Some Observations on the Current Welfare Problem
James M. Murk
There have been a number of studies on the welfare mess in the United States which have not been given very wide coverage, probably because their conclusions and their statistics do not make very happy reading for leftist-liberals who seldom want to face their failures. The following is a collection of some of these facts issued by Government studies, the Cato Institute research, the findings of the Heritage Foundation, and others.
l. The War on Poverty, the program launched by President Lyndon Johnson in 1965, originally was never intended to be an open-ended entitlement program. The liberals of the day believed that they could end poverty with a government expenditure of perhaps 18 to 25 billion dollars. Then why has the welfare program cost the American worker and taxpayer over 5 trillion dollars in the last 30 years (more than the national debt), and why is there more evidence of so-called poverty today than in 1965?
2. Welfare was viewed primarily as a temporary investment to enable the poor to become self-sufficient and help them to pull themselves out of the economic basement of American society.
3. Before 1929 and the period of the Great Depression the federal government was hardly involved in charity to the poor. This was seen as the responsibility of the churches and other private religious organizations. And the Biblical philosophy behind this charity was that if a man was able-bodied and did not work he was not deserving of any charitable help. There were the deserving poor, who could not help themselves, and the undeserving poor who were inhibited either by downright laziness or by some addiction, usually alcohol.
4. The 1930’s depression saw a great rise in people who needed economic help. Unemployment in these hard times grew to as much as 25%. The Government--national and local--took some responsibility for helping the poorest Americans. In 1929, for example, we spent what amounts to about $800 million dollars in today’s currency. With growing unemployment, however, the effort of FDR and the New Deal was to help people by enlisting them into government work programs, such as the WPA, PWA and the CCC’s. The emphasis was on “workfare” and not welfare. As much as $46.9 billion dollars was spent by 1939, most of it on these workfare programs.
5. President Franklin Roosevelt’s “liberal” welfare policies always emphasized work and responsibility. He called entitlement-welfare a narcotic and warned that if it became a habit it could ruin our nation. He called it a “subtle destroyer of the human spirit” and admonished that it could become addictive (1935 address to the Congress). America was rescued from the Depression by the industrial boom of the Second World War. With full-employment and a burgeoning economy, welfare spending amounted to little in the 1940’s and grew very slowly in the 1950’s and early 1960’s.
6. Much has been made by Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan and others in support of a concerted drive to protect illegitimate children, that America has been committed to caring for children since 1935. This is a very misleading statement considering the point of view of Francis Perkins, Secretary of Labor during the New Deal, who was also the architect of the 1930’s welfare policy. She said that she never dreamed or intended that helping children would become an entitlement for unwed mothers. Illegitimate babies at that time were always cared for by the family of the girl or were put up for adoption. There were homes for unwed mothers which were provided for primarily by private charities. This was not a serious problem, of course, because illegitimacy was less than 3% and was condemned by virtually the whole society. Today illegitimacy is 23% among whites and 68% among blacks.
7. After 1965 the spending on welfare by all governments in the United States grew with little control: 1965--$38.3 billion; 1968--$80.5 billion; 1975--$119.4 billion; 1993--$324 billion; and 1995--$378 billion. Compare its growth to other programs. National Defense: In 1965, 17 cents was spent on welfare for every dollar on national defense. By 1993 welfare spending had outstripped defense spending--$1.11 to $1.00. Education: In 1965, 29 cents was spent on welfare for every dollar spent on education. By 1993 welfare spending had risen to 91% of the education budget throughout the entire country--over 15,000 school districts. Social Security and Medicare: Today welfare spending amounts to 77% of Social Security and Medicare together. These three entitlement programs make up by far the bulk of the government’s annual budget.
8. Projections for future welfare spending has alarmed politicians who have finally voted to end it as a federal entitlement program. According to Congressional Budget Office (CBO) projections, over $550 billion nationwide would be spent in the year 2000 and a total of $1.6 trillion between 1996 and 2000. This kind of growth cannot be sustained. Only time will tell if converting welfare spending into block grants for the States will save any money or slow growth. The States have simply inherited the problems of the federal government. It is hoped that considerable savings will be made by dismantling the federal welfare bureaucracy. The legislative package passed by the Congress, however, sends block grants to the States but allows for a 4% annual increase in welfare spending. The States can increase or decrease this amount. It is now their responsibility.
