Looking at Welfare Reform through Another Lens Besides My Own

Quadagno & Street (2005) state that the United States follows the neo-liberal model of government, especially in regards to our perspectives of individualism and individual rights. We are a country built on a model of self sufficiency and “pull yourself up by your bootstraps” language. It is easy to see in the discourse and criticisms of many of our urban poor: they need to work harder… they need to stop depending on welfare… I can’t believe I’m paying my taxes and working hard so that those poor people can just depend on the government. The comments are numerous, degrading, and continually divisive, but they reinforce our perspectives of individual rights.

Quadagno & Street continue to state that voluntarism is also highly valued in the United States. Voluntarism places an emphasis on private donations by individuals rather than governmental assistance as a means to redistribute income to lower income members of society. For example, leading economist Milton Friedman makes an argument for voluntarism in his book, Free to Choose. Essentially, Friedman argues that if taxes were lower, and governmental services for income maintenance and redistribution were privatized, people would have the altruistic desire to give more to charitable organizations to continue this work. Regardless if Friedman’s point is correct, voluntarism is not an effective means to achieving social justice; for, rather than creating a system of dependency on the government, the poor are dependent on charitable organizations that in turn are dependent on charitable and altruistic individuals. Dependency still exists; charity (giving from one’s surplus) perpetuates inequality as there is no structural level change happening. So, while valued in United States, it doesn’t seem that reliance on voluntarism is the correct social policy to achieve social justice.

Working at Bread for the City last year, I found myself often asking the question, how can we encourage those on welfare to find jobs and go back to work? I was asking this, not from a judging condemning viewpoint, but more so, from an attempt to reflect on how can we make policies that make sense and actually work, and that act as a safety net for those who are in need without creating cyclical dependency. Can we create any social justice with our conceptions of welfare policy?

However, I found it interesting to reflect on Orloff (2005)’s article on United States welfare reform. Orfloff argues that the 1996 Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act was an attempt to eliminate the social right for poor single mothers to care for their children full time. Instead, as Orloff writes, “Staying at home full time to care for children has come to be understood as something to be earned through one’s efforts in the labor market – as a reward from an employer who gives paid leave” (pp.109-110). Reflecting on this point sheds light into my own thoughts on TANF last year.

Turning to myself, raised in a two-parent household, my parents were able to make our family function happen on one income during my younger years. Yet, this was a choice they had simply by being a two parent household. And in fact, I believe those years having my mother at home shaped our family, the way I look at the world, and consequently, I cannot list all the benefits our family has experienced because of those years. For my mother, raising children full time was a full time job and right in our family, something that is denied to other lower income women, simply because they are low income.

So returning to the ideological rhetoric we commonly hear about welfare benefits and the “laziness” of “welfare queens,” it is interesting to see how my own middle class perspectives shaped my own understanding of welfare. Instead of thinking about the same model of child-rearing I experienced, I projected my own values of individualism and self sufficiency, middle class values drilled into me by the American process of socialization. In my own reflections (all with positive non-judgmental intentions), I too was contributing to the common statements that, because these women are poor, they don’t share the right my mother had to stay at home with their children.

Works Cited

Friedman, M. & Friedman, R. (1990). Free to choose: A personal statement. Orlando, FL: Harcourt.

Orloff, A. (2005). Examining US welfare reform: Power, gender, race, and the US policy legacy. Critical Social Policy, 22(1) 96-118.

Quadagno, J. & Street, D. (2005). Ideology and public policy: Antistatism in American welfare state transformation. The Journal of Policy History, 17(1) 52-71.