The Price of Citizenship: Redefiningthe American Welfare State - Brief Article

Washington Monthly, June, 2001 by Nicholas Lemann

THE BULK OF MICHAEL KATZ'S The Price of Citizenship is taken up by a long compendium of all the ways in which the American welfare state has diminished over the past 20 years. We all know about the abolition of the 60-year-old Aid to Families With Dependent Children program (the one popularly known as "welfare") by President Clinton near the end of his first term. But Katz understands welfare state to denote the whole system of social provision--everything from food stamps to Social Security to unemployment to disability to private pensions. Not just cash grants to the poor but nearly everything, it seems, is tighter and lesser than it used to be.

Katz relentlessly marshals every possible recent example of diminution of the welfare state. Clinton's attempt to create universal national health insurance failed spectacularly, and the ranks of the uninsured are higher today than in 1992. Medicare and, especially, Medicaid, the federal health care program for the poor, have been trimmed back. Meanwhile, private, company-supplied health insurance plans, as most readers will know from experience, have gotten much less generous. Old-fashioned "defined-benefit" company pension plans, under which you'd get a set amount for life in retirement, have disappeared. Social Security, the government's old-age pension and by far the largest and most popular federal program, is almost inevitably going to be cut back. Job security is lower. Labor unions are less powerful. Federal disability and unemployment programs, such as the Social Security disability pension and Unemployment Insurance, have been trimmed. As the federal government has cut back its social-welfare apparatus, many state governments have too. Claims that foundations, community-development groups, churches, and civic organizations can effectively pick up the social-welfare slack are patently hollow.

Like most liberals who write about welfare, Katz operates on the assumption that a Western European welfare state, providing open-ended cash grants to people without jobs, universal health insurance, and guaranteed pensions, is the natural and best condition for a modern industrial democracy. He proposes, as the proper relationship between citizen and state, T.H. Marshall's idea of "social citizenship," in which everyone would get from government as a kind of birthright a guarantee of income and health care for life. So a feeling of incredulity pervades his account of one after another aspect of social citizenship being downsized. How could this possibly be happening? he seems always to be asking implicitly.

The Price of Citizenship is a sophisticated, literate, and useful synthesis of material from secondary sources, but Katz has not undertaken to do primary archival research or interviewing that might have led him to offer an original explanation of why the welfare state was cut back. Instead he gives us familiar material, often taken from newspaper accounts, lent a measure of gravity by virtue of having been systematically put in one place and described clearly. For the most part, he ascribes the changes in the welfare state to a political triumph of conservative ideology, achieved through energetic, imaginative, well-funded organizing and propagandizing. Believing that wholeheartedly, as he seems to, allows him to spend very little time considering anti-welfarist arguments on their own terms--either the practical argument that AFDC, at least, hurt its recipients by incentivizing them to have children out of wedlock and to leave the workforce and the mainstream culture, or the philosophical argument that government has no obligation to citizens who, for long stretches of years, don't work. Most politicians, and most citizens, strongly subscribe to both of these arguments. If changing the political climate was Katz's goal, it would have been a good idea for him to persuade us that they are wrong. Instead he has given us a high-quality exercise in preaching to the choir.

At the end of The Price of Citizenship, Katz proposes three things: reestablishing some version of the AFDC program; cutting the link between employment and eligibility for federal benefits, especially for mothers; and national health insurance. Right now no prominent national politician, even Ted Kennedy, is loudly campaigning for any of these. During the first year of Bill Clinton's presidency, it looked as if he might pull off health insurance, but those days are long gone. If Americans would accept the overarching principle of social citizenship, they could then be talked into supporting Katz's three goals--but since they haven't accepted it, social citizenship isn't much help.

What would bring the country around to a more welfarist position? The answer one most commonly hears on the left is that the welfare state should be divorced as much as possible from questions of race or even poverty. It should be packaged in a (somewhat misleading) form like that of Social Security--that is, as an insurance program for working people. Clinton demonstrated that this strategy does work. He was able to pass an enormous increase in the Earned Income Tax Credit because that program is not openly a monetary handout to poor people. Katz admires Clinton for having done this, but he doesn't endorse the idea of reviving the welfare state through repackaging, because he believes it shouldn't need repackaging; poor people should get government handouts, dammit. That is intellectually honest of him, but if he believes that simply enumerating the many reductions in the welfare state will cause the process to reverse itself, I bet he's wrong.