Welfare: Keeping People Down

IN ENGLAND they call it. "supplementary benefit." America calls it welfare and Nixon has characterized it "a monstrous, consuming outrage." But what's in a name? As long as the voters believed in welfare and most of the needy stayed off the rolls, criticism of the system was minimal despite reports that it wasn't working. The concept of welfare, though, has always run against America's well-ingrained work ethic.

Time and Newsweek last month captured "the mood of the nation" as they presented their version of the state of the "nightmare" that is welfare. The underlying assumption seems to be that people consider welfare more of a nightmare for those not on welfare than for those on it.

Welfare rolls have more than doubled in the past five years. Stories of abuse and of administrative bungling-the man who made $18,000 off the system, the housing of a welfare family in the Waldorf-Astoria-have served to confirm people's suspicions about welfare. As city budgets are pinched by rising costs (of which welfare constitutes an expanding chunk) public officials are getting panicky. And liberals with impeccable credentials are asking What is this tangled mess and what do we do about it now?

Fraud and bureaucratic incompetence do not account for the jump in welfare costs. Why does 8.6 per cent of the population now receive support when in '65 it was 3.9 per cent?

The expansion of people's awareness about what they are entitled to receive under the present welfare system has brought more people onto the rolls. National Welfare Rights Organization (NWRO), born in 66, works to alert people to their eligibility. Inreased numbers of VISTA volunteers and Community Action workers have been informing people in poverty and urban areas of their rights.

In the general population increase, the ranks of the poor are also growing.

Welfare expenses on every level have risen along with the cost of living.

The economic recession has forced thousands of job layoffs. People are forced to turn to welfare after exhausting their unemployment insurance. Between June and September of last year, the number of unemployed fathers increased by 40 per cent.

State residency requirements have been eliminated. This allows people to collect support where they are living without a minimum duration of residency. In Massachusetts, 65 per cent of recipients have always lived here, and of the 11 per cent who migrated from the South, the majority have been here for years.

Medicaid expenses have soared. Since Medicaid has been extended to include thousands of non-welfare people, it has been eating up a higher percentage of the welfare budget-well over 40 per cent of the total welfare allotment in Massachusetts.

Studies of welfare districts around the country consistently find that the rate of fraud is minute. In Massachusetts, a "quality control" sampling is regularly done and has yet to reveal a deceit level higher than one per cent, a figure too small to warrant further spending on detection.

The welfare bureaucracy-vast though it is-is understaffed. Of a $755 million welfare budget, less than $41 million goes to administrative expenses, which probably explains any errors which occur. There is a shortage of manpower on all levels, such that many social workers have dozens of cases and spend most of their time doing paperwork. Everything is done "by hand" since the age of the computer has not yet hit welfare.

Of the five main categories of assistance-Old Age Assistance (OAA), Aid For Dependent Children (AFDC), Medicaid, and General Relief-AFDC has been growing the fastest in recent years. Although there are many families with fathers living at home on AFDC, it is still a splintering force in families. The largest segment of the welfare budget is taken up with Medicaid, AFDC and Old Age Assistance.

Over 6.5 per cent of Cambridge's 100,000 residents receive welfare in some form. The vast majority of recipients in Cambridge are white.

WHAT does it mean to be on welfare in Cambridge? Midnight raids are no longer engineered, but there are still horrors.

Money is just the beginning problem. A woman with one child receives $187.60 per month, an amount which is supposed to cover food, rent, and other expenses. Four times annually she receives a small additional "flat grant" for further expenses. "You leave people very few alternatives by giving them too little money," Ruth Malenka, Director of the Cambridge welfare center, said last week.

Unless a family lives in one of the public housing projects-most of which, despite their physical deterioration, have long waiting lists-rent alone gulps the major portion of the assistance check.

"The first thing I do when my check comes is pay the rent. Then I go food shopping, the same day, and pay my bills. There's not much left after that," a welfare mother said. The check comes every two weeks and she waits for it to arrive.

If you're on welfare, money is the basic need. You are also assigned a social worker to help you with your problems (you obviously have them if you're on welfare). However, the huge caseloads of social workers and their very general training maker them of limited help in dealing with most problems.

