From: nlns@igc.apc.org (New Liberation News Service)
Newsgroups: alt.activism
Subject: NLNS: THE MYTHS OF WELFARE REFORM
Date: 30 Sep 92 01:24:05 GMT
Organization: The Ohio State University Department of Computer and Information Science

/* Written  6:17 pm  Sep 29, 1992 by nlns in cdp:nlns.news */
/* ---------- "NLNS Packet 3.2 *** 9/28/92" ---------- */

Debunking the Myths of Welfare Reform 
Mimi Abramovitz, Woman's Journal-Advocate


(NLNS)--Welfare "reform" has become the major focus in the newest 
backlash against government programs and a hot political issue, 
with the welfare mother replacing Willie Horton as the new code 
word in racial politics.  Coercive new plans have gained wide 
support by playing to a host of sterotypes and myths about AFDC and 
the women who use the program. The following myths, facts and 
comments can be used to undermine the stereotypes that fuel 
current welfare "reforms" and to build support for more progressive 
social policies.
	In 1988, the Family Support Act transformed the program 
called Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC from a 
program to enable single mothers to stay home with their children) 
into a mandatory work and training program.  The 1988 legislation, 
dubbed "welfare reform," was controversial from the start and has 
remained so as states try to impliment welfare-to-work programs, 
with only modest results. But the Family Support Act was just the 
first in a series of "welfare reforms" that use government dollars to 
dictate the behavior of women on welfare. If work was the first 
target of the "new paternalism," the second is the family life of the 
AFDC mothers. States are now rushing to offer "marriage bonuses" 
and to deny additional benefits for children born to women on 
welfare. The "Wedfare" or "Bridefare" proposals require women on 
welfare to marry and have fewer children in order to qualify for aid. 
Other programs cut benefits to families who fail to see a doctor, to 
keep kids in school or to pay the rent on time. In the name of 
monitoring fraud, some states now fingerprint welfare mothers.

MYTH: Women on welfare have large families.

FACT: The typical welfare family is a mother and two children, 
slightly less than the size of the average family in the United 
States.

COMMENT: AFDC families, like other families in the U.S., are getting 
smaller.

MYTH: Welfare mothers live "high on the hog."

FACT: The average welfare benefit is $367 a month or $4,400 a year. 
This is almost $9,000 less than the federal poverty line for a family 
of three. The real (after inflation) value of the AFDC grant fell 42% 
from 1972 to 1990, 27% if food stamps are counted. In no state of 
the union do food stamp and welfare benefits together lift a family 
of three out of poverty. Meanwhile, during the 1980s, the average 
pretax income of the richest 20% of all families rose 77%, while 
that of the poorest 20% declined by 9%.

COMMENT: Instead of helping poor women and children live high on 
the hog, AFDC keeps mother-only families living on poverty. But 
government programs do not have to keep people poor. Cross-national 
studies show that U.S.  income support programs lifted less than 5% 
of single mothers with children out of poverty in the 1980s, 
compared to 89% in the Netherlands, 81% in Sweeden, 75% in the 
United Kingdom, 50% in France, 33% in Germany and 18.3% in Canada.

MYTH: Welfare recipients are lazy and to not want to work.

FACT: Of the 13 million AFDC recipients, only 4 million are adults, 
90% of whom are women--many mothers of young children. In more 
than half of welfare homes, the youngest child is under 5 years of 
age. Many adult women on welfare are not able to work due to 
illness, disability or lack of education or job skills. Many others 
have worked at some time in their lives and others combine work 
and welfare. Still other AFDC mothers want to work but cannot find 
a job (10% of all single mothers are unemployed) or cannot find jobs 
that pay enough. (The $4.25 an hour minimum wage is $2.75 an hour 
less than the $7.00 an hour needed to keep a family of four out of 
poverty.

COMMENT: If work paid enough, fewer people would need welfare. If 
taking care of one's own children were defined as "work," all 
mothers would be considered to be working. According to a recent 
calculation, their labors would be worth at least $17,000.

MYTH: Few women on welfare are white.

FACT: Of all AFDC mothers, 40% are African-American, 38% are 
white, 16% are Latina, 2.7% are Asian, 1.3% are Native American and 
1.5% are of unknown race.

COMMENT: Women of color are overrepresented among those on 
welfare because they are overrepresented among the poor. The idea 
that AFDC is a program primarily for women of color is used to mask 
the fact that so many AFDC mothers are white, to divide women 
from each other and to make welfare a tool in the politics of race.

MYTH: Once on welfare, always on welfare. Welfare is a trap from 
which few escape.

FACT: More than half of women on welfare stay on the rolls for less 
than one year. A quarter leave within four months, and only one-third 
stay more than two years. Research on intergenerational welfare use 
has not been able to establish that daughters of welfare mothers 
necessarily end up on welfare too. Some do, some do not.

