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For some time now, I have lived by the belief that we can, and should destroy welfare as we know it. Welfare these days is hardly the shameful welfare of the 70's and 80's. You know, when the case manager used to check in your house to see if June Bug was laying up in there. Of course, June Bug was your boyfriend and maybe even the biological father of your children, but the case manager felt it was not beneficial (or lawful) for a woman to have a man and still need social services. In effect, case managers ran off June Bug and his would be replacement as well. Under the Paul Ryan plan, case managers might return.
Cost And Commitment
By the time Bill Clinton achieved a second term, it wasn't hard for him to unleash his conservative leanings. As a result of a Clinton signed bill, welfare recipients have had a shortened benefits clock for years (TANF Temporary Assistance For Needy Families). While our current, so-called liberal president has inflated recipient numbers, the welfare to work reform bill already does much of what Paul Ryan thinks he is coming up with, especially the connection to resources that prepare people for the end of assistance. If we re-institute a modern version of the age old case worker, we might sneak into areas of cost (for individual case managers) and commitment from recipients who must follow the plan in order for the program to achieve objectives.
What is the danger of such an idea? Mandatory (again, to achieve stated objectives) case manager visits that get missed resulting in disrupted benefits harm children more than their irresponsible parents. Over the years, we should have learned that forcing the ignorant poor to submit to their own betterment is not as easy as it sounds on paper. For a black American (me), these are the moments that the REAL crime of slavery starts to manifest.
Similar to the Ebola virus, ignorance is not the kind of disease you ever want to let live. Federal laws surrounding how we educate our kids reflect an awareness of this reality, but in our history, we not only functionally allowed ignorance, we forcibly produced it in mass, actually killing many who were caught pursuing its cure. Among the worse symptoms of ignorance is how it blinds those worse stricken with the disease from the only path that leads them to health. If quarantined, ignorance would die off in time, but we're too dumb for that. Ignorance is much too contagious to ignore, but we've found a way to do it with our toxic rhetoric that blames one party or another for the reasons that OUR kids are still struggling in school.
In reality, we are all in this mess together and Ryan's plan will fix some of the issues with the social safety net (Earned Income Credit increases for example) but might cause others. Namely, the fund diversion scheme that he uniquely calls the Opportunity Grant. No, this is not new government monies in the form of an additional federal grant on top of monies already being received by each state to support its welfare needs. This grant is an opportunity to switch money you already get, into services of your own choosing. Services like case managers for instance. The real concern is that Governors will soon divert these funds to address other state shortfalls, at the risk of increased hunger and homelessness in their state.
Do you remember when charter schools began to receive the headcount allotment that state and federal budgets spend each year on each student (the money follows the student)? In a similar fashion, the Ryan plan allows states to take up to 80% of their federal welfare subsidy and spend that money in ways driven by that states ideology and agenda. More conservative states are likely to force the case manager process upon poor people in order to assign blame in the event they remain poor after the process reaches an end.
In an MSNBC interview with Chuck Todd, Ryan admitted that " If the status quo was working, I would be supporting it." It is not working, according to Ryan, and Ryan says that we've got record poverty to prove that the war on poverty (i.e. welfare) isn't working. The proof of welfare is a mixed bag of success and failure that remains a subject of debate. Freeing 80% of the welfare bounty from of each state into the hands of whichever Governor is in office at the time begs for a better quality of governor than we have seen lately. These days, governors are constantly testifying before a grand jury in order to clear their name of fraud. Either Ryan is confident that his law will pass at a time when corruption in state government has gone away for good, or he needs to crumble up this bill and smoke it in his pipe dream.
He's not totally dreaming when he says that welfare is not working. By and large, welfare works about as well as common cold medicine, which can hide the symptoms for a while. Ryan is dreaming about this causation between welfare and the rise of poverty. Welfare didn't make poverty rise anymore than cold medicine made colds return again each winter. In fact, several conservatives have noted that federal dollars on a per person basis actually increased after Clinton forced so many slackers off of the doles. Those who focus on this fact, lose sight of the corner that this backs them into. If less people had access to welfare benefits as result of the Clinton reforms, doesn't it make it harder to blame welfare for increased poverty?
One day, when we gain the wisdom of the Italians or even the Native Americans, we will finally stop connecting wealth to knowledge and ignorance to poverty. There may very well be a link, but that direct causation died with the Leave It To Beaver Show and a vibrant American job market. Today, poverty is rooted in a whole complex web of decisions that are often bigger than the individuals trying to make them. Bad choices do create bad outcomes, but limited choices and limited knowledge of good choices when choices present themselves tilt the odds in a predictable direction. While it may be easy to remain insensitive when the bad decisions are done by adult decision makers, the children they breed become innocent victims of the ignorance that they will likely proliferate themselves.
So What Is The Cure?
For the common cold we don't have one. As for poverty, if you assume ignorance and poverty have a natural link, than you will spend a lot of time educating poor people only to discover that they still may not have enough jobs in their neighborhoods even if they had the education to fill them (see; Detroit, Michigan). Our economy not only has a problem with the ignorant poor, it now must deal with the educated but economically disenfranchised. Welfare can't fix poverty because welfare didn't cause it in the first place. Welfare will help some families seeking to rise above poverty, just as it does condone laziness from some too.
Ryan's plan does accept what America seems to believe as well. Welfare is necessary on some level or another, even if Ryan thinks the states can best determine that level on their own. Ryan, and America, also seem to naturally equate the words welfare and poverty as if they are one and the same. They are not, and no war on poverty needs to attack the social safety net nor look to it as a liberal panacea for poverty. Disregard what the Great Society though it could do. Welfare can only offer a humanitarian bridge when life demands it. Outside of that, welfare is not even a cool name, much less a cool idea and its presence speaks more negatively on a society than positively.
If Ryan were really interested in ending poverty, like he will pretend to be when he announces his run at the presidency soon, he would focus on job creation measures as well as a wage increase initiative. Instead, he is beginning his run with a book tour and this middle of the road pandering bill aimed towards all of those he will soon ask a vote from (mainstream republicans and independents primarily). Mainstream republicans may appreciate the name association that this bill does between welfare and poverty, but previously independent people and unaffiliated voters who have found themselves in the need of the humanitarian bridge we call welfare, won't appreciate the name association or Ryan turning a blind eye to their existence or their plight.
