There may be a reason why academics are nearly as reluctant to discuss welfare reform as they are to do a recap of The Cold War: most professors were wrong about the War on Poverty too. “Washington declared war on poverty and poverty won,” former President Ronald Reagan famously said.
Most pedagogues never saw it that way. “In Wisconsin, 33 families a day entered the state from Illinois and Chicago lured by higher benefits,” the Claremont Institute’s Eloise Anderson remembers of the land-o-lakes she called home for three decades. “The academic community denied that was a motive to move from one state to another.”
Anderson served in the Department of Welfare in Wisconsin. Among the many notable “academies” in the state are Marquette and the University of Wisconsin at Madison.
“Wisconsin is a socialist state due to the German influence that draws on the idea that everybody contributes to the pot and can draw from it,” Anderson explained. “This led to the Roosevelt [FDR] era.”
“Many of these programs came from the Midwest.” Anderson herself hails from Ohio but graduated college in Wisconsin. She worked in the Wisconsin state government for many years.
“This led to [Aid to Families with Dependent Children] and the Great Society and the notion that white America owed black America something,” the African-American policy analyst said. “Academics seized on this.”
“We gave adolescents money to move out of the house and start families.” Anderson received her graduate degree from the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee.
“All of these things came crashing together in a place called Milwaukee.” Nationally, “At any given time, [until 1996] half of the welfare caseload had been on welfare for 10 years,” National Review editor Kate O’Beirne said of public assistance as it was delivered prior to reforms of the program that the federal government undertook in 1996.
“We aren’t irresponsible here in Washington,” Heritage Foundation policy analyst Robert Rector noted sardonically of welfare as it functioned before the ’96 reforms. “We attach strings to our aid.”
“With welfare, we said to single mothers, ‘You can’t work and you can’t get married.’”
“I call this the incentive system from Hell.” Up until 1965, the federal government gave unconditional aid to such applicants, who were usually widows and orphans.
Anderson, Rector and O’Beirne spoke on a panel at Heritage that commemorated the tenth anniversary of the historic bipartisan transformation of welfare undertaken by President Clinton and the Republican Congress he frequently jousted with. Under the law, AFDC was renamed Temporary Assistance to Needy Families.
“To me, it’s another aspect of ‘Don’t ask, don’t tell,’” Professor Wiseman said of the legislation, making an intentionally obvious reference to the former president’s policy on gays in the military. “You give states block grants and look the other way.” Wiseman, who identifies himself as a liberal Republican, teaches at George Washington University.
Rector told a congressional committee last month that as a result of the Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996:
• “Child poverty has fallen.
• “Decreases in poverty have been greatest among black children.
• “Unprecedented declines in poverty also occurred among children of single mothers.
• “Welfare caseloads were cut in half
• “Employment of single mothers has surged.
• “The explosive growth of out-of-wedlock childbearing has come to a near standstill.”
“After WORA, many applicants for welfare said of the WORA restrictions, ‘If I do all that, I might as well go to work,’” Rector noted. Still, states do take a creative approach to the work requirements that the federal government now ties to public assistance to the needy.
For example, sleeping, a massage or watching TV can count as “work-related activities” in some localities because government officials in these areas consider those acts resting up to get ready for work. Just about any type of training under the sun qualifies as well.
The subterfuge has not gone unnoticed by Executive Branch officials determined to reign in such creativity. For their part, some college officials do not want government overseers to look too closely at state efforts to define work and work training.
“As the regulations are set up now, they are not aimed at ameliorating poverty,” Michelle Vazquez Jacobus of the University of Southern Maine told the Chronicle of Higher Education. “All we’re looking at is a larger poor population with fewer resources available to them.”
Malcolm A. Kline is the executive director of Accuracy in Academia.
