency trumps welfare expansion

By KATHERINE BRADLEY

For the first time in more than a generation, a lengthy recession is forcing Americans to deal with lasting economic hardship. Not surprisingly, many policymakers are reacting by attempting to increase federal spending on aid programs.

Recently, President Barack Obama released his 2010 budget appendix explaining how much he wants to spend on each federal program. A large share of his funding would go toward expanding programs for the poor.

Added to the 2009 omnibus spending bill and this year’s “stimulus” package, these policies would represent an enormous expansion of the welfare state. Programs like food stamps, Medicaid, TANF (cash assistance) and the Earned Income Credit are just a few examples of programs that have received billions more in funding and will add thousands more people to government welfare rolls.

Self-sufficiency

But in difficult times, we should ask what the goal of these programs is. Do we want a simple handout for recipients? Or should our leaders craft a strategy that helps people move toward self-sufficiency and personal renewal?

Well, Americans already know the answer. A recent poll of 1,000 people by Wilson Research Strategies shows there’s little support for increasing the amount of aid low-income families receive. In fact, only 18 percent of those surveyed said that current levels of spending on programs for the poor were “not enough.”

Despite this, Congress and the president have moved to spend more on welfare programs while also expanding eligibility for them. Within a year the number of families who receive government assistance could grow exponentially.

That would have long-lasting consequences. Welfare and assistance programs do little but prolong families’ dependence on government. They act as Band-Aids to various problems (such as lack of food or shelter) and ignore the very elements of what put a struggling family in a position of need in the first place.

Worse, these programs have undermined the family. The percent of children born outside of marriage has grown from 7 percent prior to the “War on Poverty” to 40 percent today. Ever-expanding government assistance programs trap more people into welfare dependency and leave them stuck on the lowest rung of our economic ladder.

There’s a better approach.

In 1996, the Republican Congress and Democratic President Bill Clinton joined forces to reform our nation’s largest cash welfare program. The government replaced the Aid to Families with Dependent Children program with the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) program. Note the word “temporary.”

Prior to this reform, the average family receiving cash assistance stayed on the welfare rolls for 13 years. That simply created generational poverty and dependence.

TANF, on the other hand, helped move people into jobs and self-sufficiency. Welfare offices became job-placement offices and social workers found effective approaches to put people to work. Families were issued comprehensive plans that focused on all their needs. They learned how to become more stable and to provide for themselves. Because of these reforms, caseloads shrunk from 5 million families in 1996 to 1.7 million a decade later. As a presidential candidate, Obama said he’d opposed the 1996 reform, but admitted it had, in fact, succeeded.

Reform success

Instead of launching a spending spree that expands the size and scope of the welfare state, our national leaders should instead use the success of the 1996 TANF reform as a model to replicate in other assistance programs.

TANF is only one of some 70 programs the federal government runs to help the poor. Food Stamps, Section 8 Housing vouchers and Medicaid are available, too. However, all of these programs lack TANF’s basic reform model that promotes work and self-sufficiency. In contrast to TANF, all these programs serve merely as patches to momentary problems.

The entire welfare system should be reformed to require work and emphasize marriage. After all, children raised by never-married mothers are seven times more likely to be poor when compared to children raised in intact families.

X Katherine Bradley is a research fellow at The Heritage Foundation, Washington, D.C. Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Information Services.