WE SHOULD STOP PUNISHING THE POOR AND CLAIMING IT’S FOR THEIR OWN GOOD
Before there was demonizing of Muslims, Latino immigrants and other minorities, refugees, transgender people and the press, shame and blame were leveled most often on America’s poor.
That hasn’t changed. State governments continue to target public assistance recipients by lowering subsidies, tightening eligibility criteria or cutting people off benefits. Only the conversation has been re-framed from dismissing them as “welfare queens” to patronizing them with the supposed tough-love approach.
That’s what the state of Kansas has done to 17,000 people since 2011, declaring it was for their own good. And now they have a study by the conservative Foundation for Government Accountability to justify it.
A column that ran recently in USA Today, “The poor are better off without welfare … ,” touted its findings and employed both the mean-spirited rhetoric and the false narrative of past and present welfare foes. It started by suggesting there may have been merit to a literary quote about welfare recipients as “lazy whore(s)” and “deadbeats” who “buy liquor and cell phone coverage with our tax money.”
The long-term unemployed have been rendered perhaps the most voiceless group in society, making them easier to dehumanize in public policy debates. We blame them rather than a lack of decent jobs, training or support systems for single parents, or systemic exclusion or discrimination in the work force.
Bill Clinton’s 1996 federal welfare overhaul replaced the old Aid to Families with Dependent Children with Temporary Assistance to Needy Families, using block grants to states and making public assistance temporary. It prevented states from granting welfare benefits for more than two years at a time, and imposed a lifetime cap of five. It also imposed work requirements, and it permitted states not to increase aid when recipients had more children.
But Kansas went even farther, with a lifetime limit of three years and other punitive measures. The foundation’s study tracked more than 6,000 families over four years who were pushed off public assistance, and said the number of able-bodied adults on public assistance dropped nearly 78 percent. “Incomes continued to climb each year for those removed, eventually more than tripling — increasing by 247 percent within four years,” it said. “Over that same period, these families saw an estimated $48 million increase in wages.”
But in a piece in the conservative National Review, of all places, author Robert VerBruggen questioned the findings. He wondered how many people didn’t find work. He said the authors responded that about 80 percent “had some record of employment after being removed from the program, but there was some fluctuation of people moving into and out of the labor force. About 65 percent were working in any given year after removal.”
The report on Kansas concluded with a call for Congress to let states impose work requirements “in as many welfare programs as possible,” such as Medicaid and food stamps, as Kansas did. “In so doing, they will be giving millions of American families the hand up they desperately need,” it preached.
A hand up? Work requirements have caused thousands of Kansans to lose food stamps. Repeat drug offenders are banned from getting food stamps for life. TANF recipients are only allowed a maximum of $25 a day in benefit withdrawals from ATM machines. Anyone testing positive for drugs is suspended from TANF.
It’s hard to see those harsh provisions as anything but spiteful, especially when they’re aimed at the poorest sectors of society who probably have no other way to feed themselves or their families.
During his administration, George W. Bush pushed for $350 million in spending to promote marriage and sexual abstinence to reform welfare. But government can’t end poverty by regulating the poor, making them marry, or stop having sex or bearing children.
Before cutting off anyone’s lifeline, our leaders need to offer substantive training for decent jobs and comprehensively address mental health, substance abuse or other multigenerational barriers to employment. They also need to preach less and listen more.
Des Moines Register