Today is the tenth anniversary of the Welfare Reform Act, passed by a bipartisan majority in Congress and signed by President Clinton, while opposed by a large coalition, including the Catholic bishops, who claimed that it violated principles of social justice.
Ron Haskins offered these observations (the full piece can be found here):
The left, led by senior Democrats in Congress, the editorial pages of many of the nation’s leading newspapers, the Catholic bishops, child advocates in Washington and the professoriate, had assaulted the bill in terms that are rare, even by today’s coarse standards. Democrats speaking on the floor of the House labeled the bill “harsh,” “cruel” and “mean-spirited.” They claimed that it “attacked,” “punished” and “lashed out at” children. Columnist Bob Herbert said the bill conducted a “jihad” against the poor, made “war on kids” and “deliberately inflict[ed] harm” on children and the poor. Sen. Frank Lautenberg said poor children would be reduced to “begging for money, begging for food, and . . . engaging in prostitution.”
Many Democrats and pundits shouted that the bill would throw a million children into poverty. Marion Wright Edelman of the Children's Defense Fund said that no one who believed in the Judeo-Christian tradition could support the bill. Even God, it seemed, opposed the evil Republican bill.
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In the decade that has passed since the 1996 reforms, the welfare rolls have plummeted by nearly 60%, the first sustained decline since the program was enacted in 1935. Equally important, the employment of single mothers heading families reached the highest level ever. As a group, mothers heading families with incomes of less than about $21,000 per year increased their earnings every year between 1994 and 2000 while simultaneously receiving less money from welfare payments. In inflation-adjusted dollars, they were about 25% better off in 2000 than in 1994, despite the fall in their welfare income.
Over the same period, the child-poverty level enjoyed its most sustained decline since the early 1970s; and both black-child poverty and poverty among female-headed families reached their lowest level ever. Even after four years of increases following the recession of 2001, the child poverty level is still 20% lower than it was before the decline began. Similarly, measures of consumption and hunger show that the material conditions of low-income, female-headed families have improved. Although welfare reform was not without problems, none of the disasters predicted by the left materialized. Indeed, national surveys show that almost every measure of child well-being—except obesity—has improved since the mid-1990s.
Robert Samuelson makes similar observations (his full piece can be seen here):
President Bill Clinton signed the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996, better known as “welfare reform,” on Aug. 22, 1996. A decade later, it stands as a rarity: a Washington success story. It did not succeed in the utopian sense of eliminating all poverty or family breakdown. It succeeded in a more practical way. It improved life modestly for millions of people and showed that government could orchestrate constructive change. There are small and large lessons in this. The small lessons involve poverty; the large lessons involve politics.
One little-known fact is that we have made gains against poverty in recent decades—and welfare reform deserves some credit. The poverty rate among blacks has fallen sharply, though it’s still discouragingly high. From 1968 to 1994, it barely budged, averaging 32.4 percent. By 2000 it was 22.5 percent. (The poverty rate is the share of people living below the government’s poverty line, about $19,500 for a family of four in 2004.) Similarly, there have been big drops in child poverty. Since 1989 the number of children in poverty has fallen 12 percent for non-Hispanic whites and 14 percent for blacks.
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One lesson is that what people do for themselves often overshadows what government does for them. Since 1991, for example, the teen birthrate has dropped by a third. [Sisk: Note that this is not because teenage girls were forced into abortion with reductions in welfare, asabortion rates fell continuously during the same period.] The mothers least capable of supporting children have had fewer of them. Welfare reform didn't single-handedly cause this. But it reinforced a broader shift in the social climate -- one emphasizing personal responsibility over victimhood.
Of course, poverty endures. Some mothers are unemployable and are worse off without continuous welfare. Even those with low-paying jobs often depend heavily on other government benefits, mainly food stamps and Medicaid (health insurance). And one reason that poverty hasn’t decreased more is an unending inflow of poor immigrants. Unlike non-Hispanic whites and blacks, Hispanics are the only major ethnic or racial group with more children in poverty over the last 15 years. Since 1989 the increase is 58 percent.
