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Reason Writers Around Town: Shikha Dalmia on Immigration

Mon, 18 Aug 2008 12:00:00 EDT

Over at Bloggingheads.tv, Reason Foundation Senior Analyst Shikha Dalmia discusses immigration, welfare, deportation, and much more with Mark Krikorian of the Center for Immigration Studies. Click on the image below to watch.

You Could Look It Up, But I'd Rather You Didn't

jsullum@reason.com (Jacob Sullum) — Fri, 30 May 2008 01:54:00 EDT

In a recent Wall Street Journal op-ed piece that criticizes "compassionate conservatism," Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) says:

Common sense and the Scriptures show that true giving and compassion require sacrifice by the giver. This is why Jesus told the rich young ruler to sell his possessions, not his neighbor's possessions. Spending other people's money is not compassionate.

Defending compassionate conservatism against Coburn's attack, Washington Post columnist (and former George W. Bush speechwriter) Michael Gerson says Jesus was no libertarian. He may be right about that, but he blatantly misrepresents two biblical passages in an attempt to demonstrate that God is on his side:

The Jewish tradition in which Jesus lived and taught demanded that just rulers make a minimal provision for the poor, including no-interest loans and the distribution of agricultural commodities. (Look it up: Exodus 22:25-27 and Deuteronomy 24:19-21.)

Here is the first passage to which Gerson refers:

If you lend money to any of My people, even to the poor with you, you shall not be to him as a creditor; neither shall you lay upon him interest.

Here is the second:

When you reap your harvest in your field, and have forgotten a sheaf in the field, you shall not go back to fetch it; it shall be for the stranger, the fatherless, and the widow, that the Lord your God may bless you in the work of your hands. When you beat your olive tree, you shall not go over the boughs again; it shall be for the stranger, the fatherless, and the widow. When you gather the grapes of your vineyard, you shall not glean it after you; it shall be for the stranger, the fatherless, and the widow.

These passages support Coburn's argument, not Gerson's. They are divine commands incumbent upon individual lenders and farmers. They are not, pace Gerson, instructions for "just rulers" to create government-run welfare programs.

[Thanks to Adamness for the tip.]

R.J.'s Law

dweigel@reason.com (David Weigel) — Tue, 13 May 2008 12:00:00 EDT

Sixteen years ago, R.J. Feild was born to a heroin-addicted welfare mother in Southern California. Brought into the world underweight and premature, he has trouble walking, and his bad eyesight makes it hard for him to read. He was, however, able to enter an essay contest sponsored by Assemblyman John Benoit (R-Palm Desert) called “There Oughta Be a Law,” in which the winner’s proposed bill would be brought to the floor of the California legislature. Feild’s essay suggested giving random drug tests to welfare recipients and stripping benefits from people who tested positive.

He won the contest. “You can’t make up this story,” says Assemblyman Benoit. “The beauty of this bill is that it comes from a real-life, lovable young man who’ll the suffer rest of his life for mistakes of his mother. When you see him make this argument, you can’t help be sympathetic to it.”

“R.J.’s Law,” as submitted by Benoit, is actually a little less strict than what the 16-year old proposed. It offers people who fail the drug test a choice between losing their benefits and entering rehab, although if they test positive in rehab they’ll be out of luck. “I live in a political world,” Benoit explains. “We should give these people a chance to walk down the right path. Of course, if they walk off that path, then we can’t help them.”

Benoit’s detractors point out that welfare program managers are already empowered to test recipients if they suspect they’re using drugs. Benoit doesn’t think that’s enough. “The average lady behind a counter is not trained to recognize the symptoms of drug addiction,” he says. “You need occasional random sampling. It works for professional baseball players, it works for the clerks at Wal-Mart, and it will work here.”

R.J.’s Law might not pass the Democrat-dominated legislature, but Benoit is optimistic. He is pondering another “There Oughta be a Law” contest this fall, when kids return to school.

Confidence Game

matt.welch@reason.com (Matt Welch) — Mon, 17 Mar 2008 08:10:00 EDT

Bear Stearns becomes the latest financial institution deemed by the government as too big to fail. It clearly won't be the last. From the Washington Post:

J.P. Morgan was unwilling to assume the risk of many of Bear Stearns's mortgage and other complicated assets, so the Federal Reserve agreed to take on the risk of about $30 billion worth of those investments. [...]
Bear Stearns, in particular, was confronting a run on the bank as investors were too fearful of the future to make even overnight loans to the nation's fifth-largest investment firm. If it had been allowed to fail, senior officials believed, it would have created a cascading crisis of confidence that could well have brought down several other leading firms and dragged world markets with them.
Policymakers weighed that risk against the risk that their actions would create "moral hazard," or greater willingness of companies to take inappropriate chances.

Hard to believe that "moral hazard" is a serious concern, given that the Fed has now -- for the first time in history -- wrapped its security blanket around investment banks:

Since the central bank was created in 1913, it has served as a lender of last resort for ordinary banks, allowing them to post high-quality loans at a "discount window" in exchange for cash.
Last night, it announced a new provision that will in effect do the same for major investment firms. Starting today, and lasting for at least six months, this new operation will allow "primary dealers," which are 20 major Wall Street firms, access to cash in exchange for assets in which the market is not currently functioning.

Sure is a bad time to have your savings in dollars!

In November 2006, Brian Doherty asked a bunch of economist types: Can we bank on the Federal Reserve?

Polygamous Marriage in England: Not Quite Legal, But Subsidized

bdoherty@reason.com (Brian Doherty) — Mon, 04 Feb 2008 11:20:00 EST

A great move for freedom of marital arrangements? One more small-time welfare state scam? Or another crushing defeat for Europe in While Europe Slept style? Britain offers extra welfare benefits for polygamous marriages. From the UK Telegraph:

Even though bigamy is a crime in Britain, the decision by ministers means that polygamous marriages can now be recognised formally by the state, so long as the weddings took place in countries where the arrangement is legal.
The outcome will chiefly benefit Muslim men with more than one wife, as is permitted under Islamic law. Ministers estimate that up to a thousand polygamous partnerships exist in Britain, although they admit there is no exact record.
The decision has been condemned by the Tories, who accused the Government of offering preferential treatment to a particular group, and of setting a precedent that would lead to demands for further changes in British law.
New guidelines on income support from the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) state: "Where there is a valid polygamous marriage the claimant and one spouse will be paid the couple rate ... The amount payable for each additional spouse is presently £33.65."
Income support for all of the wives may be paid directly into the husband's bank account, if the family so choose. Under the deal agreed by ministers, a husband with multiple wives may also be eligible for additional housing benefit and council tax benefit to reflect the larger property needed for his family.

Perfect 1980s Vintage Xmas Gift

kmw@reason.com (Katherine Mangu-Ward) — Thu, 06 Dec 2007 17:14:00 EST

Are you stuck in the "working man's rut"? Would you rather be on the "able-bodied welfare recipient's promenade"? Play the Public Assistance board game and find out, while reliving the glory that was 1980s welfare politics.

The game allows to you to have out-of-wedlock children, or take in game money featuring Santa, Karl Marx, L.B.J, or a "Generic Liberal Senator."

Draw a Welfare Benefit like the "Get Out of Having to Get a Job" card, or a Working Person's Burden like the "your son is beat up by ethnic gang while being bussed across town to school" card.

Enjoy the game that prompted the NAACP to declare: "We are doing everything we can to prevent it from going on the market," and the director of the Public Assistance Coalition to whimper: "We ask you to consider revising or discontinuing production of your game."

Buy the vintage 1980 edition, shown above.

Via Cheryl Miller

Do Welfare Applicants Forfeit the Fourth Amendment?

rbalko@reason.com (Radley Balko) — Tue, 27 Nov 2007 15:49:00 EST

That seems to be the conclusion to draw from the U.S. Supreme Court's refusal to hear a case from San Diego, where the D.A.'s office has been sending agents to conduct suspicionless, warrantless searches on the private homes of welfare applicants.

