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Introduction: Welfare: Rethinking the Contract
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20718 |
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SPECIAL SECTION
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9 / 1992 |
707 Words |
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Alms. Poor relief. Poor support. The dole. Scientific charity. Public assistance. Mother's Pensions. Welfare. Aid to families with dependent children (AFDC). General assistance. Emergency aid. Social service. It's been known by these and other names over the past six hundred years or so, but the goal has remained constant: to develop a program of public assistance that will help the truly needy poor, while denying a free ride to the idle or to scroungers. The central problem has remained too: Ideas or schemes or programs to distinguish have failed to make this cut in any unproblematic or uncontroversial way.
This goal and central problem and central problem are the underlying topics in the special section, which presents an account of welfare in America and of the current efforts toward welfare reform.
The greatest expansion of the American welfare system came with President Lyndon Johnson's attempt to make what he called a Great Society, which was to be done partly through waging a "war on poverty." But, three decades later, the poor--especially the urban underclass--are even more with us. State and local budgets are breaking under the ever-increasing strain. (For further discussion of this problem, see this month's Currents in Modern Thought theme "Why the State Budgets Are in a Mess.") There is a sharply rising percentage of children (especially black children) being born to unmarried mothers supported by welfare. The welfare policy that came out of the Great Society has been rewarding dependency more than personal responsibility and initiative. And the working middle class is increasingly hostile to having its tax money go toward supporting that group of welfare recipients who remain on the dole for any extended time--a time that frequently stretches to several generations.
Although it was and continues to be widely criticized and denigrated, Charles Murray's Losing Ground, published in 1984, became the watershed work in the movement toward rethinking welfare and recrafting welfare policy. Murray's opponents were forced to question and restate their own views. These discussions of welfare theory, coupled with observations of the actual outcomes of the Great Society-rooted social policy, have led to an increasing consensus among welfare policy makers and analysts that the received system in wrongheaded and counterproductive, leading to dependency and permanent poverty and destroying the two-parent family structure. Consequently, both Democrats and Republicans now acknowledge some need to redraw welfare policy and redefine the (implied) contract between the welfare recipient and the society
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