COMMENT: The biggest cause of welfare seems to be poverty. It is 
very hard for children of poor women to escape poverty, especially 
in the current economy with its falling fages and rising 
unemployment. It's hard to work your way out of poverty. People 
working at minimum wage jobs earn less than $9,000 a year. 
Employers pay women 65 cents for every dollar earned by men.

MYTH: Women on welfare have "kids for money."

FACT: Despite years of research, studies have found no link between 
the AFDC grant and births outside of marriage. Those births are no 
more frequent in high benefit states and no greater in states with 
rising grant levels than in states with flat or falling AFDC 
payments. The states provide somewhere between $40 and $65 a 
month per additional child. In contrast, the average taxpayer 
receives a $2,300 tax deduction (about $190 a month) for 
dependents. No one claims that taxpayers have more children just to 
get a larger tax deduction.

COMMENT: Neither AFDC nor the tax deduction for dependent children 
are rewards for having children. Rather, these income supplements 
recognize the value of children to society and the high cost of 
raising children. The U.S. is the only industrialized nation other than 
South Africa and Japan that does not provide families with an 
automatic grant for every child.

MYTH: AFDC encourages family breakup and out-of-wedlock births.

FACT: Single-parent households are on the rise but not due to AFDC. 
While the value of the AFDC benefit fell during the last 20 years, the 
number of mother-only households rose. Meanwhile, the number of 
married-couple households in the U.S. fell from 40% in 1980 to 26% 
in 1990. Of all the women who are eligible for AFDC (poor unmarried 
women with children under age 18), the proportion who actually used 
AFDC fell from 60% in 1970 to 45% in 1988. The number of all poor 
children on AFDC fell from 75 out of every 100 (1972-1978) to 59 
out of every 100 in 1988.

COMMENT: Unwed motherhood predated AFDC and is due to the rise 
due to divorce, delayed marriage, changing sexual norms, the falling 
standard of living and other social conditions. AFDC does not cause 
families to break up, but does give women an alternative to unsafe 
and insecure marriages. The country would be better served by an 
income support program that served individuals regardless of work 
effort or marital status.

MYTH: The AFDC program is costly and bloated, has enlarged the 
deficit and deepened the recession.

FACT: The federal and state governments together spent $23 billion 
on welfare in 1991. The federal share amounted to 1% of the $1.3 
trillion federal budget. The state share equaled 3.4% of the average 
state budget. Ninety percent of the AFDC budget is spent on benefits, 
10% on administrative costs.


COMMENT: The costs of AFDC can be compared to the $300 billion in 
tax dollars received by the Department of Defense and the $130 
billion spent in 1991 alone on the savings and loan bailout.

MYTH: Mandatory programs are needed to get the welfare poor to 
behave properly.

FACT: Mandatory programs do not work very well. Workfare has 
produced only modest, if any, increases in employment and earnings, 
and mandatory programs do not fare any better than voluntary ones. 
A recent study of California's GAIN program found that workfare 
participants averaged only $1,902 a year in earned income. The 
participants earned an average of $271 more than non-participants 
and received $281 a year less in welfare. A University of Wisconsin 
study found that Learnfare (the program that docks up to $200 a 
month from a welfare mother's check if her children miss school 
without an acceptable excuse) failed to improve the school 
attendance of welfare children, but do not exacerbate pre-existing 
family problems.

COMMENT: Mandatory programs imply that the poor will not work, 
marry, plan their families, send their children to school or take 
them to the doctor unless the government makes them do so. 
Supporters of mandatory programs for the poor are often the same 
people who argue that the government should "get off people's 
backs." But when it comes to the poor, especially poor women, they 
support government telling people what to do and how to live.

MYTH: Female-headed households are responsible for rising poverty 
rates.

FACT: The number of female-headed households have grown only 
slightly in recent years, but poverty rates have soared.

COMMENT: Gender does not make people poor. Rather, the differential 
treatment of women based on gender has contributed to the 
povertization of women. Blaming women for rising poverty rates 
does, however, mask its real causes.

MYTH: If poor women only married, they would not be poor.

FACT: Family composition does not affect poverty. Although two 
incomes are clearly better than one, the poor tend to be poor before, 
during and after they tie the knot. The two-parent household is the 
fastest-growing poverty group in the United States. The majority of 
the poor live in households with workers employed full year, full 
time. Sixty-four percent of all poor children live in families with 
one or more workers.

COMMENT: Marriage is not an effective anti-poverty strategy for 
women.

MYTH: The poor are freeloaders on government programs.

FACT: Forty-seven percent of the population receives some kind of 
direct government benefit, with 5.1% of the population receiving 
AFDC. In addition, the tax code provides numerous health, education, 
and welfare benefits to the rich and the middle class and another set 
of subsidies to corporations.

COMMENT: Everyone's on welfare.

Abramovitz is a professor at Hunter College School of Social Work 
and author of *Regulating the Lives of Women: Social Welfare Policy 
From Colonial Times to the Present*.

The Woman's Journal-Advocate can be reached at PO Box 81226, 
Lincoln, NE 68501. 

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