What's wrong with this picture?

Last month, the Washington Post had a story about welfare reform, presenting what it called

a seeming paradox in the U.S. economy: Though the number of welfare recipients continues to decline, poverty rates - particularly for single mothers and children - have surged in recent years. Just last month, the government reported that the number of people on welfare had declined by 149,000 at the end of 2003 compared with 2002, while the number in poverty rose by 1.3 million.

Exactly what "paradox" are they referring to? There's no paradox at all. In fact, effects like this were predicted when the Great Liberal Hope Bill Clinton promised to "end welfare as we know it" in 1996. Toughening requirements, putting lifetime limits on eligibility for benefits, and similar "reforms" were sold on the basis that they would cut welfare rolls. And of course they did. But the unspoken premise, one that all the proponents of "reform" understood but would not say out loud, was an equation between reductions in welfare rolls with reductions in poverty. That is, as welfare enrollment dropped, so would the poverty rate.

And of course it didn't. Because, as was, again, predicted at the time, all those people gang-pressed into "self-sufficiency" were hammered as soon as the economy started to flounder. It was only because the economy was expanding enough in the late 1990s to absorb the extra people into (for the most part) low-paying jobs that the effects were hidden for a time. (And that expanding economy would have meant the rolls would decline anyway.)

Meanwhile, as Ellen Bravo, outgoing director of 9to5, National Association of Working Women, notes, state welfare agencies

have an incentive to keep people off the rolls because they're striving to meet targets for reducing their caseloads. "The program was designed with a premium put on getting people off the rolls. The idea was ending welfare rather than ending poverty; reducing caseloads rather than reducing suffering," she said.

So rolls stay down, poverty goes up, and people who deserve aid are not receiving it.

Nationally, fewer than half of the families eligible for welfare received it in 2001, the most recent year for which statistics are available, compared with roughly 80 percent before the 1996 legislation.

To some smug, comfortable, not hungry, not unemployed, not struggling creeps this is actually a good thing because welfare is a "crutch."

"What is happening is that people are making do, without having to go back on welfare," said Douglas J. Besharov, a University of Maryland professor and resident scholar at the conservative American Enterprise Institute. ...

"The states are trying to discourage people in every way they can from going on welfare," Besharov said. "The level of hassle, the level of 'do you really, really, really want to get on welfare?' has increased." Besharov said that strategy encourages people to consider other sources of support first and helps end a cycle of dependence.

That "cycle of dependence" crap gets an added boost from Assistant Secretary for Children and Families Wade F. Horn, who claims that the old system "systematically seduced people into generations of welfare dependence." That, it needs to be said, is a lie. An oft-told tale, but still a flaming lie. In fact, in the years preceding "reform," half of welfare recipients got it for two years or less and nearly two-thirds were off the rolls in no more than four years. What's more to the point, 80% of children of welfare recipients did not become dependent on welfare as adults; indeed, nearly two-thirds of them never received welfare at all. Horn is lying. Either that or he's incompetent to hold his position. Or both. (Figures via The Poverty of Welfare Reform by Joel Handler, Chapter 3. The book is from 1995 and had the most recent data available at the time "reform" was being considered.)

Welfare "reform" is a success at reducing welfare but a failure at it's supposed actual goal: reducing poverty. But that's because, just like so many efforts before it, it's ultimately based on the false, indeed insulting, conviction that poverty is a matter of individual behavior, rather than of economic circumstances - or, more bluntly, that people are poor because they just don't (not can't, don't) work and that they will work only under the threat of legal sanctions or the press of truly dire necessity. The fact that such notions have persisted and keep reappearing despite the repeated failures over the years of programs based on them shows how deeply ingrained they are in our cultural prejudices.

The facts contradict them - but facts are at a disadvantage when faced with popular mythology expressed in bumper stickers and sound bites. We would prefer to continue blaming the poor for their own poverty, alternately lecturing and threatening them to "improve" their "behavior," and ultimately measuring our "success" less by how much we reduce poverty and suffering than by how invisible we make it, rather than face the more difficult problem that, as one writer (whose name, unfortunately, I can't recall) put it, "the problem with welfare isn't that welfare pays too much - it's that working pays too little."

Until we face that fact, until we face up to the fact that the distribution of wealth is the core issue in both poverty and welfare, then no matter our "reforms" we will not be attacking the evil of poverty but just continuing our old pattern of symbolism, ritual, and finger-pointing.