This article was reprinted from the August 10, 1996 issue of the People's Weekly World. For subscription information see below. All rights reserved - may be used with PWW credits.
In a frantic attempt to turn welfare "reform" into electoral advantage, bipartisan majorities - 328-to-101 in the House and 77-to-21 in the Senate - voted for welfare "reform" that eliminates the 61-year-old federal guarantee of cash assistance to the nation's poorest children by abolishing the Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) program.
The legislation, the most sweeping revision of the nation's social policy since 1935, affects most of the 12.8 million people on AFDC and nearly 26 million who receive food stamps, by giving states almost unlimited authority to run their own welfare programs.
The bill denies Supplemental Security Income (SSI) to more than a quarter million children, requires the head of every family on welfare to work within two years and requires adults without children to perform public service jobs after two months. Lifetime welfare benefits will be limited to five years and can be made even stricter at the discretion of a state.
And, in provisions that have nothing to do with welfare reform, the bill makes hungry children hungrier by slashing $28 billion over six years from food stamp programs that help feed 14 million low-income children and their families. And it hits immigrants with particular ferocity by denying them not only cash assistance and food stamps but school lunches and Medicaid as well.
The bill, a key element of the GOP Contract on America, will slash more than $55 billion over the next six years from funding for federal programs that help poor people - and especially poor children - keep body and soul together.
While food stamps at $22.3 billion and SSI at $22.8 billion take the hardest hits, federal spending for Medicaid, child nutrition programs, old-age survivors and disability insurance and the Earned Income Tax Credit are all reduced. Annual cuts will grow from $2.98 billion in 1997 to more than $12.7 billion in 2002.
If signed into law - after reaching Clinton's desk around Aug. 13 - the legislation will, as one writer put it, "End poverty as we know it - by making it worse." It will, as Urban League President Hugh Price said, mark the beginning of a period where Congress has "wearied of the war on poverty and [has] decided to wage war against the poor."
Why did President Clinton place politics above principle and announce his intention to sign legislation that even the New York Times called "punishment" rather than "reform?" What made it possible for overwhelming majorities in Congress and the president to feel safe in turning their backs on the New Deal and Great Society and support legislation that will cut nearly five million children from the welfare roles by 2005 and sets the stage for a renewed offensive against other entitlement programs?
And, come to think of it, who says that Medicaid, Medicare and Social Security are safely beyond the reach of the right wing if it succeeds in its effort to grab all of the levers of government in November?
AFDC was never challenged on the basis of total cost - a measly $14.4 billion in 1994 compared to $282 billion for the Department of Defense. Rather, the issue was posed in moral terms - "to break the cycle of dependency," to find a way to "move people from welfare to work," to make "welfare a second chance, not a way of life."
We were told the system had "failed" - that welfare encourages young women to quit school or work and have out-of-wedlock babies. We were told that once on welfare, these women were "trapped in dependency," unable to get a job or raise their children properly. Welfare, in short, we were told, is responsible for the spread of moral rot in society.
Right-wing hardliners like House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) and House Ways and Means Committee Chairman E. Clay Shaw Jr. (R-Fla.), told us that they, whose morality as pure as wind-driven snow, had finally decided to abide by the wishes of the body politic and accept the responsibility of driving millions of poor children even deeper in to poverty and despair in order to save them - and yes, the nation - from moral and physical decay. It was, they told us, necessary to destroy welfare in order to save it.
While Senator Phil Gramm (R-Texas) repeatedly said people "should get out of the wagon and push," White House chief of staff Leon Panetta spoke wistfully of the "intrinsic" value of work regardless of pay, as both contemplated launching millions of workers into the search for non-existent, low-skill - and lower-paying - jobs. "All they have to do," we are told, "is get off their duffs and go to work."
Supporters of "welfare to work" programs argue that "tough love" rules and regulations will force at least half of those on welfare to leave the program. But, if the experience in Oakland, Calif. has any bearing on the matter, that assumption, along with many others, is false.
Out of a case load of 6,754 households in June of this year, 13 percent had paying jobs compared with only 6.5 of the more than 7,800 welfare households who had jobs a year earlier. But there's a catch: All of these new workers remain on welfare because of low earnings - and just 28 other workers in the program have been able to find jobs with high enough earnings to leave welfare.
A study of welfare in Chicago found that "single mothers do not turn to welfare because they are pathologically dependent on handouts or unusually reluctant to work. They do so because they cannot get jobs that pay better than welfare."
A recent study found that in Illinois there are four workers in need of entry-level jobs for every job opening in the state. The gap between entry-level job seekers and available jobs is even wider in cities: six workers for every slot in Chicago and nine workers for every job in East St. Louis.
No single mother would rather try to survive on the $400 that is the average monthly AFDC grant if she could find a job that pays enough to keep her and her family's head above water. Therefore, the solution to "the welfare problem" must include a jobs program that pays a livable wage, pays decent benefits and provides adequate child care - a fact that the architects of the welfare bill chose to ignore.
Communists and others in the fight for social justice have always argued that government should be the "employer of last resort" - that when private industry either cannot or will not provide jobs, it was the responsibility of government to take over.
This is not a demand for "make work" projects. Far from it. The country and most of its major cities are falling apart as bridges are closed, school buildings stand in need of billions of dollars worth of repairs, housing stock declines in absolute and relative terms - the list is endless. But the facts remain: A federally-funded public works program would provide jobs for millions of people while rebuilding the nation's infrastructure.
Public works programs have worked in the past - one thinks of the WPA projects of the New Deal - and they will work again. Rep. Matthew Martinez (D-Calif.) has introduced HR-1591, the Jobs Creation and Infrastructure Act of 1995, that appropriates billions of dollars to fund such a program. The bill already has 28 co-sponsors and needs more.
So that's one way to fight the welfare cuts. A second is to keep the president's feet to the fire with his promise to correct what he called the "worst features" of the legislation just passed.
Neither will happen as long as the "Gang of 73" right-wing Republicans remain in control of Congress - and that means working like hell to defeat them in November. If things are tough now, they'll really get tough if we lose this one.
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