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family a decent living; the right of every family to a decent home; the right to adequate medical care and the opportunity to achieve and enjoy good health; the right to a good education.” Not a bad start for a people’s progressive program. —Harry Magdoff was the longtime coeditor of the Monthly Review with Paul Sweezy. Cutting the Lifeline The Real Welfare Fraud Ruth Conniff february 1992 All across the country, the poor are getting one message: America has no tolerance for the needy; if the poor are going to survive, they had better clean up their act and get to work. This past year, under the federal government’s Family Support Act, people who rely on Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC)—the government safety net for families so impoverished that their children are oªcially labeled “deprived”—must take job-training programs and meet a variety of other requirements. If they don’t, they lose their welfare checks. Many of these welfare reform or “workfare” requirements are intrusive and punitive . The programs don’t begin to address the root problems of poverty. Often, they don’t help participants Wnd jobs, and they exact a terrible toll on the children of the poor. But as states scramble to reduce their welfare rolls, programs that treat poverty as an attitude problem are catching on. In Wisconsin, Governor Tommy Thompson has pioneered the welfare reform movement with his Learnfare program, which cut government aid to hundreds of families when their teenagers missed too many days of school. In Michigan, Governor John Engler cut o¤ support last October to 90,000 “ablebodied ” unemployed people—many of whom were mentally and physically disabled— telling them to go out and Wnd jobs because, he said, the state could no longer a¤ord to support them. In California, Governor Pete Wilson proposed in December a referendum called the Taxpayers Protection Act, which would cut AFDC beneWts by as much as 25 percent and deny any increase in grant money to women who have more than one child. Republicans and Democrats alike are discovering a scapegoat for America’s social and economic ills in an “underclass” which conservative political scientist Lawrence Conni¤ / Cutting the Lifeline: The Real Welfare Fraud 291 Mead describes as “street hustlers, welfare families, drug addicts, and former mental patients.” The idea of a vast, free-loading “underclass” in America is pure myth. Two-thirds of the families that rely on welfare do so only for brief periods during times of intense economic distress. And AFDC payments are so low in most states that they no longer cover families’ basic needs for food and shelter—hardly a free ride. Finally, despite the racial stereotype of large black families on welfare that “underclass” theorists evoke, the great majority of the poor in America are white. But none of that matters. As the economic crisis worsens in the United States, contempt for the poor, particularly poor black women with children, is proving to have enormous political appeal. Welfare reform programs build on that contempt, while driving the neediest segment of our population deeper into despair. To Your Health Michael Feldman november 1994 Well, maybe it wasn’t a health care crisis after all; maybe we were just a bit under the weather. The way things were going, I wasn’t even surprised when the watered down version of the health plan—stay warm and drink plenty of Xuids—was blocked by the Republican leadership. Now I understand they want “in sickness and in health” out of the marriage vows. The last report from Mrs. Clinton’s task force—”three quarters of a cup of brown sugar and not a cup as stated earlier”—illustrated the degree to which the issue had gotten away from the Administration. The Xak from all sides took its toll; I don’t think I was alone in beginning to feel I would be the single payer in a single-payer system, or that managed care could manage without me. The political maneuvering was occasionally brilliant; you’ve got to hand it to Bob Dole and Newt Gingrich for coming up with the notion that everything is a preexisting condition. While the sheer scale of the original proposal may have led to its annihilation, after all, it wouldn’t have been a comprehensive plan if it didn’t have something to alarm everybody. Doctors complained long and hard about having been left out of the decision-making. Perhaps so...

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