9. Welfare has evolved primarily as a program for single mothers. It therefore rewards illegitimacy, and its other main weakness is that it pays better than work. Some long-term welfare recipients will have a higher income than some of the taxpayers who are providing their support.
10. Welfare recipients are the new leisured class. In contrast to the leisured aristocrats of yesteryear who did not work, the welfare leisured class is protected by a misguided compassion and the moral conscience of society. A non-productive, well-to-do citizenry of the past was once rejected and taxed out of existence. Time will tell what society will do with this new non-productive class of society.
11. Welfare recipients are receiving an average of two to four times the minimum wage so there is no incentive for them to take entry level jobs and few of them have any training or experience to get anything else. For example, in 46 states welfare pays more than the salary of full-time janitors; in 28 states it pays more than the starting salary for a secretary; in 8 states benefits are more than first year teachers; and in 5 states they exceed the median wage for computer programmers. In the District of Columbia welfare pays as much or more than any of the above. Believe me, it is no sacrifice to be on welfare, except the sacrifice of the spirit.
12. In Alaska, Hawaii, Massachusetts and Rhode Island the welfare package amounts to more than the average worker’s take home pay. It exceeds 70% of the average wages in 36 states.
13. In 4 states, New York City and the District of Columbia welfare is equivalent or better than $14 per hour. In 16 states it equals or exceeds $10 per hour job. In 39 states the welfare package equals the earnings of workers making $8 per hour. Frankly, how can these people be expected to work unless they have the built in drive to want to be independent of gov- ernment largess? This value or point of view has often been reinforced by social workers and the welfare bureaucracy which for years has fought the idea that welfare recipients should have to work for their benefits. Do you suppose that this could have anything to do with the fact that they themselves have a vested interest in maintaining the status quo in the welfare system? After all, the taxpayers are footing the bill for the welfare bureaucracy as well as its clients.
14. Welfare is perhaps the number one element supporting and encouraging illegitimacy in America. Children born out of legal wedlock to single mothers used to number only 3% in our nation. Today the overall average is 32% and among blacks it is 68%; in fact, in the ghettos of the inner cities the number of illegitimate children hovers around 80% and has been reported to be as high as 89% in Harlem. America is on its way to matching Latin America with all its disorganization, social upheaval and mayhem, where 80% of all children are born out of legal wedlock. Today over 50% of children in America will live at some time or another in a family without two parents. If this continues, American civilization is on its way out as a socially viable, working society. There will be too much wide-spread psychological trauma and dysfunction for the society to work.
15. The dysfunctional family in America has proved to be the number one cause of all our social pathologies: violent crime, drug abuse, educational decline, child poverty, child abuse, teenage pregnancies and illegitimate births, divorces, etc. Large numbers of children growing up with only single mothers, who themselves have been victims of illegitimacy, mature without a moral code except what they make up themselves on the streets. Many have no knowledge of right and wrong; they know no work ethic; they have learned no responsibility, diligence or discipline; they are only partially literate and have developed no skills. They are subject to becoming victims of crime and the drug culture. The children that welfare is seeking to protect and nurture because of society’s misplaced compassion often repay that society with indigence and criminality, and they multiply all the social pathologies generation after generation which feeds the monstrous growth of the whole welfare tragedy.
16. A major reason why the welfare system has failed is that it made no moral demands on its recipients. It was virtually a “free ride.” What private charities and the religious organizations could demand; namely, that the poor be or become “deserving,” was not permitted of a value-neutral government program. This fact plus the conscious rejection of the Judeo-Christian value system by the leftist-liberals, who have run the society for the last 30 years, helps explain why the welfare system has just about ruined us. They have given us a living object lesson in how the charity business ought not to be run.
17. The principles of Judeo-Christianity are essentially Biblical principles of tough and realistic love. They presuppose a view of the nature of man which is an anathema to liberals; namely, that man’s nature is subject to an overriding self-interest called selfishness, which the theologians call sin. In the face of all the evidence for this evaluation of man, it is difficult to understand the opposition of the secular humanists and liberals to this premise. Perhaps it is their fairy tale view of human nature which has prompted most liberals to call any discipline injected into the welfare system draconian measures proposed by a mean-spirited conservative majority. I wonder if they would call a football coach like a Vince Lombardi or a military commander like a General Schwartzkopf mean-spirited when they tried to inculcate discipline and responsibility into their respective “teams?” There are several Biblical principles which have never been considered or applied in the present administration of the welfare program. They are expressions of “tough love” which has always been a part of the Judeo-Christian ethic.
