Welfare Nostalgia

Reactionary left-wingers just can't let go. They still believe that good intentions are the sine qua non of good social policy. In today's paper, the New York Times goes through data contortions in an effort to undermine one of the most successful social policies in recent years–welfare reform.

In a front page article, "Side Effect of Welfare Law: the No-Parent Family," the Times finds that some small proportion of children whose mothers were once welfare recipients are now living with other relatives or in foster care. The story is illustrated with anecdotes in which children are being raised by grandparents while their mothers learn to cope with the world of work. While not stated, the chief implication of the story seems to be that in order to protect these children the United States should return to the old system in which welfare was an entitlement.

The Times article mirrors the denunciations made back in 1996 by reform opponents. For example, Marian Wright Edelman, president of the Children's Defense Fund, then predicted that reform would do "serious injury to American children." Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D-N.Y.), condemned it as "the most brutal act of social policy since Reconstruction." They were spectacularly wrong.

The proper way to evaluate welfare reform is to look at how the welfare system's former victims are faring. Six years ago, Congress set deadlines for welfare recipients to find jobs and limited benefits to only 5 years. Since then, according to the Heritage Foundation, employment of never-married mothers has climbed 50 percent; employment of single mothers who are high-school dropouts has risen by two-thirds and employment for young single mothers (ages 18-24) has nearly doubled. The result is that 2.3 million fewer children live in poverty than did in 1996. Of course, under the old entitlement system, the percentage of Americans living in poverty in good economic times or bad didn't change for nearly 3 decades

The Brookings Institution concurs, noting, "A mother with no more than three children can escape poverty if she works steadily and full-time at a $7 an hour job and receives the benefits to which she is entitled." No one is saying that life after welfare is a piece of cake, but as Brookings also noted, "Still, in the end, work pays better than welfare."

Brookings also found that after welfare reform that "teen pregnancies and births have declined dramatically, the share of children born out of wedlock has leveled off, and the share of children being raised in two-parent families has increased. The strong emphasis on parental responsibility in the 1996 law has been followed by large increases in paternity establishment and child support collections."

Claims by welfare reform opponents that it would harm children are wrong. "So far little evidence of widespread harm has materialized," declared the Brookings researchers. The old welfare entitlement system favored by reactionary liberals practically mandated the destruction of two-parent families by bribing welfare mothers to throw out their husbands/partners in order to qualify for benefits.

Given decades in which whole generations of people lived in a debilitating welfare dependency culture, it is unreasonable to expect that welfare reform would be a miracle Lake Wobegon panacea in which all children and all families would be above average after only six years. The motives of the reformers may not have been as generous as The New York Times might have liked, but their analysis of the negative incentives that welfare entitlements had on people stuck in poverty turned out to be right. Clearly, ideologues at The New York Times and elsewhere have not yet learned that the road to hell is still paved with good intentions.