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The Daily Signal
Why We Must Be
Bold on Welfare Reform
Kay Coles James
March 11, 2018
Washington is in a unique position to solve America’s welfare crisis
for a very simple reason: Washington created it. The policy and
programs it established a half-century ago have depleted people,
obstructed their purpose, and extinguished their extraordinary
possibilities.
The evidence of this failure is all around us. Being black and the
daughter of a former welfare recipient, I know firsthand the unintended
harm welfare has caused. That’s why much of what I am about to share
relates to the African-American experience.
But this isn’t a problem specific to us. When it comes to welfare, the
black community is merely America’s “canary in the coalmine.” What has
happened to so many African-Americans can happen and is happening to
any American subjected to the same failed liberal policies.
So while I will speak to the experience of the black community, I know
the majority of Americans on welfare aren’t African-American. As a
result, this appeal has relevance for all Americans, and it’s on their
behalf that policymakers must confront and come to understand a few
vitally important things.
The liberal Left continue to push their radical agenda against American
values. The good news is there is a solution. Find out more >>
First, the problem isn’t people: It’s policy.
I urge all policymakers to read “Slave Narratives From the Federal
Writers’ Project,” easily accessible online and at the Library of
Congress. In them are powerful stories demonstrating the strength and
resilience of my people.
These narratives never fail to move me deeply, and the one that strikes
me to my core is this: In the days, weeks, and months following
Appomattox, emancipated African-Americans could be seen walking mile
after mile. They weren’t fleeing their former owners: The crime of
slavery had been ended, after all. No, they were searching, often in
vain, for their family members who had been ripped from their embrace
and sold to other slave owners.
I can’t even begin to imagine how traumatic it would be if someone took
my husband, children, or grandchildren from me. It would be unspeakable
under any circumstances, let alone for the purpose of being sold into
slavery. Yet that’s exactly what happened so many times before
Emancipation. No wonder, then, that many freed men and women walked
huge distances, searching for their lost parents, siblings, spouses,
and children. So strong is the value of family that this was the first
thing they did when they had the freedom to do it.
With a hunger for the education they’d been denied, freed slaves also
set up schools in churches, in homes, and—famously—under the
Emancipation Oak that still stands on what became the campus of my alma
mater, Hampton University. They honed the skills they learned on the
plantation and in the workhouse too. And they got jobs—jobs that
enabled them to support their families and build the future that has
enabled African-Americans like me to pursue our dreams.
What they did was extraordinary. It’s a tale of survival, of family, of
faith, and of indomitable determination. Those freed slaves and their
children and grandchildren built businesses, colleges, churches, and
communities, and they did it not only often without government help,
but often in the face of government adversity known as Jim Crow.
This history is so important for policymakers to consider because it
helps make sense of the harm done to the African-American community
since then by liberal policies like welfare. Consider: Since the
so-called War on Poverty was launched more than 50 years ago:
Our marriage rate has plummeted, and the number of out-of-wedlock
births has soared.
Children are being raised without the security of an intact family or
having ever even experienced parental marriage.
Fathers are routinely rejecting their responsibilities, increasing
their children’s risk of living in poverty.
Nearly 1 million black boys and girls are being raised by a
grandparent, often because their parents suffer from drug abuse, have
passed away, or are in prison.
It’s long been said that family is the very first Department of Health
and Human Services, but in recent decades, that bedrock of our
community has been broken almost as badly as it was during the days of
slavery.
As Kim Holmes of The Heritage Foundation wrote in his book “Rebound”:
“The welfare state … substitute[d] a check for a father, a social
worker for a caring mother or grandmother, and a slew of civil rights
organizations for the neighborhood church.”
My great-grandmother was enslaved, and I wonder what she would think of
America today. She experienced the heartbreak of families being torn
apart and sold to distant plantations.
Would she be able to understand why so many children are now growing up
with only one parent?
Would she have any tolerance for all the fathers who are turning their
backs on their responsibilities and walking away?
Would she have any patience for the notion that it’s “politically
incorrect” (whatever that really means) to say a man and woman should
be married if they’re having a child?
And would she have any doubts as to why so many fatherless teens seek
in street gangs the sense of belonging they never experienced at home?
The answers are no, no, no, and no. These dysfunctions are the result
of policy choices this nation has made, not the people on whom they’ve
been inflicted.
That’s why the focus on welfare reform is so important. Under the
so-called enlightened approach launched by the Great Society liberals,
more money is doled out to people who (1) aren’t married, (2) have
children, and (3) don’t work.
Who could come up with such an idea? The kind, it seems, who apparently
just couldn’t see that doing this would destroy two of the most
effective defenses against poverty: work and marriage.
Instead, this approach rewards people for not working, for having kids
out of wedlock, and for staying single. And guess what it’s produced?
More of exactly what we’re paying for: unemployment, out-of-wedlock
births, and single-parent families.