So: we've made a stubborn problem a bit more manageable. It’s pragmatic progress, not a panacea. Why can’t we do the same for other pressing problems—energy, immigration, retirement spending (Social Security, Medicare)? Here, welfare reform’s political lessons apply.
Greg Sisk
Of possible interest to some MOJ readers, I'm scheduled as a guest Dr. Albert Mohler's radio show this afternoon, at 5:19 EST, "for approximately 10 minutes", to discuss my recent Business Week essay, "Confessions of a Genetic Outlaw." You can listen to the show live on-line. Dr. Mohler blogged about my essay today. Dr. Mohler is President of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. He was labelled by Time.com as "the reigning intellectual of the evangelical movement in the U.S."
Lisa
Northwestern law prof Anthony D'Amato's new paper, "Porn Up, Rape Down," offers a thesis that we discussed on MoJ earlier this summer. Here is the abstract:
The incidence of rape in the United States has declined 85% in the past 25 years while access to pornography has become freely available to teenagers and adults. The Nixon and Reagan Commissions tried to show that exposure to pornographic materials produced social violence. The reverse may be true: that pornography has reduced social violence.
He cites some statistics showing a strong correlation between internet access and a reduced incidence of rape, suggesting that perhaps "internet porn has thoroughly de-mystified sex."
Rob
This morning at his news conference, President Bush indicated his support for the over-the-counter sale of the Plan B morning-after pill. The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops does not share this view. (HT: Amy Welborn) Perhaps the President is focused on his evangelical base?
Rob
Monday, August 21, 2006
Wilfred McClay takes issue with the suggestion that there is a "party of death" at work in America, rather than a party "in love with . . . a shortsighted and impoverished vision of life: the dream of complete and unconstrained personal mastery, of the indomitable human will exercised on the inert and malleable stuff of nature by the heroically autonomous and unconditioned individual who is ever the master of his fate and captain of his soul, and whose own existence is, or deserves to be, infinitely extensible." One obvious symptom of this mindset is, according to McClay, our reliance on rights talk, which "does not necessarily give rise to responsibility-talk. Sometimes it may have the opposite effect, in luring us into a false sense that we have fulfilled all righteousness merely by dutifully observing the rights of others."
Much less eloquently, I try to press a related point in this Christianity Today article, appearing as part of the magazine's coverage of the controversy over pharmacists' claimed rights of conscience.
Rob
As we gear up for another semester of loving the law, I want to commend to the wider world three very helpful books that I read this summer. In the first, Who's Afraid of Post-Modernism?, James Smith, a philosophy prof at Calvin College, explains why Christians should not presume that postmodern thought is a threat to the faith. By way of (woefully) cursory summary, he argues that:
Derrida's insight that there is "nothing outside the text" should push us to "recover two key emphases of the church: (a) the centrality of Scripture for mediating our understanding of the world as a whole and (b) the role of community in the interpretation of Scripture."
Lyotard's assertion that postmodernity is "incredulity toward metanarratives" is "ultimately a claim to be affirmed by the church, pushing us to recover (a) the narrative character of Christian faith, rather than understanding it as a collection of ideas, and (b) the confessional nature of our narrative and the way in which we find ourselvesin a world of competing narratives."
Foucault's claim that "power is knowledge" should "push us to realize . . . (a) the cultural power of formation and discipline, and hence (b) the necessity of the church to enact counterformation by counterdisciplines. In other words, we need to think about discipline as a creational structure that needs proper direction. Foucault has something to tell us about what it means to be a disciple."
Smith, writing as an evangelical, concludes that postmodern theology will be "much more hospitable to both dogmatic theology and the institutional church," and that the postmodern church "must be radically incarnational," affirming the incarnation's scandalous "particularlity with respect to both space and time." This requires, in turn, "a healthy sense of being constituted by our traditions as we look forward to an eschatological hope in the future."
A fascinating read, due in part to the fact that the postmodern evangelical church, as prescribed by Smith, looks quite Catholic.
Rob
