Contents of W:

• Welfare Reform

Welfare Reform [sic]:

          The United States recently instituted a ãwelfare reformä which placed limits on the duration over which poor people can utilize our already-inadequate social safety net. In the process of pushing through this major policy change, the poor were blamed for their poverty, and all social, economic and governmental causes of poverty were ignored. The law also ignored the reality - that most people are not ãchronic welfare dependentsä, but instead use welfare sparingly to ride out economic hard times - and focused on a few extreme cases of long-term welfare use as a paradigm for the entire system.

          Demonizing the poor is nothing new for American politicians; we have been blaming the poor, underprivileged and our most recent immigrants for our social problems for decades. But this ãreformä, and its draconian measures, is unprecedented. Of particular concern are the families affected by the five-year limit, many of which consist of single mothers and their young, dependent children. No other individual has been so mistreated as the welfare mother. Blameless for the irresponsibility of her childâs/childrenâs father, she endeavors to perform the greatest social service that any citizen can: the upbringing of our next generation. The victim of structural conditions which brought about her poverty (a poor education system, an unjust taxation and expenditure rubric, and economic isolation of many communities), she is told that she must ãfind a jobä. In the meantime she must endure demeaning ãworkfareä, a means by which local municipalities can exploit the labor of welfare recipients at sub-minimum-wage rates. How does the welfare mother raise her children? Who raises her children while she searches for the job that doesnât exist or is subjugated to the slavery of workfare? The answer, in practical terms, is no one. And the irony is that we will turn around and blame her for ãnot raising her children rightä if one of them succumbs to the culture of crime which infests his or her neighborhood; all of this occurs not only at the hands of our political apathy, but under welfare reform as a matter of policy.

          Clearly welfare reform is a kind of social control, a cleverly-disguised means of blaming and punishing the poor, for it has no basis in sound economics:

The most cost-effective use of an unskilled motherâs time is usually caring for her children, not serving burgers while someone else cares for her children. The rationale for putting these mothers to work is political and cultural, not economic. That means that somebody has to pay the cost. The question is whether it will be the government or the poor. ²² 

Welfare reform is a disgusting abandonment of the responsibility which all of us must have for our fellow citizens. Not only do we need a real social safety net called ãwelfareä, but we also need economic development, quality education and social spending for all citizens, particularly those born into poverty.

          Real welfare reform would eliminate our truly wasteful support system, the system of corporate welfare. Our national expenditure on corporate welfare dwarfs our national spending on social welfare. The real welfare cheats are not poor mothers, but corporations and their highly-paid executives and officers, who enjoy government subsidies and are offered legal means by which they skirt taxes, costing hard-working poor- and middle-income Americans billions of dollars a year.