Now, ask yourself: What if I took that kind of “welfare” policy and
implemented it in your family? If I said to your sons, “Sweetie, you
don’t have to work; I’ll take care of everything,” and if I said to
your daughters, “Sugar, you go ahead and have as many babies as you
want; I’ll give you more money to take care of them,” what do you think
your family would be like in 20 years?
I’ll tell you: Your sons would be lying at home and not working, your
daughters would be having kids out of wedlock, and your family would be
a whole lot poorer.
Is that what you want for your family? I don’t think so. Then why do we
allow the government to do to other families what we wouldn’t want for
our own?
The misguided compassion of this liberal policy has so many unintended
consequences. It’s destroying hopes and dreams. It’s allowing
despair-inducing welfare to take the place of pride-fueling work. It’s
depriving millions of children of the love and security they’d get from
the two people they need most: their mom and dad. And it’s causing the
spark to go out for whole generations.
This is wrong. It’s gone on too long. And it must be stopped.
Fixing this won’t be easy, but with an empowerment agenda it can be
done. By empowerment, I mean replacing dependence with independence,
hopelessness with hope, and poverty with the power to realize our
dreams. And so I’d like to offer policymakers five solutions for an
empowerment agenda that will make their efforts so worthwhile.
Reinstill “achiever values” by putting a greater emphasis on
empowerment and work.
America must return to what Dr. Carl Ellis Jr. calls “achiever values.”
When I was a child, I watched my mother board a bus for work in the
cold morning hours and return well after sunset, tired but ready to
care for her own family. Her daily routine taught my brothers and me
the dignity of honest work and the satisfaction of supporting her
family.
Contrast that with today. We’ve spent $28 trillion on a dizzying array
of government programs for poor and low-income Americans that promote
non-achiever values, and millions of Americans are now dependent on the
handouts of others. That’s why then-President Barack Obama’s order
letting states waive the 1996 work requirement was so wrong—and why a
strong work requirement is so important now.
I, of course, know that the purpose of welfare is to help people when
they fall on hard luck. But shouldn’t that also mean that its goal is
to help people get past those hard-luck stretches so they can get back
on their feet and once again provide for their families? Of course it
should, and work does exactly that.
That’s why The Heritage Foundation has long called for welfare to be a
work-based system, not a one-way handout. Nine out of 10 Americans
agree, but today work is almost absent from the welfare system.
We can fix that by strengthening the work requirements in the Temporary
Assistance for Needy Families and earned income tax credit programs and
extending them to food stamps too. (A bill from Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah,
and Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, S.1290/H.R. 2832, would tackle both; a
bill from Rep. Garret Graves, R-La., H.R. 2996, is a robust food stamp
work requirement in standalone legislation.)
Bottom line: If you’re not too young or too old, not physically or
mentally disabled, then you should be working. You need to be working.
Not for us and not just for the Treasury, but for you, for your kids,
and for your future.
Stop destroying the family.
Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the late four-term Democratic senator from New
York, absolutely nailed it when he said:
[T]here is one unmistakable lesson in American history: a community
that allows a large number of young men to grow up in broken families,
dominated by women, never acquiring any stable relationship to male
authority, never acquiring any set of rational expectations about the
future—that community asks for and gets chaos.
He was right: Our policies have profoundly undermined marriage by
reducing support when both parents are in the home. If a single mom on
public assistance marries the father of her child, guess what happens
to the support she’s been receiving? It gets cut—sharply.
That’s why these policies are commonly referred to as marriage
penalties. They literally and very effectively penalize mothers and
fathers who get married. No surprise: They’ve caused millions of single
parents to realize the smartest thing they can do is stay single.
This is more than a matter of family values. It’s about valuing family,
and that’s why it’s so important that you eliminate the marriage
penalties now embedded in welfare policy.
We’ve talked about ending these marriage penalties for a long time.
Now, for the first time, we’ve got a serious policy solution to start
doing that, proposed by The Heritage Foundation. In Congress, Rep.
Jason Smith, R-Mo., is taking the lead on making our idea a legislative
reality.
Promote transparency about the real cost and effectiveness of the
welfare state.
I mentioned earlier that government has spent over $28 trillion on
welfare programs, but do you know how much it now spends each year? The
answer is a stunning $1.1 trillion. Just imagine the sticker shock if
every American knew. Maybe that’s the reason policymakers and the
American public don’t get this information through the annual budget
process.
This is a real problem. Without honest and accurate information,
lawmakers and their constituents are handicapped in their ability to
press for the rational policy reform that’s long overdue.
That’s why The Heritage Foundation is calling for presidential budgets
to report on welfare spending in its totality. We also want the
administration to release data on the actual aggregate benefits being
received by individuals on welfare.
Just as important, Washington should be paying for results, not merely
for process. Today, government programs generally fund services rather
than the outcomes that are needed. If any business operated this way,
it would soon be bankrupt. (Perhaps that’s why the U.S. federal
government is more than $22 trillion in debt?)