Yes, applicants were free to refuse the searches, though I suspect that refusing a search would itself be (unofficially) enough to trigger further investigation. Refusing a search also means forfeiting welfare benefits.

This is part of a series of incidents across the country over the last few years using administrative or regulatory procedures to conduct warrantless searches for criminal activity (yes, I'm writing an article on it).

I suspect the law-and-order response to the policy in San Diego would be something along the lines of "if they can't prove they're clean, they don't deserve my tax dollars." Of course, if everyone who received any sort of government assistance had to consent to a search of their home, the Fourth Amendment would be pretty much null(er). For example, I'd guess there'd be quite a bit more outrage if these fishing expeditions/searches were being done on the homes of, say, middle class kids applying for government-subsidized student loans instead of low-income people applying for welfare.

Let SCHIPs Chart Their Own Course

jsullum@reason.com (Jacob Sullum) — Wed, 17 Oct 2007 06:40:00 EDT

As "a conservative who wants to help restore the limited federal government envisioned in the Constitution," Rep. Roscoe Bartlett said, he could not in good conscience vote to override President Bush's veto of a bill boosting federal spending on children's health insurance. But the Maryland Republican also said he was "proud" to have supported the creation of the State Children's Health Insurance Program (SCHIP) and promised he would "work to ensure a safety net of health insurance for the children of the working poor."

The Framers would have insisted on nothing less, as reflected in the Constitution's Health Care Clause. Oh, wait. The Constitution has no Health Care Clause. Nor does it include any other provision that authorizes Congress to spend taxpayers' money on health insurance for the children of the working poor, the grandparents of the middle class, the nephews of the super-rich, or the kin of any other socioeconomic group.

Still, Bartlett and Bush deserve some credit for resisting the expansion of a highly popular program that never should have been created to begin with, especially since they knew they'd be accused of being stingy child haters. They would deserve more credit if they applied their avowed principles a little more consistently, in which case the charges of cruel penny-pinching would be less credible.

When Bush vetoed the SCHIP bill, which would have spent an additional $35 billion over five years, he expressed concern about "federalizing" health care. "I believe in private medicine," he said, "not the federal government running the health care system." He also worried that opening SCHIP to families earning up to three times the poverty level (about $62,000 for a family of four) would move it away from its original goal of serving people too poor to afford insurance but not quite poor enough to qualify for Medicaid.

It's hard to reconcile Bush's opposition to a bigger federal role in health care and his emphasis on strict means testing with the Medicare prescription drug benefit he championed, which is expected to cost $675 billion during the next decade while compelling middle-class taxpayers to buy Lipitor for retired billionaires. More generally, Bush's "compassionate conservatism," if it means anything, means a willingness to spend other people's money on sympathetic causes.

No wonder Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) found Bush's SCHIP veto puzzling. "If we're truly compassionate, it seems to me, we'd want to endorse this program," Hatch said. "I don't think the president is somebody who doesn't want these kids to be covered."

If you're "truly compassionate," according to this prominent conservative Republican, you support more money for SCHIP. Otherwise, you want kids to die of untreated diseases.

The basic question of whether the government should force taxpayers to pay for children's health insurance has not come up much in the debate provoked by Bush's SCHIP veto. But there clearly is wide disagreement about the program's details, including eligibility criteria, coverage of adults, and minimum benefits.

The intractability of these disputes is illustrated by divergent responses to the Congressional Budget Office's estimate that between a quarter and a half of children covered by SCHIP would otherwise have private insurance. For supporters of "single payer" health care, this substitution of government for private coverage, which would become more common if eligibility criteria were loosened, is a feature, not a bug.

Instead of trying to resolve such issues at the national level, why not let each state go its own way, with results that vary depending on local values, the local cost of living, and the local health care situation? No federal money would mean that one state's legislators could no longer force another state's taxpayers to subsidize their generous impulses, but it would also mean no federal restrictions.

Permitting a wide range of policy experiments in areas where the federal government has no license to act is not just the law. It's a good idea.

The Rise and Fall of the Swedish Welfare State: The Metal Years

mmoynihan@reason.com (Michael C. Moynihan) — Tue, 19 Jun 2007 16:36:00 EDT

I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but for those reason readers who compulsively listen to Stryper and/or Keel, you might consider consulting a doctor. And if you happen to live in Sweden, you might want to locate the closest welfare office. The Local explains:

A Swedish heavy metal fan has had his musical preferences officially classified as a disability. The results of a psychological analysis enable the metal lover to supplement his income with state benefits.

Roger Tullgren, 42, from Hässleholm in southern Sweden has just started working part time as a dishwasher at a local restaurant. Because heavy metal dominates so many aspects of his life, the Employment Service has agreed to pay part of Tullgren's salary. His new boss meanwhile has given him a special dispensation to play loud music at work.
"I have been trying for ten years to get this classified as a handicap," Tullgren told The Local.
"I spoke to three psychologists and they finally agreed that I needed this to avoid being discriminated against."

In a country where heavy metal never really went away, this is indeed a dangerous precedent.

Yngwie Malmsteen could not be reached for comment at press time.

Welfare Redux

gillespie@reason.com (Nick Gillespie) — Mon, 26 Feb 2007 08:35:00 EST

Via the Cincy Enquirer comes this report on the state of welfare:

The number of families receiving cash benefits from welfare has plummeted since the government imposed time limits on the payments a decade ago. But other programs for the poor, including Medicaid, food stamps and disability benefits, are bursting with new enrollees.
The result, according to an Associated Press analysis: Nearly one in six people rely on some form of public assistance, a larger share than at any time since the government started measuring two decades ago....
[Bush administration official Wade] Horn noted that employment among poor single mothers is up and child poverty rates are down since the welfare changes in 1996, though the numbers have worsened since the start of the decade....
"The true goal of welfare to work programs should be self-sufficiency."

More here.

Back in 2000, Reason's Mike Lynch reported on how welfare reform was actually working (or not) in the mean streets of Camden, New Jersey. Read that here.

Liberty Comes to Liberty City

jwalker@reason.com (Jesse Walker) — Tue, 09 Jan 2007 10:58:00 EST

Robert Neuwirth describes a Miami law that

takes its name from Pottinger v. City of Miami, a 1988 federal court case (decided in 1992), in which the city's policy of arresting homeless people for engaging in "life-sustaining conduct" on the street (thus making it a crime simply to be without a home on public land) was ruled illegal. "The City’s practice of arresting homeless individuals for the involuntary, harmless acts they are forced to perform in public is unconstitutional," senior United States District Judge Clyde Atkins wrote in the decision, adding that "the City’s practice of seizing and destroying the property of homeless individuals" was also against the law. The principles of Judge Atkins' decision were memorialized in a 1998 memorandum called The Pottinger Settlement.

Why write about the law now, years later? Because in Liberty City, a desperately poor ghetto neighborhood, a group called Take Back the Land is citing the settlement as it argues that it has the right to "squat on public land, to build housing for our own community" with "no government permission or money."

Here's an account of their efforts in a Miami Herald op-ed:

Umoja Village Shantytown...is a grass-roots Take Back the Land project started two months ago on a vacant city lot in response to Liberty City's gentrification, the affordable-housing crisis and the mismanagement of millions of dollars earmarked to ease this crisis. Umoja, 32 makeshift homes -- wooden pallets covered with painted cardboard -- is filled to capacity with 40 residents, including a family with an eight-week-old baby. There's even a waiting list. There's more than enough good cheer among the formerly homeless who run their small village. They have a work chart and a small garden. They make decisions collectively, cook communally and abide by the four rules posted outside the makeshift kitchen: respect for one another, no drugs or alcohol, no violence and no sexual harassment....

The city is considering offering Umoja's 40 residents beds in a homeless shelter. Most Umoja residents don't regard this as a viable option, in part because it is a temporary solution and in part because of the restrictions the shelters impose. Umoja resident Jonathan Baker had to leave a shelter because his job conflicted with the shelter's curfew. He's gainfully employed with a paycheck and taxes withheld. Should he be forced back into a shelter and subsequent unemployment?