(1) “Those who do not work, shall not eat!” is a command given by the Apostle Paul to some of the Greeks. (II Thes- salonians 3:10) It had always been part of the Jewish law. John Smith used this principle at Jamestown with the highbrow, upper class British settlers who thought manual labor was for servants or slaves. The work ethic became part of the Protestant Biblical contribution to the American tradition. This philosophy is what built this nation. Work was highly valued, and a man felt shame if he could not make his own way by his work. A”free lunch” was only given to the disabled, the sick, the helpless and those who were called “the deserving poor.” The “undeserving poor” were on their own to sink or swim. This was tough love, but it worked. Lyndon Johnson’s effort to get rid of poverty by throwing free money at it has proved to be one of he most destructive decisions in the social history of America. (Quotations from the Bible are from the New International Version.) Among the Jews in the Old Testament times the poor were provided for by leaving grain in the fields and figs and olives on the trees during harvest. Also every seventh year the land was to lie fallow and what grew up in the fields and in the orchards could be harvested by the poor who had no land. But the poor had to work for this food. They had to glean the fields and the trees. They had to prepare the grain to make bread and preserve the stores of what they had been allowed to harvest. There was no free ride. A constant “handout” is debilitating both to one’s character and one’s self esteem and weakens ambition and resolve.
(2) “Bear one another’s burdens, and so fulfill the law of Christ,” (Galatians 6:2) grew into voluntary help associations. Volunteerism has been another secret of our nation’s success. When the government picks up the tab, it destroys the habit of charity in the body politic. Welfare took away the moral ‘growth in grace’ of the nation. Everybody’s job becomes nobody’s job. But remember that the purpose of these volunteer help associations had as a goal to make everyone who was able bodied to become independent. This principle is expressed in Galatians 6:5--”Every man shall bear his own burden.” Once again the distinction was always made between the “deserving” and “undeserving” poor. The prevailing belief in the Biblical view of the nature of man precluded free handouts. Poor people were given a “hand up” not a “hand out.”
(3) Jesus indicated that what you sow you will reap. The New Testament expresses basic common sense, “Don’t be deceived. God cannot be mocked. A man reaps what he sows. The man who sows to please his sinful nature, (that is, he who practices a “do as I please” philosophy) from that nature will reap destruction.” (Galatians 6:7-8) We have tried to ameliorate the consequences of negative, sinful behavior and thus avoid reaping what we sow. Teenage fornication is immoral because it has destructive results--ultimately the dysfunctional family which destroys the society. However, with permissiveness, excuses, and a mind-set that says sex is amoral and then seeks to avoid the consequences of illicit behavior with condoms and abortions and free money, we have created a monster which will shatter us. And it multiplies itself with more and more devastating mischief each generation. We have made things worse by trying to help people avoid reaping what they have sown.
(4) Then Jesus told us that we would always have the poor with us, indicating that we would never entirely get rid of poverty. (St. Matthew 26:11) Academics and do-gooders did not believe that, so they tried to eliminate poverty. Using their own system and values in doing so, they made it worse. Liberals admit that the poverty in America today is worse than it was when the welfare programs started in the 1960’s. Some people just do not know how not to be poor. Many do not want to work. They have never developed the minimum habits of life which would enable them to succeed in any area. We can try to train them, but we should not be surprised if it proves to be a thankless task. We cannot make them work. This does not mean that we should not try, but we may have an entire generation of virtually helpless drones produced by the well-meaning, but short-sighted and ill-informed policies originating in the dream of the Great Society. We should note Frederick Douglass’ wiser warning to his black contemporaries in 1853, “Learn trades or starve!”
