| |
Bookmark:Solow make workfareWork and Welfare,
|
|
Two years after its passage, the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act is credited with achieving what President Clinton has called “the biggest drop in welfare rolls in history.” Underscoring the landmark legislation that ended a federal entitlement and turned power over to the states, the President also said, “The fundamental issue is that we've reduced the welfare rolls by 3.8 million.” The numbers are certainly impressive – prompting governors in state capitals from Boston to Sacramento to declare victory. As the initial time limits go into effect, most states are in solid shape, thanks partly to a sound economy and partly to the new ability to ease people off welfare and into work. Nonetheless, welfare reform has its critics. Some oppose it on ideological grounds, while others argue that the early success of welfare reform will evaporate with the first recession. Still others worry about compassion fatigue, the “mean-spiritedness” of workfare, the persistent poverty of the urban underclass, the emphasis on single mothers, the lack of job training, and the rigidity of time limits. In addition, they fault the inability of state welfare officials to track former recipients effectively. Given the temper of the times, critics acknowledge that welfare has been a bad deal for both taxpayer and recipients. “I hate welfare,” announced Peter Edelman, in his March 1997 Atlantic Monthly piece that predicted “serious injury to America children, who should not have had to suffer from our national backlash.” According to public opinion, workfare is a success, ratifying the end of the age of the entitlement. But public opinion, lower caseloads and tough love are not enough, say the critics. There is something fundamentally wrong in our expectations about welfare and workfare, and we will rue the day when welfare reform will lead us into an existential blindness on the human condition. Like Edelman, Nobel Laureate Robert M. Solow of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has a deep disdain for the welfare reform act. “I cannot bear to write down the fatuous title that Congress gave [the welfare reform act],” he writes in Work and Welfare, a slim but heady compilation of two recently delivered Tanner Lectures. Amy Gutmann, the Tanner Lecture series editor, brought four scholars together with Solow: neoconservative historian Gertrude Himmelfarb, New York Times columnist and legal scholar Anthony Lewis and economists Glenn Loury and John Roemer. Like Edelman, Solow refuses to believe that welfare reform, as currently packaged, can work. Solow believes that recipients should work for benefits but not as required under existing workfare rules. “Fair workfare,” as he calls it, would be more generous, more accommodating, more genuine in terms of democratic spirit, and gratifying for both taxpayer and recipient, who are mutually dependent. With Work and Welfare, Solow has written an intriguing but fabulously flawed book about ethics and economics. There may be those who find themselves reluctant to disagree with a Nobel laureate on matters of public policy. But this book is certainly open to much criticism. Americans have long balanced compassion and demands for responsibility. And the results of more than $5.4 trillion in spending since the early days of the Great Society testify to government failure. Operating from the premise that a fully functioning labor market will not provide jobs for people with low skills, Solow says that we cannot expect welfare recipients to find jobs that pay a living wage. Such jobs are just not there. Roemer's model tends to support Solow's. Welfare recipients make tradeoffs when considering a move to the job market. Indeed, they face high marginal costs such as child care and transportation. A low-wage worker will take a job only if his or her after-tax wage earnings exceed the welfare benefit. Moreover, flooding the market with low-wage workers will eventually dampen the wages of other low-income workers. However, any discussion of welfare reform, workfare and employment goes hand in hand with a discussion of the culture of poverty. Welfare erodes moral virtue, as Himmelfarb notes. The Victorians carefully differentiated between the deserving poor and the undeserving poor, a habit of thinking we should perhaps revisit, according to Himmelfarb. Loury points out that the culture of poverty has created an underclass unfit to work. Holding the poor to some modicum of responsibility is not class warfare. But not to Solow, who says simply that “it will do no good to tell the same people that they should become fit for work when there are no jobs to be had.” Solow dismisses the distinction frequently made between ordinary disabilities and “socio-economic disabilities.” While the public recognizes ordinary disabilities as legitimate, “apparently, socio-economic disabilities do not count.” But Solow's thinking is an affront to common sense. The private generosity of Americans in helping the poor is legend; few nations come close. Americans sensibly believe that, with some help, most people can overcome “socio-economic disabilities.” Most troubling is Solow's dismissal of private-sector charities as an instrument for helping the poor. If policymakers should be directed toward “conserving altruism,” they might, as we have often argued, consider offering tax incentives for contributing to private charities that help the poor. But Solow would, apparently, have none of that. “If the answer is that [the poor] were to be left to private charity, then I have to say that I much prefer some collective provision ... Servility and gratitude toward one's betters is not my idea of propriety in a democracy.” It is ironic that Solow's idea of propriety is to sustain a welfare state that has imprisoned generations of the poor in a trap far worse than any Victorian poorhouse he could imagine. A longer version of this article will soon appear as part of BHI's "On the Issue" series. the guarantee, of further robust NewsLink
is the quarterly newsletter of the Beacon Hill Institute for
Public Policy Research at Suffolk University. © 1996-1998. All rights
reserved. Posted on 11/20/98. |