1995 Global Cultural Diversity Conference Proceedings, Sydney
Poor Support, Poverty and the American Family
Assumptions behind Welfare Reform in the USA
and their Relationship to Lives of Welfare Mothers
Dr Peter David Brandon
Institute for Research on Poverty, The University of Wisconsin, Madison, USA
I thank the National Institutes for Health (NIH), the Under-Secretary of Planning and Evaluation of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (ASPE), the Institute for Research on Poverty (IRP) for funding this research and Professor Robert Hauser for his encouragement. The author's comments do not necessarily represent the views of the NIH, ASPE, or the IRP.
This paper discusses some assumptions driving reform of the American welfare system. Few governmental structures created to serve its citizens are as diverse as the American welfare system. It is an incredibly intricate safety net cast across 50 states and the District of Columbia and is sewn to suit the unique features of each state.
Presently, however, the web of this safety net is undergoing the most profound changes since President Roosevelt's New Deal. People may disagree about the prudence of changing the system but no one disagrees that American society is witnessing the most draconian restricting of its safety net in over sixty years.
The groups dominating welfare reform are fiscally conservative and they share a deep suspicion of the incentive structure of the current welfare system. They want the federal government out of providing for the needy, arguing it does more harm than good. To some extent they are right.
Their control over the direction of welfare reform means that the federal government may soon become a minor player in providing poor support, especially for poor single mothers. If that happens, I think it will be a retrograde step, although I too think re-evaluating many anti-poverty programs is a good idea.
Several factors gave these groups command over reforming welfare. Two, in particular, coincide with the theme of this conference.
First, conservative groups convincingly argued that the perverse incentives of the welfare system affect all welfare mothers similarly. The basic argument is that the behavioural response of welfare mothers to the incentives of the welfare system is uniform and invariant of their personal circumstances. Second, these groups successfully depicted them as people who possess traits in conflict with mainstream American values.
However, some assumptions about the destructive incentive effects of the American welfare system remain speculation rather than fact and the popular portrayal of welfare mothers as indolent and chronically dependent, a caricature rather than a profile. Nonetheless, these groups' political gains will fundamentally alter the American welfare system.
I argue that if legislators and the American public better understood the diverse behavioural reactions of single mothers to the welfare system, the public would more seriously question claims that the welfare system is insidious and would doubt stereotypical images of welfare mothers.
Regrettably, therefore, ignorance of the diversity of responses of poor women to the welfare system, rather than insight, is the engine driving welfare reform. More effective and cost-efficient changes to the system would happen if the real diversity in welfare mothers' lives was better documented and disseminated to the public.
This paper lists several of the most quoted condemnations of the American welfare system and shows why those condemnations lack sway. One by one, I will list eight criticisms of the system and after each one I will present the empirical findings pertaining to it. Each contention, without accompanying findings to rebut it, erases the complexity in the lives of American single mothers and fosters policies promising quick solutions, solutions to a set of problems that heretofore have proved obdurate.
Solely focussing on welfare mothers makes sense because this group is the single largest population receiving income transfers in the U.S. and the group that is the target of much of the present welfare debate (Brandon, 1994).
Assumption 1: Single mothers go on welfare and caseloads are too high.
Fact: In the United States, only a handful of all single mothers ever go on welfare. Admittedly, most people realise that many single mothers never receive welfare and that caseloads have plateaued. Nevertheless, I mention this since this issue has been forgotten in the current debate over welfare reform.
Conservative groups unapologetically claim that the "welfare problem" needs remedying. This demand obscures the fact that for many years welfare caseloads have stabilised, if not fallen. Robert Moffitt's (1992) work shows that since the late 1960s welfare benefits in real terms have tumbled and that since the early 1970s the average monthly number of welfare families per capita has remained steady.
Surprisingly, most single mothers never enter a county welfare office in the United States. Blank and Ruggles (1993) have shown that most women who ever become eligible for welfare never receive a welfare check. Even though all the mothers in their study were at one time or another entitled to a welfare check, only 28 percent of them ever resorted to public assistance, most specifically cash transfers.
Why so few? Because single mothers want to remain economically self-sufficient. Those that can make it on their own will and those that cannot will seek transitional help. This is exactly what the two researchers discovered. They found that those needing help were the truly disadvantaged: teenage mothers, blacks, the disabled, the less educated, and those with more children (Blank and Ruggles, 1993).
Their results suggest the public U.S. officials' preoccupations with high welfare caseloads are misguided. Only a minority of those who are eligible for welfare programs actually use them. When they do use them they use them for a short period of time. I revisit this point later in the paper.
I have made slower progress on this issue than Blank and Ruggles (1993). Let me parenthetically add, however, that in one of my studies I find that of the 3,370 women who ever became single mothers during the period of observation, less than 31 percent ever received a welfare check (Brandon, 1994).
Assumption 2: Welfare encourages teenage mothers to head their own households.
Fact: Non-marital births among teenage females is a controversial issue. Currently, lawmakers have proposed new rules disallowing teenage mothers from living outside of their parents' homes. This proposal is based on the belief that the welfare system encourages teenage mothers to leave the home of their parents to create their own independent households.
Past researchers at the Institute of Research on Poverty, like Danziger et al. (1982), have found some evidence consistent with the theory that welfare benefits lower the cost of establishing an independent female-headed household. These researchers, however, never asserted that their findings implied that teenage mothers choose to head their own households.
More research on this topic is needed. Thus, the new proposals about where teen mothers should live rests on circumspection regarding that they may or may not choose.
Presently I am investigating the living arrangements of teenage mothers. My results fail to indicate a massive exodus of teen mothers out of the homes of their parents following the birth of their child. Quite the contrary, I find in my sample of young teen mothers that at the time of the birth 42.2 percent were living in their parent's homes and fifteen months later only 20 percent of them had moved out, some to form their own households with the father of their child. Over the following 12 to 15 months, about another 23 percent left their parents' homes. These data suggest detachment from the parental household unit is slow rather than a rapid one to get welfare benefits and make a new home. Incidentally, over forty percent of those young mothers never received welfare during the course of the study.
Assumption 3: Welfare mothers do not work.
Fact: Many people feel that welfare mothers do little to help themselves. Analyses of nationally representative samples of welfare mothers, however, find that many more welfare mothers work than most people presume.
Recent research shows that a substantial proportion of welfare mothers work and eventually earned their way off welfare. My research finds that forty-three and a half percent of the mothers in a nationally representative sample of welfare mothers worked. As Table 1 shows these mothers worked across all sectors of the economy, particularly in service, retail, and manufacturing industries. Many of these mothers were prepared to take lousy jobs, meaning jobs with no medical insurance or other fringe benefits; they worked in bars, in "mum and pop" shops, on factory floors, in laundries, and in restaurants. Moreover, they worked while juggling family responsibilities.
Other researchers reported similar findings. Ethnographers working in blighted inner-city neighbourhoods and other social scientists working with large data sets have both found that many welfare mothers in the inner-city work. Indeed both groups of scholars have evidence showing that the world of work for these mothers is complicated, especially since work for these mothers oftentimes spans formal and informal labour markets.
In one ethnographic study in Chicago, Edin and Jencks (1992) found that working accounted for nearly fifteen percent of the income for 50 Chicago area welfare recipients. In another study that used a longitudinal source of data, Harris (1992) found that 51 percent of the women on welfare worked and that women with the shortest spells of welfare were more likely to spend half of their welfare spells simultaneously working while receiving public assistance.
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