(5) The tenth Commandment says “Thou shalt not covet.” (Exodus 20:17 “You shall not covet your neighbor’s house. You shall not covet your neighbor’s wife, or his manservant or maidservant, his ox or donkey, or anything that belongs to your neighbor.”) Built into the bedrock of the foundation of the welfare system is a philosophical evaluation of injustice rooted in envy. The forced redistribution of wealth is a part of any socialist formula for a human society. It is part of the motivation behind the progressive income tax in virtually all modern governments including America. This redistribution of income by progressive taxation, however, has been shown to be the number one reason for irresponsible democratic action, undisciplined spending and a burgeoning bureaucracy. (Hayek)
There is a problem in all capitalist economies where the more capable, industrious and lucky get richer and the less capable, less hard working, or unfortunate get poorer. In the nation of Israel the solution given by God was the Year of Jubilee when the society was suppose to start over with ancestral lands reverting to the original owners, and all debts were forgiven. This was a plan for an agrarian society, but it was seldom practiced. The principle applied in the New Testament is most clearly stated by the Apostle Paul urging the Corinthian church to give so that there could be greater equality in the church family around the world. The Jerusalem church especially had fallen on hard times and the Greek churches were asked by church leaders to share their wealth. It was a voluntary system, not a tax.
This idea we call charity was a new concept for the Roman world. There is no record in history of any voluntary charities which predate Christianity in the Gentile nations. Paul’s principle was, “Remember this: Whoever sows sparingly will also reap sparingly, and whoever sows generously will also reap generously. Each man should give what he has decided in his heart to give, not reluctantly or under compulsion for God loves a cheerful giver. And God is able to make all grace abound to you, so that in all things at all times, having all that you need, you will abound in every good work.” (II Corinthians 9.6-8) This is without doubt the basis for the unique historical emphasis on volunteerism in American culture and is still preached from American pulpits. This Judeo-Christian value laid the foundation for virtually all charitable organizations and was a basic principle promoting a voluntary, although patchwork, distribution of wealth in American society. Andrew Carnegie, with his staunch Scotch Presbyterian heritage, set one example by giving all his fortune away building libraries and doing other charitable enterprises before he died. The further we retreated from the Biblical commands and traditions in America, however, the more secular humanist socialists have tried to enforce what had once been voluntary. Are we much better off for the change? Selfishness, self-indulgence, self-interest and envy are all equally evil motives. They all bear bitter fruit and much trouble.
18. The way the welfare system as a whole has been administered is pathetic. As the sociologist Charles Murray has warned it doesn’t need fixing; it needs junking. We need a “complete change of mind.” (In the Greek this is the word metanoia which is translated in the New Testament by the word repentance.) Local control is right; the people must get involved. Block grants are no permanent help; they simply transfer the problem to state bureaucracies which may be little better than the federal government; albeit they may be cheaper. Somehow the people must get directly involved perhaps in a change in the taxing structure, or the charity should be gradually turned over to private agencies. It must be personalized; and people on welfare must feel the suffering of the consequences of their own indigence and irresponsibility. Wisconsin and Michigan so far are doing the best job, but I am sure that even they do not have the complete answer. What we don’t need are guys like leftist Robert Reich pontificating to these states that they are all wrong.
We need above all to eliminate cash payments to unwed mothers. This is an absolute must! We need to pursue with severe sanctions dead-beat dads, especially those who make a macho game out of getting as many young women pregnant as possible. We are discovering that it is not so much a teenage problem as it is a problem of much more mature men taking advantage of young girls. These men must be penalized. Ensure that the responsibility for illegitimate children belongs to them and to the whole family. If families will not care for them, take children from their single mothers and place them for adoption or in private, well-supervised care. Put shame back into the equation. Call wrong, wrong! You will soon see an abrupt change in the statistics. Today teenagers see no shame in having a child out of wedlock. Because of the rewards, many do it on purpose. Our society is seeking to ameliorate the consequences of this selfishness, in other words, make it easier for this disorder to exist; for example, high schools are even providing day care centers for single mothers while they go to classes. Unless our mindset is changed and all of this is fixed, it will virtually destroy our society as we have known it in two more generations.
So far the new Republican majority has barely made a beginning in changing much of the basic philosophy or pattern of the welfare system. With no penalty for illegitimacy, or no alternative provision being made for the babies of unwed mothers, we will never solve this problem, and it will get worse and worse because it “inbreeds.” Republicans have simply shifted the responsibility to the States, which is a step in the right direction, but much more drastic measures must be employed. Will the State bureaucracies have the foresight, wisdom, and courage to do what must be done?
Rev. James M. Murk