Not having done any reporting on this myself, I can't say for sure whether this is really a short-term effort aimed at embarrassing the government into building more low-income housing or if the organizers genuinely hope to transform their camp into a more permanent neighborhood, a la the Third World squatter cities that Neuwirth, Hernando De Soto, and others have described. But their rhetoric certainly suggests the second approach. Check out the YouTube videos here, especially the third one, to see some people who are fed up with waiting for the government to act and ready to do things themselves. "One of the big things that we thought would not work," one activist explains, "was if we were like any other social service agency where we did everything and then delivered it to the residents. An integral part of this is that the residents had to participate in it and they had to run their own city." That's a marked contrast with life in the shelters. Whether it will work out as planned is still up in the air -- there are people in the government who still hope to shut down the site.

The Sun-Sentinel covers the village here.

The Daily Business Review tackles the story here.

Reason's Mike Lynch visited a pirate radio station in Liberty City here.

The Giving Gap

kmw@reason.com (Katherine Mangu-Ward) — Tue, 19 Dec 2006 10:52:00 EST

'Tis the season for giving—and it turns out that conservatives and like-minded welfare skeptics more than hold their own when it comes to charity. So says Arthur C. Brooks in his new book Who Really Cares?: The Surprising Truth About Compassionate Conservatism. Brooks, a public policy professor at Syracuse University, sums up his own results thusly: Giving is dictated by "strong families, church attendance, earned income (as opposed to state-subsidized income), and the belief that individuals, not government, offer the best solution to social ills--all of these factors determine how likely one is to give."

Brooks shows that those who say they strongly oppose redistribution by government to remedy income inequality give over 10 times more to charity than those who strongly support government intervention, with a difference of $1,627 annually versus $140 to all causes. The average donation to educational causes among redistributionists was eight dollars per year, compared with $140 from their ideological opposites, and $96 annually to health care causes from free marketeers versus $11 from egalitarians.

A 2002 poll found that those who thought government "was spending too much money on welfare" were significantly more likely than those who wanted increased spending on welfare to give directions to someone on the street, return extra change to a cashier, or give food and/or money to a homeless person.

Brooks finds that households with a conservative at the helm gave an average of 30 percent more money to charity in 2000 than liberal households (a difference of $1,600 to $1,227). The difference isn't explained by income differential—in fact, liberal households make about 6 percent more per year. Poor, rich, and middle class conservatives all gave more than their liberal counterparts. And while religion is a major factor, the figures don't just show tithing to churches. Religious donors give significantly more to non-religious causes than do their secular counterparts.

But far more striking than conservatives outbidding their liberal pals for charity points is what Brooks finds about class distinctions. Brooks finds that in families with incomes of less than $14,000 annually, working poor families gives more than three times as much as families on welfare. They also are twice as likely to give, and twice as likely to volunteer. "It is not poverty per se that makes people uncharitable—but rather the government's policy for eradicating it," says Brooks.

There is an appropriate intuition that American people are really generous, and they are. But you'd think that people give away a higher percentage of their income because they can afford to, and that's not true. It turns out that the people who give the biggest percentage of their income away are the working poor in American today. Now the "working" part is key, because the non-working poor who have the same incomes give the least. But the working poor who have low incomes but employment, particularly stable employment give like crazy and we should all take a giving lesson from them. They're also very income mobile and so there's this virtuous cycle of giving and success. These people are also hugely interested in issues of freedom and pretty hostile to government income redistribution. We are told that the poor are a homogenous group in America and they neither homogenous behaviorally, nor attitudinally.

Asked about the relationship of the belief in freedom to the levels of giving, Brooks responds quickly: "Freedom and opportunity are the sister virtues to charity," he says. "People who do not value freedom and opportunity simply don't value individual solutions to social problems very much. It creates a culture of not giving."

Of course, conservatives have a stake in proving that private charity works, and liberals have stake in proving that government solutions work. So there may be two sides to this coin. Sure, liberals don't give to charity, but when conservatives are put in charge of social services, they tend to do a pretty awful job. No one needs to be acting in bad faith for this to be true. It's simply human nature not to focus your energies where you think they will not be best rewarded.

The people who give the least are the young, especially young liberals. Brooks writes that "young liberals—perhaps the most vocally dissatisfied political constituency in America today—are one of the least generous demographic groups out there. In 2004, self-described liberals younger than thirty belonged to one-third fewer organizations in their communities than young conservatives. In 2002, they were 12 percent less likely to give money to charities, and one-third less likely to give blood." Liberals, he says, give less than conservatives because of religion, attitudes about government, structure of families, and earned income. The families point is driven home by other results from Brooks. He writes that young liberals are less likely do nice things for their nearest and dearest, too. Compared with young conservatives, "a lower percentage said they would prefer to suffer than let a loved one suffer, that they are not happy unless the loved one is happy, or that they would sacrifice their own wishes for those they love."

Not to worry, though. The problem is one of age, not generation: "When people age," says Brooks, "they get better. I don't know exactly why that is, but one of the ways that they do so is they figure out what makes them feel good and what is good for other people and most pursue more of those activities. Giving is healthy and pro-social and so you see more of it as people get wiser."

There's something fundamental about the urge to give. Brooks explains the "helper's high" occurs when our brains reward us with pleasure-producing opiods when we help someone out—this factor, he says, promotes a virtuous cycle: "Tangible evidence suggests that charitable giving makes people prosperous, healthy, and happy. And that on its own is a huge argument to protect institutions of giving in this country, as individuals, in communities, and as a nation. We simply do best, as a nation, when people are free and they freely give."

"There's something incredibly satisfying, inherently, about voluntary giving," says Brooks. "And nobody has ever reported any brain science suggesting that you get an endorphin rush when you pay your tax bill."

Katherine Mangu-Ward is an associate editor for reason.

The Giving Patterns of Liberals and Conservatives (Veiled Subscription Pitch)

gillespie@reason.com (Nick Gillespie) — Wed, 29 Nov 2006 07:13:00 EST

From the Chronicle of Philanthropy via Arts & Letters Daily:

In Who Really Cares: The Surprising Truth About Compassionate Conservatism (Basic Books), Arthur C. Brooks finds that religious conservatives are far more charitable than secular liberals, and that those who support the idea that government should redistribute income are among the least likely to dig into their own wallets to help others....
His initial research for Who Really Cares revealed that religion played a far more significant role in giving than he had previously believed. In 2000, religious people gave about three and a half times as much as secular people — $2,210 versus $642. And even when religious giving is excluded from the numbers, Mr. Brooks found, religious people still give $88 more per year to nonreligious charities....

Mr. Brooks calls it a "bitter irony" that those favoring income redistribution are not doing much redistributing from their own bank accounts — and he blames liberal leaders like Mr. Nader for letting liberals off the hook. In essence, for many Americans, political opinions are a substitute for personal checks," Mr. Brooks writes.

More here.

Critics say that Brooks, who teaches at Syracuse University, is a stealth conservative with crap data, though he says he's politically independent and that his research improves on past findings. He is one of the talking heads on John Stossel's 20/20 special, Cheap in America, which airs tonight (details here).

Well, as long as we're talking about giving, let me take a moment to remind you to give the gift of Reason this holiday season.

Really, what better way is there to annoy and educate your right-wing and left-wing loved ones?

Or reward friends who believe in "Free Minds and Free Markets" but are too broke, cheap, and/or lazy to sign up for the award-winning, lushly produced print edition of Reason?

Or help those who suffering from arteriosclerosis? As Christopher Hitchens writes, "I find that Reason keeps my...arteries from hardening, or from flooding with adrenaline out of sheer irritation, because in the face of arbitrary power and flock-like comformism it continues to ask, in a polite but firm tone of voice, not only 'why?' but 'why not?'"

Gift subs start at $20 for the first one and then drop to a mere $17 per for any additional ones. And if you order by December 2, we'll make sure that your lucky friend (and don't forget yourself) gets the first issue by Christmas.

