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Keep the Mothers at Home
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11237 |
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BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
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9 / 1993 |
3,110 Words |
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Theresa Funiciello
Theresa Funiciello went from being a homeless welfare mother
to an organizer of other welfare mothers, then a special
assistant to the commissioner of New York State's Department
of Social Services and an adviser to the New York State
legislature. She is the author of Tyranny of Kindness:
Dismantling the Welfare System to End Poverty in America
(Atlantic Monthly Press, 1993). |
THE DREAM AND THE NIGHTMARE
The Sixties' Legacy to the Underclass
Myron Magnet
William Morrow and Company, Inc., 1993
A locker-room mentality dominates the spirit of many contemporary discourses on poverty and welfare in America. Intellectual jocks bandy loose talk about women (and some men) as lesser beings, subject to odd sexual whims and antisocial behaviors and, more generally, as so many objects for experiment. Facts need not get in the way--they can be (and are) marshaled to suit the moment. Myron Magnet's The Dream and the Nightmare is no exception. In his chapter on "Victimizing the Poor," he cites twenty-six "real" men (and one fictional [man]) as evidentiary elements of his central argument that poor people have been victimized by being said to have been victimized. Not a single female is called upon to prove a point. Yet the chapter is largely about people on welfare--94 percent of whom are single mothers and their children.
This is disturbing for a number of reasons, not the least of which is Magnet's tendency to make short shrift of the facts. For instance, early in the book, he implies that individual benefits have increased by noting that "means-tested welfare spending rose 44 percent between 1980 and 1987." This is a stretch, since cash assistance in the form of welfare payments through Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) has steadily fallen in constant dollars since 1970. AFDC payments in no state even reach the poverty line, according to the House Ways and Means Committee. Some means-tested programs have soared--like Medicaid. But these are dollars that go to doctors and other health care professionals to pay for the care largely of poor elderly people--not money that goes to poor families for subsistence. Folding Medicaid and similar programs into the overall numbers is disingenuous, at the very least. If one were to take them seriously, poor people who are hospitalized for six months would be rich. Magnet, unfortunately, does few of his own calculations, relying on data culled from others who often calculate with clear political motivation.
If it were true that AFDC (welfare) benefits had increased, then some credibility could be attached to Magnet's claims that welfare mothers opt for the dole over the wage labor market, even when "work will normally lift people out of poverty." By work, of course, he means only labor that is performed in exchange for a wage. Then again, if Magnet had been doing his own homework, he would know that most single mothers
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