The fortunate trend in welfare is toward a separation of financial and social help. If a recipient needs specific services, hopefully he/she can be referred to where they are available.

Cambridge does not have a food stamp program. Instead, there is surplus food doled out in cans and bags at local distribution spots. This "food"-which the government has no use for and generously throws to the poor-consists of delicacies such as powdered milk, lard, flour, canned hamburger meat, spam, and powdered potatoes. Much of it is inedible at best.

To be on welfare in Cambridge is to live in a bad area, unless you are one of the fortunates who got in under a rent subsidy program (some of the elderly do; and under a leasing program the Cambridge Housing Authority is able to help subsidize a small number of families' rent). If you live in one of the several housing projects in Cambridge, your rent is bearable but your neighborhood is unattractive and filled with broken families. The schools are awful and children find themselves identified as poor.

There is evidence that welfare people are socially discriminated against on many levels. Trying to find housing is complicated since landlords dislike having welfare families. And it is a well-known fact that local grocery stores pad their prices the day welfare checks arrive in the mail (the first and 16th of each month).

These factors, although they are imposed from outside, are internalized by welfare recipients. "Welfare-that word makes me shudder," said one recipient. "People are laughing at us. Being on welfare is the most humiliating thing in the world."

How can a person on welfare wean him/herself from the dependency which the system nourishes? Waiting for the check, asking for money for special needs, always to be given things rather than doing for oneself, creates a unique dependency, separate from the simple need for sustenance. All factors conspire to keep a welfare person down: the day-to-day money scrape which prohibits planning, the bad neighborhoods, unsatisfactory schools, lack of autonomy.

This latter bane is characterized by the lack of personal resources such as money in the bank and the power to obtain what one needs (better schooling for the children, a voice in government, good medical care, whatever). In other words, having to ask for the basics to live is degrading; it can become a consuming humiliation.

A program in Massachusetts which has helped people on AFDC gain options is a job-training program, started in '68, called WIN. It is 75 per cent federally financed and currently enrolls 2000 unemployed fathers. Training programs such as WIN are positive indicators that the government is beginning to attack some of the roots of poverty, not just the symptoms.

If humiliation and dependency can become a circular pattern, programs such as WIN help people to break out of the circle by choosing and working for their own alternatives. Ronald Reagan's suggestion to force recipients to take jobs "in those areas of public need which serve the good of society and the best interests of the community" underlines his inability to view people on welfare as fully human.

Edward C. Banfield, Shattuck Professor of Urban Government, has proposed such measures as placing lower class "problem families" in closely supervised housing projects and institutionalizing the "highly incompetent poor."

DESPITE the apparent backwash in American public opinion about welfare, the trend within the welfare system is not toward greater restrictiveness. In the early days of welfare, late-night "raids" were commonplace. Although NWRO lost a Supreme Court battle against home inspections last January, the Cambridge welfare department (partly because of understaffing) does not investigate clients' claims for fraud, except on a spot-check basis.

Nixon's Family Assistance Plan (FAP). Pat Moynihan's brainchild, is at least a step away from the old dependency relationship of client-to-department. FAP would provide a minimum income ($1600 rock-bottom) for everyone. It does not allow nearly enough money. But the concept of a minimum life sustenance for everyone would help strip away the stigma of welfare.

Packaged as FAP is with the concept of supplementary income for the "working poor" (that is, the "respectable" poor) who are not earning enough, it appeals to many people. In the '30's and '40's public housing legislation was sold on the basis of being beneficial to the working lower classes.

FAP aims at getting the "injured," non-working members of the society into the mainstream and earning. Studies show consistently that people neither enjoy being on the welfare rolls nor stay there indefinitely. And those who do not work, such as the aged and disabled (over half the caseload in Cambridge), and mothers with small children, generally cannot work.

To be poor today, amidst conspicuous American affluence, is to have many unmet wants. Welfare as an institution is nobody's panacea, especially those who live on it. But to talk of "the shame of the nation" ( News-week, Feb. 8) is merely to say, as liberals have always done, "well what can we do for them now?"