Americans Are Hungry? Not So Much...

gillespie@reason.com (Nick Gillespie) — Thu, 16 Nov 2006 08:41:00 EST

The other shoe--really, I couldn't think of a clever alternative related to food--in the Great American Real Life Stretchpants Experiment, a.k.a. the obesity "epidemic", a.k.a. manifest destiny--has dropped: The number of Americans "struggling with hunger," reports the AP, declined in 2005, the first time in six years the figure went down.

Last year, 35 million people experienced food insecurity, meaning they didn't have enough money or resources to get food. The number was 38 million in 2004.
The department [of Agriculture] had waited until after Election Day to issue the annual report, prompting accusations from Democrats that the Bush administration was playing politics with hunger.
Despite the positive news, the report is still drawing criticism, because analysts decided not to use the word "hunger" to describe how hungry people are.

More here.

The San Francisco Chronicle Goes Pulitzer-Fishing

kmw@reason.com (Katherine Mangu-Ward) — Wed, 01 Nov 2006 17:07:00 EST

"First in a series" can be the scariest words in the English language, as a seasoned (and embittered) journalist once told me. And he was right. Especially when the email address that corresponds with the series is "shameofthecity@sfchronicle.com."

But lo and behold, the San Francisco Chronicle's three-part series on homelessness is actually quite informative and balanced. And it raises an interesting question for libertarians: When legit use of existing government programs makes homelessness a hugely expensive problem for local goverments, is an aggressive campaign to get them onto various welfare rolls and into low cost, subsidized housing a good idea if it's cheaper overall? And what if the homeless people costing the state tons of money say they don't want help? How hard should the government try to convince them that they do, especially if sucessfully doing so will reduce the overall financial burden on taxpayers?

The first story asks the utterly fair question: How much does homelessness cost? It tells the story--and does the accounting--on the "redemption" of one tough case, Georgia Mitchell:

It is expensive redemption -- Mitchell's home and medical care cost taxpayers about $21,000 a year. But her case shows how that can be far cheaper than allowing homeless people to deteriorate on the street, becoming public nuisances and financial burdens.
In her last two years on the street, the public spent nearly $100,000 annually on Georgia Mitchell's emergency care and support.

The article also deals with the question of what to do with people who just don't want help:

The rejection of help is a key reason there are so many homeless people on the nation's streets. But state and federal laws allow addicted or mentally ill homeless people to refuse the very services that could assist them. Ever since the 1960s patients' rights movement, they have had the same prerogative as housed citizens to refuse any service unless they pose a danger to themselves or others -- which is hard to prove.
The only way [Officer] Peachy could force Mitchell into drug rehabilitation was to arrest her and hope she was sentenced to rehab -- which courts usually do. But she could leave rehab any time after starting it.

The mayor's program is tough, and interesting:

Newsom has expanded the leasing of residential hotel rooms in large part with $14 million a year in savings from his controversial Care Not Cash program. Begun in May 2004, Care Not Cash slashed welfare checks to the homeless to $59 a month, from $410 a month....

Another administration initiative has been Homeward Bound, which since February 2005 has sent 1,445 people back to where they came from at a cost of $204,889 in bus tickets and money for food. In a speech on Thursday, Newsom said the number of those who climbed aboard the buses had grown to 1,656.

The third story concedes that, while there's some antecdotal evidence that things are looking up, the city really has no idea where the $108 million spent on homeless projects is going because there is little accountability or central data gathering.

Basically, you've got the highlights now--consider this a sort of "we read Pulitzer candidates so you don't have to" service. But if you insist on reading for yourself, the three parts are here, here, and here.

The Ownership Society and Its Discontents

info@reason.com (Ryan H. Sager) — Wed, 01 Nov 2006 12:15:00 EST

CHOICE IS APPEALING. That’s why it’s at the heart of the loose amalgam of programs, theories, and buzzwords that President George W. Bush calls the Ownership Society. It’s Bush and his political advisor Karl Rove’s way of trying to bring everyone inside the Republican tent. People who are happy with the government just the size it is shouldn’t be spooked, they say: The Republicans aren’t trying to take anything away, they just want to give people more choices. Libertarian types shouldn’t be spooked either, and maybe they should even be excited: Republicans are finally dismantling the New Deal and replacing it with the free market, or at least a Rube Goldberg approximation thereof. And if policies to expand home and small business ownership can be tied in (because, hey, the word ownership is in there), all the better; that could appeal to African Americans and Hispanics. A Republican Party pushing an Ownership Society can be all things to all people.

This leaves those of us who care about limited government with a dilemma. Do we take the idea of an Ownership Society seriously, despite the fact that it comes from a group of people who have proven beyond a shadow of a doubt that they are comfortable not just increasing but ballooning the size of the federal government? Or do we cast it aside, despite the fact that as a political formulation the Ownership Society offers perhaps the most promising path in a generation to expanding individual freedom?

At the risk of giving the Bush administration the benefit of the doubt, libertarians, small-government conservatives, and all other natural skeptics of the president and his policy shop should take a step back, take a deep breath, and take the Ownership Society seriously. The big-government conservatives are right about one thing: Republicans are never going to roll back the New Deal. But they can shape what takes its place as America moves past the framework of its old industrial-era economy, to which the New Deal is inextricably tied.

At the same time, the Ownership Society can’t be judged in a vacuum. The Republicans have held the presidency, the House, and (except for two years) the Senate since 2001. The president has had more than five years to advance a bold new approach to conservatism under some of the most favorable political conditions imaginable, and at first glance it doesn’t look like he has much to show for it. What’s more, the small steps he has taken toward realizing that vision have come at great expense in sheer dollars and cents, as well as in greatly expanding the role of the federal government.

If the Ownership Society is supposed to be the best political means to achieve small-government ends—if it’s supposed to be the realistic alternative to the paint-fume-huffing delusions of committed libertarians—then it only makes sense to judge its performance in the real world, without pulling punches or granting points for effort.

The Evolution of Ownership

Though Bush had used the phrase on occasion before, it wasn’t until the 2004 Republican National Convention that he brought under the umbrella of the Ownership Society several policies and goals that turned out (more by happenstance than by design) to tie together thematically. “Another priority for a new term is to build an Ownership Society, because ownership brings security, and dignity, and independence,” he told the crowd at New York City’s Madison Square Garden. “In an Ownership Society, more people will own their health care plans, and have the confidence of owning a piece of their retirement.” Bush extolled the fact that homeownership was at an all-time high in America, and he promised that more Americans would own their own homes. He said that his administration was transforming schools by raising standards, and he promised that it would keep insisting on accountability and empowering parents and teachers. “In all these proposals,” he said, “we seek to provide not just a government program, but a path—a path to greater opportunity, more freedom, and more control over your own life.”

A fine vision, that. But Bush’s words didn’t flesh out exactly what an Ownership Society is at the end of the day, or how far along his administration might be in creating one after a full term in office. In fact, Bush didn’t make a single speech during the 2004 campaign or in the year after his reelection giving the idea significant depth or detail.

Still, upon examination, it’s possible to map out a constellation of programs and proposals that, taken together, form something of a coherent picture. Bush’s stalled proposal for private Social Security accounts? Definitely part of the Ownership Society. The tiny health savings accounts tacked onto the humungous Medicare prescription-drug bill? Also part of the Ownership Society. Setting targets for increased minority homeownership? Sure, why not. Proposed job-training accounts? What the hell. A prospective overhaul of the federal tax code? Somewhat inexplicably, Bush aides also consider this idea part of the package. The No Child Left Behind law? Passed in 2001, it predates the newfangled slogan, but administration officials say it gives parents more control over their kids’ education, an idea central to the Ownership Society concept.

What’s remarkable, then, is just how short a distance Bush has traveled with this idea in five-plus years. Even the president’s greatest defenders are left praising achievements his administration hasn’t…well, achieved. “Imagine if the president had won the fight for private accounts in Social Security,” the conservative pundit Fred Barnes wrote in his 2006 book Rebel in Chief. “And imagine if he had expanded consumer-driven health care.…Achieving it would have been an epic feat. And Bush, having succeeded in creating an ownership society, would be the most important and consequential domestic policy president since FDR.”

