Kay S. Hymowitz, writing in the City Journal, has a marvelous piece on the 1996 welfare reform engineered by the new Republican majority in Congress, and signed into law by Bill Clinton. Here is her summary of the effects of that legislation:
This, then, is where we find ourselves today, ten years after reform: a record number of poor single mothers off the dole and the majority of them gainfully employed; less poverty among single mothers, especially black single mothers, as well as their kids; children adjusting well enough; and state governments taking care of their own. The situation is so far from what experts predicted that, as New York University political scientist Lawrence Mead has put it, it brings to mind the Sovietologists at the fall of the Soviet Union.
In short, welfare reform was one of the most successful pieces of social legislation ever enacted. But she goes on to point out that it was less successful than its conservative backers hoped.
All of this might seem to lead to the conclusion that welfare reform has been a triumph for conservative thinking. That would be overstating things. TANF was never simply about ending welfare dependency. As part of a larger bill called the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA), it was designed to improve the lives of the formerly dependent more broadly by nudging them toward middle-class life.
The Left always thought of moving up as a matter of money, not behavior: if people earned a middle-class income, they believed, middle-class conduct and aspiration would be sure to follow. Conservatives tend to see it the other way around: middle-class mores are necessary for economic success. If people adopt bourgeois habits and ambitions, they will work hard, save, and plan, and eventually have the money to make a down payment on a house or pay parochial school tuition. In the case of PRWORA, supporters took this idea a bridge too far. They imagined the work ethic as the engine that would carry all other virtues in its train. Jobs would bring discipline to the lives of poor single mothers and transform them and their children. Work would turn them into bourgeois strivers.
And you do hear stories that seem to support that theory. Take Jewel, one of the three protagonists of Jason DeParle’s American Dream. After failing repeatedly, she finally got her GED after the book came out, and is now studying for a nursing degree, even while she holds down a full-time job. She is still with her boyfriend of ten years, and he, in turn, has kept straight in the six years since he was released from prison, working during most of that time. Though they haven’t married, they are raising their son together, pooling their money, and behaving in most respects like a married couple—helping, as DeParle told me, to “stabilize and encourage each other.”
But taken as a whole, you’d have to conclude that welfare reform has not been the extreme makeover that supporters had sought. And the reason is that it has barely touched the single-mother problem. Reform optimists predicted that by heightening women’s self-respect and belief in their future, work would make them more marriage-minded. “Women, realizing welfare won’t support them, may begin to make better choices: demanding more from the men in their lives, delaying childbirth, teaming up with breadwinners,” journalist Mickey Kaus theorized. Reformers also hoped that work requirements would act as a deterrent: girls seeing their mothers and older sisters juggling a low-paying job, an apartment, and children, all without a husband’s help, would shun such a life.
Welfare reform had robust beneficial effect on women, but not so much on men. That is the remaining problem for social reform: how to persuade men at the low end of the economic spectrum to commit to their children. Its not clear that anyone knows how to do that.
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