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Welfare Reform Today: Catholic Perspectives
A presentation by Thomas Massaro, S.J.
INTRODUCTION Welfare reform is a pressing domestic issue that bears on the pursuit of the common good in the United States. Yet this question, like many others of immediate concern to the nation's poor, has been rather eclipsed lately by geopolitical realities of war and terrorism. To help encourage reflection on the direction of welfare policy, the Woodstock Theological Center sponsored a public lecture by the Rev. Thomas Massaro, S.J., at a time when Congress is revisiting the issue.
Father Massaro, who is on the steering committee of Woodstock's Catholicism and Civic Renewal Project, is a professor of moral theology at Weston Jesuit School of Theology in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and the author of several books including Catholic Social Teaching and U.S. Welfare Reform, and Living Justice: Catholic Social Teaching in Action. He delivered his lecture, a summary of which is presented here, on April 24 at Georgetown University. Father Massaro will continue to examine the ethical implications of welfare reform on behalf of the Civic Renewal Project.
The topic of welfare reform has brought mostly disappointment of late. Congress is already seven months beyond the original September 30, 2002, deadline for reauthorizing the sweeping 1996 law that overhauled the welfare system. Few promising or creative proposals for improving our nation's social services delivery system have surfaced in recent years, suggesting that we have largely missed the opportunity collectively to learn from our six-year experiment with welfare reform. While Catholic voices continue to call for a more humane and sensitive set of policies to address the genuine needs of America's low-income families, it is not clear that any religious voices are receiving an especially serious hearing. The nation has been distracted by war in Iraq and numerous other issues that wipe anti-poverty efforts off the front pages.
The 1996 welfare reform law ended the Aid to Families with Dependent Children program, replacing this income maintenance program with the work-based Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) program. The law abrogated the income entitlement for poor single-parent families in favor of a system of capped block grants to the states, which now design and administer their own welfare programs with much less federal oversight. The law included a five-year lifetime limit on benefits, a series of gradually increasing work requirements imposed on each state's welfare caseload, controversial incentives for states to reduce illegitimate births, and sharp cuts in an array of means-tested benefits. Cost savings topped $54 billion over six years. Nearly half of that total accrued from disqualifying legal immigrants from most social programs. The provisions of the law directly reflect the "personal responsibility" agenda of the Republicans' 1994 "Contract with America."
Although it is notoriously difficult to evaluate the effects of such recent social policy legislation, most observers judge the 1996 law a success. Dire predictions of widespread destitution have not come to pass. Child poverty rates have declined slightly every year for the past decade, although at 18 percent American child poverty is still by far the highest in the industrialized world. The most astonishing result of welfare reform is the 54 percent decline in welfare rolls nationwide, a huge drop from the all-time high of 14 million in 1994 to about 6 million currently.
Where Have They Gone? These findings raise two key questions. First, what happened to all those former welfare recipients? Clearly, many did indeed replace their benefit checks with paychecks, as the overall rate of job-holding among single mothers rose from 58 percent in 1993 to 74 percent by 2000. However, these "success stories" are tarnished by the realization that average hourly wages for this group hover around $6.50, hardly enough to raise a family even to the poverty level. The low-wage and often unsteady service work generally available to this population tends to lack health care coverage and other important benefits. Another deep concern is about the million or so single parents who left welfare, whether voluntarily or due to the time limits or other program sanctions, but did not find a job. Because of a systematic failure to keep track of "welfare leavers," we simply do not know what happened to nearly a third of those exiting welfare. Those who "fell through the cracks" of the system are mostly the least-skilled single mothers and their children. In the absence of better information, we can only speculate that they rely on some combination of support from family or male partners, emergency assistance from charities, and black market employment.
The second question is: To what do we credit the huge decline in welfare caseloads? Clearly, some former recipients were "pushed" off welfare by the stricter program rules, time limits, and sanctions imposed by states (e.g., teen mother exclusions, drug testing, workfare requirements). Others, however, were "pulled" by the lure of jobs in the private sector. Welfare reform had the advantage of being implemented during an extraordinary economic boom. It is often overlooked that the new work-based system has not been tested by a deep and prolonged recession, when slack labor markets could doom the progress made so far.
The unresolved debate over the reauthorization of the 1996 law has dragged on for over a year, but has been disappointingly narrow in scope. The main novel feature of President Bush's proposal is a tightening of work requirements, so that as much as 70 percent of the remaining caseload must be in work programs for as much as 40 hours a week. These numbers seem unrealistic to many observers, including most Republican governors. Nevertheless, the House has twice passed the Bush version, and the Senate is holding out for only minor revisions, including more funding for child care subsidies for working single mothers.
Reaching for the Common Good. The tradition of Catholic social teaching emphasizes several themes that, if taken seriously, recommend a reopening of many ethical issues in welfare reform. It calls for social (beyond merely personal) responsibility, regard for the common good, equal social participation, the option for the poor and respect for the rights and human dignity of all persons. All this challenges the status quo in American social policy. For example, the welfare block grant system, capped and inflexible as it is, raises the moral objection that genuine human needs are going completely unmet, especially in states with extremely low benefits and pockets of desperate poverty. When time limits, sanctions, and work requirements are imposed inequitably, or on a "one-size-fits-all" basis, they often affect low-income families in needlessly punitive ways. In the absence of new resources for job-training and childcare subsidies, such harsh measures impose unbearable burdens on those with the most serious barriers to employment. Legislation that places disadvantaged families in nearly impossible situations violates the most fundamental principles of Catholic social teaching.
The influence of Catholic social teaching need not be limited to the official policy statements of bishops or even church-based advocacy groups like Network and Catholic Charities USA. Inspired by the Catholic tradition of social concern, many individuals and groups should continue to contribute to the ongoing debate about welfare reform. We should seek to broaden the discussion of American social policy, so that we reconsider the broad spectrum of family and employment policies. Our ultimate goal should be not just a shrinking of the welfare rolls, but rather broad and genuine progress against poverty in our affluent nation.