Too bad it didn’t work out that way.

Barnes still says he thinks the Ownership Society has a shot at going down in history next to the New Deal and the Great Society (some company). Bush’s conservatism, Barnes and others argue, breaks daring new ground because it is not aimed at reducing the supply of government, as in the Gingrich years. Instead, it aims to reduce the demand for government, by making people more self-sufficient and less dependent on handouts. Even if many of Bush’s bolder proposals haven’t yet been enacted into law, they argue, his pilot programs and half-measures will whet Americans’ appetites for choice, and his reorientation of the political debate will set the course for future Republican presidents and congresses.

Libertarian critics counter that the Ownership Society is merely big government by another name, providing only the faintest illusion of choice. The government would still be taking people’s money and forcing them to spend it on schooling or health care, or to save it for retirement; adding insult to injury, it would then allow (force?) citizens to choose from a menu of pre-approved, government-sanctioned options as to how precisely they would like to receive the required services. Meanwhile, government’s growth would continue unabated.

Each of these views of the Ownership Society has an element of truth. But the only way to judge Bush’s success is by looking at the results so far.

Owning Education

In January 2003, a little over a year after President Bush signed the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) with a beaming Sen. Ted Kennedy (D.-Mass.) by his side, Harlem mother Eunice Staton filed suit against the New York City public school system. Staton and a group of parents from New York City and Albany were looking to sue for their right, under the new federal law, to transfer their children from the failing public schools they were in to more successful ones. The school district had neglected to notify them that their children’s schools were failing and that they had the right to transfer, but once they found out, they wanted to take control of their kids’ destinies. Staton, who had three boys in two of the city’s 300 failing public schools, told the press she felt “like a prisoner.”

The suit was thrown out, making Staton and her fellow plaintiffs just a few of the millions of parents let down by the promise of a bold, new approach to federal education reform. Barnes calls NCLB “a perfect example” of the president’s redefinition of conservatism “to fit the times and to come to grips with political reality.” If that’s true, Bush’s conservatism is in worse shape than almost anybody could have imagined.

In the 2000 campaign, Bush and his team did away with the old conservative answer to education reform: closing down the federal Department of Education. It’s still not such a bad idea (the money would be better spent at the state level), but it could hardly make for worse politics. As Republican pollster David Winston put it, “Getting rid of the Department of Education doesn’t explain anything to me about how my child’s going to be better educated.” What Bush came up with instead, however, wasn’t a way to devolve power to the states in a more politically acceptable way, nor a way to give parents more control. Rather, the Bush administration came in and said, We can tame the federal behemoth better than the last guys. We can be the ones to finally make it accountable.

The administration’s initial plan was ambitious. Bush’s “blueprint,” released not long after he took office, included two fairly radical proposals. First, kids in failing schools could take their share of federal funds to a more successful school, public or private. (In other words, they could use those funds as a voucher.) Second, states that agreed to strict accountability timetables could get all their federal money as essentially a block grant, instead of being bound by strict federal allocation formulas that tend to steer funds to special interests.

How quickly did Bush abandon real reform in favor of getting a bill, any bill, through Congress? On March 22, 2001, Rep. John Boehner (R-Ohio) introduced the No Child Left Behind Act, which essentially followed the president’s blueprint: vouchers of up to about $1,500 and flexibility for the states. By May 2, the House Education and the Workforce Committee had stripped the voucher provisions from the bill (on a 27-20 committee vote where five Republicans sided with all of the panel’s Democrats) and significantly watered down the flexibility provisions. It was a nice month while it lasted.

Conservatives were crestfallen, but the White House couldn’t care less. National Review recounted a White House education aide explaining that supporters of school choice should have done more to lobby lawmakers instead of expecting the White House to do it. The aide said the issue was “never central to the president.”

What was central to the president was changing the politics of the education issue from favoring the Democrats overwhelmingly to favoring the Republicans at least narrowly. Internal GOP polling in May 1999 showed the Republicans trailing Democrats by a full 21 percentage points on education. When Bush entered the race, however, he changed how Republicans talked about the subject. He talked about closing the “achievement gap.” He talked about ending “the soft bigotry of low expectations.” And, of course, he talked about leaving no child behind. By August 2000, the Republicans had closed their education gap to 10 points. By March 2001, when NCLB was introduced in Congress, Republicans were leading the Democrats by 5 points on the issue.

But having come so far during the 2000 campaign, Bush chose not to spend any of that political capital on a worthwhile bill. “The president wanted a bill,” says Krista Kafer, a former House education committee staffer who also did a stint as an education analyst for the conservative Heritage Foundation. “It didn’t bother him that it was a significantly flawed bill.” The price of getting a bill that could pass 340-81 in the House and 87-10 in the Senate (with Kennedy part of that 87) was high: no vouchers, almost no new flexibility for states, a large across-the-board spending increase, a program combating hate crimes, a program promoting “gender equity,” and a “cultural exchange” for “Alaska Natives, Native Hawaiians, and Their Historical Whaling and Trading Partners in Massachusetts.” All that NCLB amounted to, really, was strengthening certain federal accountability requirements that were already in place, plus the president’s Reading First initiative, which helps states and schools adopt research-based reading programs. The bill’s “choice” provisions were utterly meaningless.

Under NCLB, school districts have done everything they can to avoid granting kids transfers out of failing schools. They don’t inform parents of their rights. They give them extremely small windows of time to act. They even send letters home meant to confuse or mislead parents. A researcher in Colorado found that a district there had sent parents home a letter with the good news that their school had been selected for “School Improvement” under federal law. “We are excited by this opportunity to focus on increasing student achievement,” the letter said, making it sound as if the school had won a grant, not gotten a slap on the wrist. No wonder that in the 2004–05 school year, just 1 percent of students eligible for choice under NCLB actually transferred schools.

The public school choice provisions are the only thing approximating “ownership” in the No Child Left Behind law, and yet they have been an utter failure because of resistance from local bureaucrats—resistance that NCLB does nothing to uproot.

Owning Health Care

If the Ownership Society has been an unmitigated disaster when it comes to education, its record when it comes to health care might be termed a mitigated disaster. Specifically, the disaster of the $1.2 trillion Medicare prescription-drug entitlement is mitigated by the significant expansion of health savings accounts (HSAs) that was included in the same bill, the first major free-market health care reform in a generation.

The question is: Is the trade-off worth it? Is it worth significantly (and permanently) expanding the size and scope of the welfare state so long as the expansion is tied to measures that will give Americans a degree of ownership over benefits previously controlled by the government?

There was a logic to adding a prescription-drug benefit to Medicare—it made little sense to say the government would pay for open-heart surgery, but not for the drugs that might make such surgery unnecessary. But most seniors already had some form of drug coverage. In 2002, the year before the benefit was passed, some 70 percent of seniors spent less than $500 out-of-pocket for prescriptions. A relatively small, targeted drug benefit, aimed at the 22 percent of seniors who didn’t have drug coverage, could have caught those who were falling through the cracks at much less expense.

But why be efficient when you can be popular for only a few hundred billion dollars more? Republican leaders, with their eyes on the 2004 election, were set on creating a universal benefit for more than 40 million elderly and disabled Americans. So they created Medicare Part D, the Medicare prescription-drug benefit.

The expense of all this is tremendous. Not only is the government crowding out private insurance that individuals were paying for themselves, but it has to write checks to corporations to discourage them from dropping retirees’ drug coverage and leaving the federal government to pick up the tab. In 2003, the Congressional Budget Office said the drug benefit would cost $400 billion over 10 years, and the White House accepted that number. The president’s first budget after the bill was signed bumped that number up to $511 billion. But neither of those numbers was a real 10-year figure; both counted two years, 2004 and 2005, when the new benefit wouldn’t be on line yet. The real 10-year cost, from 2006 to 2015, is closer to $1.2 trillion.

