The twilight of liberal welfare reform

Public Interest, Spring, 2000 by Lawrence M. Mead

THIRTY years ago, welfare reform was a liberal issue. In the 1960s and 1970s, government planners proposed that cash welfare benefits be raised and extended to the entire low-income population. But those proposals were rejected, and since the 1970s, the welfare debate has turned sharply rightward: The goal today is more to reduce dependency than to relieve poverty. The most recent welfare reform, enacted by the Republican Congress in 1996, was very conservative. Partly due to it, the number of families on cash aid has fallen by half in the last five years.

But left-of-center social planning is not entirely dead. The most important liberal reform experiment since the 1970s recently wound up in Milwaukee. The New Hope Project attempted to provide poor adults with the means to escape poverty wholesale. Eligibility extended to everyone 18 or over and willing to work who had incomes at or below 150 percent of the federal poverty line. That included many two-parent families and single persons, not all of them strictly poor, as well as the much needier female-headed families traditionally covered by welfare. To all these adults, New Hope promised a job (either in the private sector or, if necessary, a community service job, or CSJ), a wage sufficient to bring the family at least to the poverty line, plus subsidized child and health care. No established antipoverty program ever offered a package this generous. But to get any of it, participants had to work an average of at least 30 hours a week.

New Hope tested this plan in two poor neighborhoods in Milwaukee, one mainly black and the other heavily Hispanic. The benefits were offered to 678 clients, whose outcomes were then compared to those for an equivalent control group without the benefits. The program ran from 1994 to 1998, with each client guaranteed the benefits for three years.

When President Clinton proposed his own welfare plan in 1994, his mantra was, "If you work, you shouldn't be poor." He proposed that adults on welfare be required to work within two years, but they were guaranteed government jobs if they could not find their own. The plan was overtaken by the tougher Republican reform of 1996, which time-limits aid and guarantees no jobs. So New Hope became the chief test of the Clinton idea, If the clients were willing and able to work 30 hours a week, it promised, they would indeed escape poverty. That "if," as events proved, turned out to be the main problem. The program's achievements were real, but they lay in another direction.

The barriers theory

The thinking behind New Hope was typical of today's liberals, who seldom argue anymore for an egalitarian society and rarely attack capitalism, at least not openly. Rather, they claim that equal opportunity, which most all Americans support, has been denied to the poor (or minorities or women) by invidious "social barriers," especially racism and sexism. The Left's radicalism lies not in its utopian projects, which it has abandoned, but in its picture of current society as much more oppressive than most people believe.

The idea for New Hope came from the Congress for a Working America (CFWA), a left-leaning community group dedicated to promoting employment and training for the poor. CFWA's theorist was David Riemer, a lawyer with a long involvement in liberal causes and currently Director of Administration to Mayor John Norquist of Milwaukee. In The Prisoners of Welfare, published in 1988, Riemer contended that the main obstacles to overcoming poverty in America lay with the labor market, not with the poor themselves. The working-aged poor remained needy because they could not find jobs, or the jobs they did find paid below the poverty level. The answer was to guarantee them employment by funding community-service positions and to subsidize wages and benefits. That conviction shaped the New Hope "offer."

Riemer's argument reflected the experience of the 1970s and early 1980s, when repeated recessions and the contraction of factory employment made it seem to many liberals that jobs simply did not exist for a sizable part of the labor force, particularly the low-skilled. By the 1990s, however, jobs were plentiful, even for people with a high-school education or less. In October 1995, as New Hope began, over 32,000 full-and part-time jobs, at all skill levels, were estimated to be available in Milwaukee and surrounding counties, while the unemployed numbered only around 25,000. In the years 1994-98, when the project operated, the unemployment rate was 5 percent or less in Milwaukee County and below 4 percent most of the time in the urban area as a whole.

Few takers

As it happened, New Hope's chief problem was not the labor market but the reluctant response of those it intended to help. The Milwaukee neighborhoods the program targeted were indeed depressed. According to one survey, only 54 percent of the adults in them were employed. Planners estimated that a quarter of all adults in these areas, 12,000 total, might apply for New Hope. But only a handful did. It took the staff 17 months to get 1,362 eligible adults to come forward and express an interest; of these, half were offered the benefits and the other half put in the control group. Despite extensive mailings and outreach, only 20 percent of persons in the areas covered by New Hope said they had heard of the program.