Race and the Politics of Welfare Reform

2. Ghettos, Fiscal Federalism, and Welfare Reform

chapter 2 Ghettos, Fiscal Federalism, and Welfare Reform michael k. brown Welfare reform in 1996 had little to do with poverty; it had a lot to do with racialized politics of poverty. Conservatives declared that anything was better than the old welfare system for poor women and that their plans for tough work requirements and time-limited bene‹ts was a policy of hope. What they were really interested in was politically exploiting the issue and painting the Democrats as defenders of “amoral” black women in ghettos. Liberals rationalized welfare reform as necessary , but they also understood it to be a way of banishing race, and racialized poverty, from the political lexicon. For the Democrats welfare reform was as much about solving their frayed relationship with disgruntled , irate middle-class white voters as it was about poverty. Now many liberals think that replacing the cash entitlement of Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) with a work-based safety net precludes racial stigmatization of social bene‹ts and ensures political legitimacy for antipoverty policies. Rather than suppressing the debate about race and poverty that began with Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty and Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s famous report, welfare reform will reopen it. Opponents of the 1996 welfare reform legislation feared that repealing AFDC’s cash entitlement would lead to untold misery. In a scathing editorial, the Washington Post called the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA) “reckless because it could endanger the well being of the poorest children in society in the 47 ⠂ name of a series of untested theories about how people may respond to some new incentives.” Others worried that welfare reform would unleash a “race to the bottom” as states competed to lower bene‹ts and keep migrating poor people out. Today any lingering concern that poor children will be plunged into misery is quickly forgotten amid cheers over plummeting caseloads. Yet the euphoria over the so-called success in replacing welfare payments with paychecks masks the real dilemma underlying welfare reform—a con›ict between the ‹scal incentives embedded in the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) program and racialized poverty concentrated in big-city ghettos. Changes in the racial composition of poor women remaining on the rolls expose the political trap at the heart of the new welfare policy. In many states whites have left the rolls faster than blacks. The proportion of white families in TANF sharply dropped to 31 percent of all cases; racial minorities now account for over two-thirds. Meanwhile, states have amassed ‹nancial windfalls due to the rapid decline in caseloads and ‹xed federal ‹nancing. Most states are either hoarding this money or passing it on to white middle-class voters in the form of tax cuts and other subsidies. Whether this surplus will be used to help the African American and Latina mothers remaining on the rolls is an open question. Policymakers assumed that PRWORA’s work requirements and time limits would be cushioned by public investments in education, job training , child-care, and other services for poor women. Yet states are encouraged by the ‹nancial incentives of the act to push welfare recipients into any available jobs or workfare, and the ‹scal structure of the law provides no guarantees that ‹nancial windfalls will be used to help those most in need. When it converted the AFDC entitlement to cash bene‹ts into a block grant administered by states, Congress reduced the money states were required to contribute to welfare and gave them considerable freedom in allocating federal dollars. Other than a frail hope that governors and state legislators could do better, there is little to prevent the money from being used for white middle-class constituencies rather than poor African American women and Latinas living in urban ghettos. Race and devolution have been antagonistic features of federal social policy since the 1930s. Title IV of the Social Security Act gave states control of AFDC bene‹ts and eligibility and led to pervasive racial discrimination in both the North and the South. Supreme Court decisions and civil rights laws curtailed these abuses in the 1960s by diminishing state authority over eligibility and by ordering states to provide due process of law to poor women who lost their bene‹ts. These policy changes parRace and the Politics of Welfare Reform 48 tially centralized AFDC. The 1996 welfare reform law unwinds the welfare system once again and grants states enormous authority over poor women and their children...