Administration officials estimate that various forms of savings will bring that closer to $720 billion. With Medicare, however, it has never been a good idea to accept the more modest cost estimates. While there’s been some early evidence of cost savings from drug plans competing against one another, it’s unlikely to make a serious dent in the program’s cost. And even going with the most modest of estimates, the prescription-drug benefit will increase the financial burden of Medicare by roughly a third, bringing its expenditures up from 2.6 percent of gross domestic product in 2003 to 3.4 percent in 2006. As 78 million baby boomers head toward retirement and Medicare eligibility, things will only get much, much worse.

All of this seemed like a high price to pay for HSAs. But it would be a mistake to underestimate just how radical a reform HSAs represent. “They were the first market-based health care reform really in over 60 years,” says Michael Cannon, director of health policy studies at the libertarian Cato Institute.

An HSA is essentially a 401(k), but for medical expenses instead of retirement savings. Individuals and their employers can make tax-free contributions. But unlike a 401(k), funds withdrawn to pay for medical expenses before age 65 are never taxed. HSAs can be set up only in conjunction with qualifying high-deductible health insurance (so that catastrophic expenses will be covered). They allow younger and healthier workers to save money on premiums while building up assets they can tap when they’re older and need more health care; this encourages HSA owners to be more price-conscious when tending to their everyday health-care needs.

HSAs became available under the new law at the beginning of 2004. Interest in them gained momentum quickly. In the first 15 months they were available, 1 million people had purchased the high-deductible health insurance to qualify for opening the accounts; in the next 10 months, another 2 million people signed up. What’s more, HSAs seem to be fulfilling their purpose of making health care affordable to the uninsured and containing costs. According to separate estimates from the health company Assurant and the trade group America’s Health Insurance Plans, which represents some 1,300 insurance providers, as many as 40 percent of HSA applicants were previously uninsured. A survey from Deloitte Consulting shows that the cost of consumer-driven health plans, such as HSAs and less flexible health reimbursement arrangements, increased by only 2.8 percent from 2004 to 2005, as opposed to an average of 7.3 percent for all other types of plans.

Building on this success, Bush in his 2006 State of the Union Address proposed expanding the amount of money individuals can put in HSAs and making them more accessible to individuals and employees of small businesses. His prescription-drug plan, one of the signature “accomplishments” of his first term and a key campaign issue in 2002 and 2004? He didn’t even mention it.

On the political side of things, there can be little doubt that the prescription-drug bill has been a disaster. A Gallup poll taken the month the bill was passed found that 73 percent of seniors thought the benefit wouldn’t go far enough. Once the benefit’s implementation got underway in January 2006, anger over the bill heated up even more as seniors came into contact with its complex machinery and hostile news stories flooded the media. As the midterm campaign season got underway, it was clear that the Democrats would use the prescription-drug plan as a weapon going into November, harping on its alleged stinginess, its complexity, and the Bush administration’s refusal to allow Americans to buy price-controlled prescription drugs from Canada and Europe.

With the bill giving Republicans so little political benefit, all that’s left is the question of whether it was a wise policy tradeoff. Grace-Marie Turner, president of the Galen Institute, a pro-market health care think tank, says she is absolutely certain HSAs could never have been passed any other way. “I cannot believe the naiveté of those who ask why couldn’t we have just passed HSAs on their own,” she says.

One such naive soul is Cato’s Michael Cannon—though he has a bit more than wide-eyed innocence behind his assertion that HSAs could have been won another way. He thinks HSAs could easily have been added to a tax or budget bill. In particular, he points to a Senate roll call vote in 2001 that showed that support for lifting the restrictions on Medical Savings Accounts (the forerunners of HSAs) was only a few votes short of a majority—and the 2002 elections resulted in the net gain of one new HSA supporter. “You had two stinking votes to get, you could have bought that for less than $400 billion,” says Cannon. But since HSAs were more of an afterthought designed to keep free-marketeers in line than a central part of the president’s agenda, there never was a push to pass them on their own.

Whatever your view of such hypotheticals, one of the corroding effects of the Ownership Society was clearly on display in the process that brought about the Medicare bill: its underlying assumption that the growth of government can never be stopped, or even slowed. In the third year of Bush’s presidency, with the Republicans having just reestablished control of the Senate and increased their margin in the House, those underlying assumptions expanded to include not just that government will stay the same size, not just that it will get bigger, but that it will explode catastrophically no matter who’s in power—and there’s nothing anyone can do about it, so it might as well be Republicans doing the exploding.

Owning Retirement

If the 2003 Medicare bill was wildly cynical and crassly political, it needs to be said that Bush’s advocacy of Social Security privatization over the years has been consistent, principled, and, yes, even bold—if not always well-articulated.

While Bush, Rove, and other Republican strategists see Social Security reform as part of a larger plan to—how to put this gently?—destroy the Democratic Party, the president has also long understood that the federal retirement system is unsustainable in its current form, short of massive tax hikes or benefit cuts. Rebel in Chief author Barnes traces Bush’s advocacy of private accounts back to his first, unsuccessful campaign for Congress in 1978. During that race in West Texas, Bush told a group of realtors at the Midland Country Club that “the ideal option would be for Social Security to be made sound and people be given the chance to invest the money the way they feel.” The issue wasn’t a big one in the campaign, but the idea would remain the same 22 years later.

Bush hit Social Security privatization hard during the 2000 campaign, and Al Gore and his allies hit back even harder. In the presidential debates, Gore labeled Bush’s plan “Social Security minus” and said that Bush would cut benefits and leave seniors eating cat food. The AARP and the labor unions spent millions on phone banks, mailings, and ads. There were even recorded calls by Ed Asner made to scare old folks out of their homes and into the voting booth. But ultimately, Bush had the politics of the issue right. In exit polls, 57 percent of voters said they supported Bush’s vision of private accounts—including one-third of those who’d voted for Al “Lock Box” Gore. In Florida, seniors split fairly evenly between Bush and Gore. Social Security was no longer the third rail of American politics. The new president might not have mustered the momentum for reform, but he demonstrated that it was no longer suicidal to try.

Once in office, Bush appointed a commission, chaired by the late Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D-N.Y.) and AOL/Time Warner COO Richard Parsons, to consider how to “modernize” Social Security. The panel was heavily tilted toward privatization proponents, but it had the unique disadvantage of releasing its final report on December 11, 2001, when the nation was in no mood to worry about an issue that fell well short of life or death. The prospects for private accounts just got worse in the spring and summer of 2002, as the names Enron, Ken Lay, and WorldCom became late-night punchlines and the stock market sank to five-year lows. Reform was off the table for the rest of Bush’s first term.

Social Security was far from the biggest issue in the 2004 campaign, but when Bush won reelection, he decided it was time to take his big gamble. He dedicated a 1,200-word section of his 2005 State of the Union Address to a call for reforming Social Security with personal accounts, then embarked on a barnstorming tour of America, including 60 stops in 60 days in March and April.

But the push fell flat. Despite all the talk about an Ownership Society, Bush put little effort into pushing the ownership aspects of Social Security reform, preferring to stress the system’s solvency problems. And even then, while he succeeded in convincing many Americans that the system needed reform, he didn’t convince many that it needed to be reformed right then. By late spring 2005, it was clear that reform was going nowhere. As early as March, Bush’s personal approval rating began to dip. Support for his Social Security proposal also dropped. A report from the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press found that support for private accounts fell among those considered most likely to support them, younger Americans, between February and March, from 66 percent to 49 percent. Opposition among older Americans was much higher. The Pew poll also found that among all Americans, the more they heard about the plan, the less likely they were to support it. And when the public’s support wavered, Republicans in Congress got squirrelly and ran for cover.

Creating a consensus that Social Security needs to be changed and creating broad familiarity with the concept of private accounts among the public were two non-trivial accomplishments. And it’s hard to see how anything short of political miracle-working would have brought a nervous public charging head-first into the most radical reform of the New Deal ever undertaken.

