Welfare Reform that Really Works #10

WELFARE IS NOT A SAFETY NET FOR CHILDREN!

Children are the winners in real welfare reform; they are losers when they continue to live in homes where dependency is the norm, where the assumption is--for whatever reason--that some government program is your only means of survival.

The current "compassionate" welfare system, initially designed to help children, has failed to do so because its foundation is flawed. The current system assumes that poverty can be eliminated with assistance programs. The exact opposite has proved true: Welfare, by encouraging even greater dependency and illegitimacy, only generates more poverty.

Robert Rector, well-recognized welfare authority from the Heritage Foundation, puts it succinctly:

The greatest benefit (of welfare reform) will accrue to children. In the past, liberals have been mesmerized by the belief that "poverty" somehow harms children and that welfare, by "combating poverty," is therefore good for kids. Hence they are timid, if not outright adversarial, in their attitude toward serious efforts to reduce welfare dependency. But studies that compare children on welfare with poor children not on welfare show that it is actually welfare dependency, not poverty, that harms children.

Welfare reform which mandates work activities to "move participants toward self-sufficiency" vs. immediate movement to the labor force does not deliver children from poverty. Those who claim "recent welfare revisions will put even more women and children on the streets," use scare tactics, totally debunked by the actual experience of successful reform states. Washington state legislators must pay attention to experience over the forebodings of those want to maintain the current welfare state.

When Wisconsin led the way in welfare reform 10 years ago, people said that children would be the primary "refuse of reform." Yet the visionaries in Wisconsin (and all over the country) knew that poverty was not essentially a money issue. Those people went to work to prove what they knew was true.

Just a few of these academic studies are cited in Robert Rector's article "How Welfare Harms Kids," The Heritage Foundation Backgrounder, June 5, 1996.

"Higher welfare benefits did not improve children's cognitive performance. Research published in 1994 (O'Neill and Hill, City University of New York) examined the IQs of young children who were long-term welfare dependents, having spent at least half of their lives on AFDC. The IQs of long-term welfare-dependent children in low-benefit states were not appreciably different from those in high benefits states.

"Higher welfare benefits encourage dependency longevity. O'Neill and Hill have shown that a 50% increase in monthly AFDC and food stamp benefit levels will lead to a 75 percent increase in the number of mothers with children enrolling in AFDC and a 75 percent increase in the number of years spent on welfare.

"The more welfare income received by a family while a boy was growing up, the lower the boy's earnings as an adult. It is critical to note that the Corcoran and Gordon study compares families whose average non-welfare incomes were identical. The study shows that the extra welfare income, even though it produced a net increase in resources available to the family, had a negative impact on the development of young boys within the family.

"The welfare system harms children by promoting illegitimacy. Washington Post reporter Leon Dash, When Children Want Children, confirms that most unwed teen mothers conceive and deliver their babies deliberately rather than accidentally. The availability of welfare plays an enabling role, though perhaps not the principal one, to have an illegitimate child.

"Children born out of wedlock are more likely to experience: retarded cognitive (especially verbal) development; lower educational achievement; lower job attainment; increased behavior and emotional problems; lower impulse control; and retarded social development." The statistical significance of all these claims is well documented.

The "Chicken Littles" prophesy great doom for children as a result of aggressive welfare reform. Yet they cannot deny that Wisconsin children and their mothers are not left homeless; that low income children in Virginia are now more likely to have both father and mother raising them; that children in Mississippi are benefitting from living in a home when their mother is married to their father, not a welfare check.

Prepared by Karen Woods, Research Analyst

Evergreen Freedom Foundation P.O. Box 552, Olympia, WA 98507 Phone: (360) 956-3482, Fax: (360) 352-1874 Email: effwa@effwa.org