Monday, October 14, 1996
ILLUSION:
Backlash against aid based on prejudices, errorsBy Nancy
Folbre
As a talk show guest, I’m startled when my first caller
describes welfare as nectar of the gods. For a moment, I think he’s
referring to some kind of cheap wine. No, he means the steak and
lobster that everyone knows welfare mothers pig out on.
I am ready to explain that the real value of benefits from Aid
to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) and food stamps has
fallen 20 percent over the last 15 years when a grandmother phones
in about the welfare moms ruining her Bingo games. I want to say
something about how gambling hurts the poor, but she shuts me up by
asking if I ever actually play Bingo.
I’m an economist, on the air to criticize the latest change in
welfare policy. I feel like an accountant who has wandered into an
Express Your Anger workshop with no therapist in sight. Numbers
seem to drive these people crazy. I can see the gleam in their eyes
over the phone.
Scott, the host of a Cincinnati radio show, says all welfare
should be eliminated. I comment that two-thirds of recipients are
kids. This really irritates him. "Every time I talk to a liberal,"
he complains, "they always start whining about the children."
I wonder if he says this to his wife when she asks him to change
a diaper once a week. But there’s no time to inquire.
Scott has a caller, a small-voiced woman who confesses that she
gets assistance. "But I’m not like those others," she insists, "I
only have two kids, and I’m not going to have any more." I tell her
she is typical. Two children are the average for welfare mothers,
and all mothers. Scott snorts. "I don’t believe that," he responds,
"and if government statistics say that, they’re lying." Scott
apparently gets his information about the poor from a friend who
works in a convenience store.
I cite the same statistics to Jesse, another talk-show host from
Oregon. He calls me a liar too. He adds that all government
statistics are part of a liberal conspiracy to keep poor people
down. "But Jesse," I want to ask, "WHAT IF IT WERE TRUE that
welfare mothers only had two kids?" I fantasize his therapeutic
answer: "Then, I couldn’t use welfare to explain all bad behavior
in this world, and wouldn’t know how to make it stop."
Instead, Jesse keeps repeating the toll-free number for Brothers
Organized for a New Destiny. He announces that the worst thing
about welfare is not that it causes women to over-mother but that
it causes men to under-father. It undermines responsibility. If we
just got rid of it, Jesse says, men would step in and take charge
again. Poverty, drugs and crime would disappear.
I reach for something that listeners can relate to. For
instance, about two-thirds of AFDC recipients leave the rolls
within two years, but often end up returning because good jobs are
hard to find. A deep-voiced guy calling from a car phone thinks
this is the stupidest thing he’s ever heard. "I know there’s jobs
out there," he says, "because I’ve got two of them." Jesse repeats
that there is no such thing as unemployment.
I bring up the federal budget, explaining that we spend more
money on subsidies for the well-to-do than on programs for the
poor. My host asks me if I hate all affluent people. "I don’t think
so," I answer, "I am one." "You must not be a Democrat," he
responds, "because everyone knows that Democrats don’t make any
money. They’re all losers."
I’m tempted-to ask him what it is, exactly, that he is afraid of
losing. But I don’t have that kind of patience. I tell him he
should get off the radio and read the paper. He says he doesn’t
have to listen to such insults and hangs up.
For a moment, I’m temporarily safe from interruption. It occurs
to me that, while I never particularly liked welfare as we knew it,
I’m more worried about welfare as we are going to know it. The new
work requirements and time limits will get some people off the
rolls, but where will they and their children go? Into jobs and day
care, or into hunger and despair?
What about welfare as we are going to feel it? In that elusive
future economists call the long run, I can see one possible good
outcome. As the new rules increase the ranks of the working poor,
low and middle-income families will have more in common. It will
become harder to blame poverty on the poor themselves. Who will we
blame then? Those who are actually sipping the nectar of the
gods?
Nancy Folbre is Professor of Economics at the University of
Massachusetts and co-author, with Randy Albelda and the Center for
Popular Economics, of "The War on the Poor: A Defense Manual." For
more information, call Hildy Karp at (212) 245-0510.