But it’s also worth recognizing that while the ownership pushed by Bush is in some ways more politically palatable than the austerity pushed during the Gingrich years, it is also no political palliative. Tough choices are still tough choices, and the public isn’t likely to believe that it can get something for nothing. Social Security may be the key to creating an Ownership Society, but no one’s found a way to make it click.

Failing, But Not Irredeemable

By accepting the premises behind so much of the federal edifice, Republicans have left themselves with precious little room to maneuver. If a conservative president comes into office set on education reform, but accepts off the bat that the Department of Education’s role should increase, not decrease, and that vouchers are off the table, he’s going to end up with a meaningless clump of sod like NCLB. The same goes for health care, where a lack of confidence and imagination—not to mention a routine triumph of politics over principle—prevented Republicans from even attempting to win free-market innovations like HSAs on their own before tying them to a massive expansion of the welfare state.

Still, Bush’s version of the Ownership Society is not the only version imaginable. Time and again Bush has decided that getting any bill is more important than getting a good bill. A more principled president or Congress might yet do some real good with the ideas Bush has clumsily and carelessly groped toward.

For now, however, all Bush’s Ownership Society has done is prove a timeless law of politics: Once you’ve written yourself a permission slip to bend on principle in the service of a higher good, you end up looking like a pretzel.

In Defense of Welfare Reform

CathyYoung63@aol.com (Cathy Young) — Tue, 29 Aug 2006 09:58:00 EDT

Welfare reform had long been a contentious issue in American politics. In the 1980s and early 1990s, ending "welfare as we know it" was a staple of cheap political rhetoric for Republicans and Democrats alike. It was also widely regarded as a nearly utopian goal. Then, President Clinton made the drastic overhaul of the welfare system a reality, in a bill signed into law on Aug. 22, 1996. Ten years later, the welfare reform report card disproves much scaremongering on the left and points to some important accomplishments, but it also highlights how much there still is to accomplish, both in reducing poverty and strengthening families.

When welfare reform passed, dire predictions abounded. The legislation, designed to end welfare as a system of permanent dependency and get recipients off the dole and into the workplace, was denounced as a policy driven by greed, heartlessness, and even racism, a betrayal of the weakest in our midst. Anna Quindlen, then a New York Times columnist, referred to it as "the politics of meanness." Marian Wright Edelman of the Children's Defense Fund cried "national child abandonment." Senator Edward M. Kennedy spoke of "legislative child abuse."

Some feminists, such as authors and commentators Katha Pollitt and Barbara Ehrenreich, were incensed by what they saw as welfare reform's punitive attitude toward single mothers, the majority of adult welfare recipients. Welfare mothers, they claimed, were being demonized in misogynistic rhetoric, even though it's safe to say that the harshest language ever used about women on welfare never approached the vitriol toward "deadbeat dads" (most of whom are also poor and working in marginal jobs at best).

Paradoxically, antiwelfare-reform feminists, most of whom had assailed the idea of full-time motherhood as a noble female vocation, found themselves defending a system that paid women to stay home with children. They mocked—rightly, in some cases—the hypocrisy of right-wingers who attacked poor single mothers for not holding jobs, yet lamented the rise in middle-class married mothers working outside the home. But surely it was at least as inconsistent for those on the left to hail the movement of married women into the workforce, and then treat full-time motherhood as an entitlement for poor single women. No, single women did not have babies to collect welfare checks; but for those who were trapped in lifelong dependency, the welfare system functioned as an enabler.

In fact, as writer Kay Hymowitz demonstrates in an article in the spring issue of City Journal, the past 10 years' policies have been highly successful in getting single mothers off welfare and into the workforce. From 1994 to 2004, recipients of Aid to Families With Dependent Children dropped from 5.1 million to 2 million. About 60 percent of the women who left welfare have moved into jobs; many others have employed partners and are studying to acquire job skills. The predicted surge in child poverty, and horrors such as child abandonment and child prostitution, have not materialized. Indeed, poverty rates for African-American children hit an all-time low in 2001 and rose only slightly during the subsequent recession.

There remains, however, much to be done. Perhaps the biggest weakness of welfare reform is that it has focused almost exclusively on women, neglecting the all-important issue of their partners and the fathers of their children. Many reports on the struggles of single mothers trying to get themselves and their children out of poverty treat the men in these women's and children's lives as an obstacle to success, offering stories of hard-working women held back by lazy, feckless, often violent boyfriends. In some cases the stereotype is true; but many of those men, like many women, are trapped by a lack of resources and skills and by a subculture that offers few models of successful work and parenting. And some, as reporter and author Jason DeParle and others have documented, are trying their best to stay connected to their children.

Today, there is a need for more efforts, in the public and private sector alike, to encourage employment and child-rearing among poor fathers. One of the baneful effects of the old welfare system was that it enshrined the idea of family and children as a female sphere while turning men into outsiders. Reintegrating men into families will not end poverty or solve all social problems, but it will be a major step in the right direction.

The Amazing Colossal Poorhouse

jwalker@reason.com (Jesse Walker) — Tue, 22 Aug 2006 13:26:00 EDT

Ten years ago today, President Bill Clinton signed the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act, known more colloquially as welfare reform. The president had promised to end "welfare as we know it," and by signing the bill he did exactly that: In 2006 the welfare state is larger than ever before, but the way Americans think and talk about it has been radically changed. As a function of the government, welfare is thriving. As a culture war issue, it's practically dead.

The size of the welfare state isn't easy to discern, and its boundaries aren't so simple to define. Conservatives associate the dole with indolence, and thus sometimes will discount programs that attempt to push recipients into the workforce or to enforce habits congenial to low-wage labor. But the welfare state has always been tied closely to social engineering; it is a pendulum that swings between relatively permissive grants and stricter subsidies. Liberals, in turn, tend to think of welfare in terms of generosity, and thus sometimes will discount a program that does not make life significantly better for the recipients—even if it obviously constitutes a vast expansion of the state's redistributive machinery. (That's how Consumers Union was able to dismiss President George W. Bush's new Medicare benefit, expected to cost as much as $1.2 trillion in its first 10 years, as a "stingy" system guilty of "undermining the fundamental principle" of Medicare.) But few government programs have been created out of sheer munificence. The growth of the welfare apparatus has been linked much more closely to two baser impulses: buying the beneficiaries' support, and keeping the beneficiaries in line.

Even without conservative or liberal blinders, many Americans discount two large swaths of the welfare state. First: payments to people who aren't poor. In his history of American welfare, In the Shadow of the Poorhouse, Michael Katz notes the difference in social attitudes toward public assistance (which "has become synonymous with welfare") and social insurance (which "carries no stigma"). By any sensible definition, Social Security is a transfer payment: In the words of the program's own website, "the Social Security taxes paid by today's workers and their employers are used to pay the benefits for today's retirees and other beneficiaries." But because it enjoys the trappings of an insurance program, and because the bulk of its largess goes to the middle class, it usually falls into a different mental category—at least until someone proposes privatizing it, at which point we're reminded of all the destitute octogenarian widows who rely on their Social Security checks to get by.

As the left-liberal historians Frances Fox Piven and Richard Cloward wrote in their 1971 book Regulating the Poor, most "social welfare activity has not greatly aided the poor, precisely because the poor ordinarily have very little influence on government. Indeed, 'social welfare' programs designed for other groups frequently ride roughshod over the poor, as when New Deal agricultural subsidies resulted in the displacement of great numbers of tenant farmers and sharecroppers, or when urban renewal schemes deprived blacks of their urban neighborhoods." For simplicity's sake, I won't even address the question of corporate subsidies. Suffice to say that penniless people aren't getting all or even most of the handouts.

