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Wed, 26 Dec 2007
Why should you worry about welfare?
[Appeared last week in the Woonsocket Call, Pawtucket Times and other fine RIMG papers.]
While browsing through old reports at the state house library a while back, I found the 1936 report of the state's Public Welfare Department. The report was interesting, but it was the cover that caught my attention. It's a fascinating image, but what's most fascinating about it is how incongruous it seems in 2007. Just try to imagine some meeting next year of the newly reorganized Human Services directorate, where an artist proposes this as a cover for their first annual report. When the laughter finally subsides, the new director will lean over and, with teeth clenched, inform the artist that meetings are not for drollery.
But what, exactly, is so strange about it? I spent a little while with my friend Google, browsing welfare department (ahem, "Human Services") logos in various states and cities. What you find these days is lots of little stick figures representing, I suppose, the people such departments are intended to help. (Check out whatcheer.net to see some.) Another way to say it is that they represent someone else. What's different about the 1936 drawing is that it seems to imply that the person who might need help is *you*.
[You can see the old logo, and some newer ones, below.]
Jacob Hacker, who teaches political science at Yale, wrote a book last year called "The Great Risk Shift." In it, he proposes that the most significant public policy changes over the past 30 years have been those that forced us all to assume more risk in our lives than our parents. Long-term employment contracts went out with the original VW bug; fixed-rate mortgages have been supplanted by floating rates; and pensions, when they exist at all, are no longer guaranteed income, but 401(k)s, where your pension depends on how astute an investor you were.
The truth is that we live in a more uncertain world than a generation ago and these days, many of us are in a position where a serious illness, an accident or untimely death, a layoff or a divorce could throw their family's finances into a tailspin. Maybe that's why bankruptcies are up 600% since 1980.
Hacker uses evidence from newspapers and survey data to make his case. I have another source. We've all heard about the people who have been on welfare for years. The Governor wants you to be mad at them, even though most of them are too young to drive. But what about all the others? These are people who need the program for a while, and then they're over their crisis, or their children grow more independent, and then they get off.
I spent a little time this week with the results of a five-year study headed by Mary Ann Bromley, a professor at Rhode Island College. That study interviewed 638 people receiving cash welfare benefits in 1998 and 1999, and then again a few years later, to see how they were doing. The results are interesting, and quite complicated, but the basic story is pretty clear. Five years after they were receiving welfare, 55% of the study participants were happily employed. Another 23% had been off welfare, but had been forced back on -- usually by the loss of a job or by a medical crisis.
With that in mind, I went back to the DHS annual welfare reports and did some figuring. There are fewer than 10,000 families on welfare now, and compared to around 400,000 households in the state, that seems like a small number. But according to the reports and my rough calculations, over the past decade or so, it seems that more than 60,000 families -- upwards of 160,000 adults and children -- have received cash welfare benefits from the state. We don't help much (the benefit amount hasn't been increased since 1989) but we spread the help wider than most people think.
Stand in the grocery store next time you're there, and look around. It's likely you'll see no one who is on welfare right this very moment, since only about one out of every 35 of us is receiving benefits. But if there are more than seven or eight customers, you will almost certainly see at least one person who has been on welfare at one point, and is now doing fine. These people live in the city and they live in the suburbs. They are your neighbors, and they might even be you. And that's the point.
So here's the real tragedy here. We have a social problem, which is the real increase in risk and uncertainty in most people's lives over the past 25 years. And we have a government that is in a position to allay the problem. Income supports, health care, pensions and child care are all services happily (and cheaply) provided by governments in dozens of other countries, in Europe and around the world. But the position of the people we've elected to run our various governments is that we can't learn from those countries, and that government can no longer even try to solve the problems that only it can solve. Is that how you want your state run? With a padlock on the door?
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