Our Grenfell: Slow death of the poor

The high rises in Britain to burn in the past 20 years — Garnock Court in Scotland, and Lakenal House and Grenfell Tower in England — happen to be places where poor people lived. Whether in the U.K. or the U.S., chances to make money abound from making poor people’s lives more dangerous.

We mostly grow used to the poor dying around us. Every so often though, the deaths of poor people happen in horrific fashion, such as last month at Grenfell Tower, where an estimated 80 residents of that housing project died. The images of Grenfell dissolving in flames are revolting enough that the public noticed, and not just in Europe, how dangerous it is to be poor.

Grenfell is not about fire, but about how nations provide, and fail to provide for, basic human needs. In the United States we have our less dramatic way of taking the lives of poor people. It is just as shameful as housing them in a firetrap, but it's not so dramatic as an inferno.

Our firetrap is our welfare program, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), which has given control of $16.5 billion in federal anti-poverty block grants to states. The states promise the feds and taxpayers they will manage the block grants with decency, then don’t.

Since the “welfare reform” law of 1996, states have been permitted to take the same sized federal TANF block grants each year, even while their caseloads plunge, in most states to fewer than 5% of their residents in poverty. Section 417 of the law says the federal government has no authority to tell states how to spend their block grants.

State bureaucrats appreciate the lack of oversight, and quickly figured out that the fewer people they enroll in their welfare program, the more millions states can keep at the end of each year, “unspent.” This unspent money is a slush fund used for non-poverty purposes. This is corruption.

Special interests in the U.K. saved money by covering Grenfell Tower in flammable materials; U.S. states save money by diverting welfare cash from poor people. States also please special interests by giving them contracts to run service programs like “two parent family formation and maintenance” and “job readiness.” Poor people cannot eat these services nor get their basic needs met with them, but the myth that the poor can live without any cash while none of us can continues to hold water.

In New York state last year, welfare administrators kept $111 million in “unspent” funds, as if there were no one else to help by the end of the year. I guess they haven’t been to midtown Manhattan, where destitute men and women, some with children, roam as often as European tourists. We passersby quash our normal human distress, because administrators assure us that the U.S. still has a real national welfare program. Maybe if we saw poor people waving a white sheet from a burning high rise, we’d pay more attention.

For now, we don’t. So in Maine, its welfare commissioner, Mary Mayhew (whom I call Mary Mayhem) cut 3,000 people off the welfare rolls between 2014 and 2016. Child poverty in Maine exploded. While she was removing children from TANF, “Mayhem” kept $92 million of her state’s welfare block grant.

In Wyoming, 64,405 people live below the poverty line, yet only 1,112 people are enrolled in that state’s welfare program. Wyoming kept $24 million of its block grant last year as “unspent”; that’s nearly half of what the state received to help its poorest.

Few states do better. Fifteen have so-called family caps, barring benefits for babies born to families already enrolled. Bureaucrats use “unspent” funds to plug state budget gaps. Enablers of this theft provide a policy rationale, among them the Heritage Foundation’s Robert Rector, who misrepresents people on welfare as getting large benefits by including the value of their health insurance ($10,000) and their kids’ school lunch ($1,200) in his estimates of their annual aid.

Whether from a firetrap or from the grind of going without basic needs met, poverty kills. It kills the rest of us little by little, too. Creating, demanding, a corruption-proof safety net with adequate cash assistance, such as a universal basic income — a payment to every American to make sure no one lives in poverty — is the most sensible solution.