Second: the prison system. Hardly anyone thinks of convicts as being on relief, but the typical prisoner, more so than anyone on food stamps or in a workfare program, relies almost completely on the state (or a nominally private company paid by the state) for food, shelter, and health care. Most people would not commit a crime to get a free night in a cell, even if some hobos see jail as "three hots and a cot." But the history of the penal system and the history of welfare are closely intertwined, going back to the invention of the prison and the poorhouse. As the sociologist David Wagner writes in The Poorhouse, a social history of the institution, "two totally different ideas—hospitality and punishment—oddly enough became confused," with the old medieval institution of the almshouse and the newer, more punitive workhouse both falling under the "poorhouse" label in popular discussion. (Workhouses were rare in America, but poorhouses attempted with mixed success to enforce a regimen of labor. One 19th-century New York journalist, quoted in Katz's book, visited a Rhode Island institution where he saw "a party of men carrying wood from one corner of the yard to another and piling it there; when it was all removed it was brought back again and piled in the old place.")

It's telling, at any rate, that one of the centers Wagner studied, the poorhouse in Rockingham County, New Hampshire, evolved directly into both the county nursing home and the county jail. They share the same complex to this day.

All that having been said, there are at least three approaches to measuring the welfare state: the number of people on the rolls, the amount of money spent, and the intrusiveness of the system.

People on the rolls. If you focus narrowly on the program known until '96 as Aid to Families with Dependent Children, and known since then as Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, you'll get the impression that welfare is disappearing. In a time when the country's population was growing, the number of families receiving AFDC/TANF subsidies dropped from 4.6 million a decade ago to under 2 million today. There were several reasons for this, including a booming economy in the late '90s, but the chief factor was welfare reform, which established new time limits and work requirements for the program's clients.

But if you look across the spectrum of federal social programs, a more ambiguous picture emerges. As Douglas Besherov of the American Enterprise Institute pointed out last week in The New York Times, some of the families booted from TANF simply move to different sources of assistance: "food stamps (an average of more than $2,500), the Women, Infants and Children program (about $1,800 for infants and new mothers), Supplemental Security Income (an average of over $6,500), or housing aid (an average of $6,000). Their children also qualify for Medicaid. In reality, these families are still on welfare because they are still receiving benefits and not working—call it 'welfare lite.'" It's not clear what makes this arrangement "lite," given that all five forms of aid have seen their budgets increase since Bush took office.

In March, USA Today examined 25 programs, from Medicaid to the Earned Income Tax Credit. In nearly all of them, enrollment grew. Congress expanded eligibility for several, usually with the proviso that the recipients also work. But for the most part, this growth was a matter of the existing programs stretching to take on more clients as they fell below the poverty line. That doesn't necessarily constitute an increase in the number of people getting benefits: USA Today calculated that overall enrollment increased 17 percent from 2000 to 2005—"the biggest five-year increase in 40 years"—but that double-counts people who joined more than one program. But it certainly isn't the unambiguous contraction you see if you look at TANF alone.

Lest we forget, incarceration expanded considerably during this period as well. It is not true, as some leftists have suggested, that the people who left the welfare rolls simply moved en masse to jail. But there is an overlap; and, at any rate, any measurement of the number of Americans who depend on the government for sustenance should account for the 2,186,230 people incarcerated in the country's prisons and jails—up from 1,630,940 in 1996.

Money spent. Again, a narrow focus on TANF gives the impression that welfare outlays are down. Spending on that one program dropped severely in Clinton's second term, and has remained roughly flat under his successor. But overall spending on transfer payments has increased radically, particularly under Bush. That shouldn't be surprising, given that government spending overall has increased radically under Bush. The tricky issue—particularly for those of us who are inclined to regard any transfer payment as welfare, whether the recipient is a single mom or a multinational corporation—is discerning which spending does not fall into the welfare category.

I'm not going to go through every item in the budget. I'll just note that even by the narrowest definition of welfare spending—programs aimed at fighting poverty—the figure has gone up 39 percent during the Bush presidency. There isn't any ambiguity here. The government is spending more money on welfare—and with the coming explosion in entitlements, you can expect it to spend even more in the future.

Intrusiveness. I said earlier that the history of the welfare state is linked closely to the history of social engineering and total institutions. Granted: Even in the 19th century, more people received benefits via non-institutionalized "outdoor relief" than through a stay in the poorhouse. But the Progressive Era ideologues who founded the modern welfare state saw outdoor relief as an evil to be contained, in part because it was frequently distributed by urban ward bosses, not credentialed professionals. And after the '30s, as the feds plunged deeper into dispensing "outdoor" funds, the money was soon followed by the sorts of surveillance and other rituals of degradation that once were reserved for the poorhouse. Piven and Cloward, for example, describe how AFDC mothers in this period were "often forced to answer questions about their sexual behavior ('When did you last menstruate?'), open their closets to inspection ('Whose pants are those?'), and permit their children to be interrogated ('Do any men visit your mother?'). Unannounced raids, usually after midnight and without benefit of warrant, in which a recipient's home is searched for 'immoral' activities, have also been part of life on AFDC." Government money usually comes with strings attached, and a large part of the history of welfare is the history of bureaucrats trying to tighten those strings.

For the most part, the agitation that preceded the reforms of the '90s reflected that tradition of imposing controls, not the libertarian tradition of opposing the welfare state itself. Neoconservative critics such as Myron Magnet and James Q. Wilson were never averse to, say, putting welfare mothers into strictly supervised group homes. And center-left writers such as Mickey Kaus called for a complex system of government-guaranteed jobs that was both more punitive and more expensive than the old order.

Ten years later, the most striking thing isn't how the poor have adapted to TANF's new rules, which may be more stringent than the previous system but still aren't as constraining as the ideas Magnet, Wilson, or Kaus proposed. It isn't even the increasingly rigid institutions that have filled the social space the poorhouse left behind. (Wagner's book makes a convincing case that the modern homeless shelter tends to be more draconian than the almshouses he studied.) It's how the intrusiveness of the welfare state has climbed up the social ladder, affecting not just the indigent but the wealthy and middle-class beneficiaries (and potential beneficiaries) of the entitlement state. On the left, "public health" Fabians routinely justify restrictions on personal choices—smoking, eating, wearing a helmet—on the grounds that the public will pay the bill if your decision lands you in the hospital. On the right, the border-control crowd uses essentially the same argument against freedom of movement and freedom of contract: As long as we're paying for Mexicans to use our schools and emergency rooms, they argue, it makes sense to restrict immigration.

Immigration, incidentally, is the one area where welfare still has an impact on the culture wars. In the old days, you could rile up red-meat conservatives by arguing the relief rolls were filled with shiftless, undeserving bums living high on the taxpayers' dime. Today, the immigration debate centers not on services meant for the desperate but on services meant for everyone: schools, hospitals, public amenities. Immigrants aren't accused of pretending to be poor or pretending to look for a job. They're accused of pretending to be Americans, of taking goods that rightfully belong to all us citizens regardless of class.

Paupers or millionaires, we're all on welfare now—or might as well be, to judge from the state of our liberties. That's one way to end welfare as we knew it.

Data: Welfare As We Know It

jwalker@reason.com (Jesse Walker) — Mon, 05 Jun 2006 00:00:00 EDT

If you add together the money the federal government spends on health care, housing, food, and income support for the poor, the total constitutes more than 16 percent of the budget. When George W. Bush became president in 2001, the figure was 15.3 percent—and the budget itself has grown considerably since then as well.

When the conservative Heritage Foundation reported these facts in a February 2006 paper, it was arguing against what it called "the tired old myth that Republicans were cutting spending for the poor to pay for tax cuts for the rich." The more striking point, though, is that this president is so free with the public purse that even anti-poverty programs—arguably the least popular form of spending within his party—have gotten more money on his watch.

Even more notable: Ten years after Bill Clinton allegedly ended "welfare as we know it," the feds are spending more than ever before on the welfare state. The reform Clinton signed arrested the growth of the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program (formerly Aid to Families with Dependent Children), but other subsidies have more than made up the difference. According to a March analysis in USA Today, enrollment in anti-poverty programs increased an average of 17 percent from 2000 to 2005. During the same period, the U.S. population grew by just 5 percent.

Graph (not available online): Percentage of Federal Spending Devoted to Poverty Programs (Heritage Foundation)