Instead, taxpayer funds should be going only to programs that actually
are delivering the outcomes—such as job placement—that they promise.
And the administration should be reporting on such outcomes in detail,
so that policymakers can assess which programs deserve continued
funding and which should be replaced with more effective alternatives.
Be bold, and don’t back down.
When I had the privilege of serving as Virginia’s secretary of health
and human resources, we passed statewide welfare reform. This was
before Congress passed Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, and it
was against fierce resistance from the left and the media. But we did
it, and we learned some important lessons that might be of value.
First, our paramount focus was to help people. Our reform policy was
crafted by a 40-member Commission on Citizen Empowerment that included
many current and former welfare recipients. Those fine Virginians were
uncompromising. They knew firsthand how destructive welfare is, and
they pushed us to enact the most conservative reforms anyone had ever
seen.
Second, we took on the left and beat them at their own game. We
assembled a war room where we not only responded to their attacks, but
also anticipated and launched quite a few of our own. We recruited
powerful advocates in all the affected communities.
We went across the state to spread the word, and we told the true
stories of welfare’s impact, stories that were more heartbreaking and
compassionate than anything any liberal opponent ever offered. We
shared those stories throughout Virginia—with or without the media’s
help.
Last but by no means least, we didn’t take “no” for an answer. Sure,
the left tried to stop us. They even defeated all of our bills during
the first legislative session. But we came back in the next one. Gov.
George Allen promised—not threatened, promised—that he’d make their
votes against welfare reform the No. 1 issue in the upcoming election,
and liberals folded like a house of cards.
The result was a package of workfare, learnfare, and child support
enforcement measures that had an immediate and positive result.
According to an independent analysis by Virginia’s version of the
Government Accountability Office, the reform enabled welfare caseloads
to drop by “nearly 50 percent.” It also resulted in “a strong increase
in the average percent of recipient resources that is from income and a
strong decrease in the average percent of recipient resources that is
from [welfare] payments.”
Importantly, our reform in Virginia also achieved budgetary savings. In
fact, the same happened at the federal level. Thanks to the 1996
legislation, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families is the only
welfare program in which spending has been under control over the past
two decades.
And all this happened despite the Congressional Budget Office, which
didn’t believe reform would generate savings. Had conservatives
listened to the CBO 20 years ago, there never would have been a welfare
reform, but Congress—backed by the analysis of Robert Rector at The
Heritage Foundation and others—had the courage to say the CBO was wrong.
History has proven us correct. Work requirements reap savings in the
long run. Just as we saw in Virginia, enabling welfare recipients to
find work leads to fewer people depending on welfare and cost savings
for taxpayers.
What that means is welfare reform works:
It replaces dependence with independence.
It enables welfare recipients to become workforce participants.
It restores pride, self-respect, and personal responsibility.
Most of all, it heals and helps the most vulnerable parents and
children among us.
But I don’t need empirical evidence to tell me that welfare reform is
right. I know it from my own personal experience, and that leads me to
my last piece of advice for policymakers.
Remain focused on the remarkable progress that can be achieved.
In light of all the harm African-Americans have suffered from liberal
welfare policy, you might think I’d be pessimistic about what the
future holds for the black community. But I’m not. As angry as I am,
I’m also filled with hope about what the future can and, I pray, will
bring to our people and our nation.
The first reason is simple: I have faith in God, in the hope that is
America, and in the human spirit. I don’t look at people and think
they’re incapable of taking care of themselves or of making the right
decisions. Not at all. I look at all people, no matter their age, race,
gender, income, or religion, as having the vast possibilities that come
from being made in the image of God.
I’m not just convinced every child has these possibilities; I’ve seen
it. Spend even just a little time with 5-year-olds and you’ll see it
too. They are smart. They are so creative. They are positive. And they
have boundless energy.
Since all of God’s people are born with vast possibilities for growth,
fulfillment, and success, what they are crying out for is an
opportunity: an opportunity to grow up healthy and safe, to be nurtured
by their family’s love, to study and learn, and to pursue whatever
direction their dreams and talents take them.
It’s simple: If given the opportunity, every child truly can grow up
(as the popular toast goes) to be healthy, wealthy, and wise, and their
communities will be better, richer, and more peaceful as a result.
So I call on policymakers to pause in their work and just imagine what
that America would be like.
Imagine an America where civil society flourishes, life is protected,
and children grow up with the love and protection of a whole family.
Imagine an America where every parent has the opportunity to experience
the pride of providing and being a role model for their children.
Imagine an America where every child—every single one—has equal access
to an excellent education.
Imagine an America where liberty, equality, and opportunity aren’t just
the gifts we inherited. They’re the endowment we pass on.
That’s the America we need. It’s the America we can build.
Policymakers can achieve this with an empowerment agenda. They can save
lives from failed liberal policies, and they can make it possible for
millions of Americans to realize their dreams.
All it takes is a willingness to take the bold action that America
needs.
Read this and other articles at The Daily Signal
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