[PEN-L:4632] Angry White men--Speak up!

[albelda@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx]

What follows is an op-ed piece by my friend and co-author Chris Tilly.  He sent
it to the Progressive Media Project (at the Progressive Magazine) which sent
it out on the Knight-Ridder service for newspapers to pick up. I thought
people might like to see it, pass it around, or use as a basis for
their own op-eds to their own area newspapers.

Chris wrote this after a meeting of a group of progressive academics concerned
about poverty in the Boston area (from a variety of disciplines) met poverty
advocates.  One woman from the group representing welfare recepients made an
impassioned plea for white men to speak up in support of affirmative action and
against cuts to women and children.

Please pass on -- or better yet get angry too!

Randy Albelda
albelda@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx


                     AN ANGRY WHITE MAN DEFENDS WELFARE

                                Chris Tilly
                               March 24, 1995

Let me start by identifying myself.  I am a white, married-with-children,
middle class, middle-aged man.  And when it comes to welfare, I'm angry.  In
fact, I'm mad as hell.

Am I angry because taxpayers' money is being squandered to support laziness
and undermine the family?  No, I'm angry because politicians--Republicans and
Democrats alike--are using a combination of disinformation, myth, and
stereotype to attack welfare.  Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC),
the income supplement we call welfare, is a flawed but fundamentally sound
program that provides a critical lifeline for millions of American families.
When I see attempts to dismantle this lifeline under the cover of "reform," my
blood boils.

Let's take a step back.  Why is it that we're scaling back and putting more
restrictions on welfare?  Could it be that we've succeeded in ending poverty?
Of course not.  A record six million children under age six live in poverty.
Poverty has trended upward in the United States since the mid-1970s.  Two
changes have fueled this trend: the drying up of decent jobs for less-skilled
workers, and the erosion of welfare benefits by inflation and government
cutbacks (after correcting for inflation, the average welfare payment has
fallen by almost one half over the last two decades).

Then maybe we're cutting back welfare because we simply can't afford it any
more?  There's not a very compelling case for this, either.  AFDC makes up
less than one percent of the Federal budget, and a few percentage points of
state budgets--three percent in my state, Massachusetts.  Other forms of
assistance, such as agricultural subsidies or the tax deduction for mortgage
interest, are far more costly.  And many of the welfare reforms adopted or
proposed at the state and federal levels--such as workfare and subsidies to
employers--actually add to the costs of the programs.

So it must be that welfare fosters long-term dependency, right? Wrong again.
About half of AFDC recipients are off the rolls within a year, and almost
three-quarters are off within two years.
This is not surprising: surviving on benefits worth a fraction of the poverty
line, with bureaucrats and social workers controlling your life, is not much
fun.  True, many women leave welfare only to return later.  They are driven
back by low-wage jobs providing no health coverage, and the difficulty of
finding affordable child care.  But this is more of an indictment of the sorry
state of the labor market--for the entire bottom third of the workforce, not
just welfare recipients--than an argument for excluding more women from AFDC.

What about the claim that AFDC encourages women to have children-lots of
them--at public expense?  It turns out that welfare recipients average two
children, the same as other families with children.  And a woman receiving
AFDC is less likely to have another child than is the average woman.
Furthermore, there's a much larger and costlier program that pays people
public money for having kids.  It's called the tax exemption for dependents.

Rather than condemning this government-funded fertility incentive, politicians
of both parties are calling for new tax breaks for couples with children.

If none of these reasons explain the attack on welfare, what's left?  Some
politicians--a minority, I believe--think that being a single mother is
morally wrong.  Since they cannot outlaw divorce or legislate chastity, they
are doing the next-best thing: penalizing those single mothers who are poor
enough to need government aid.  But for most politicians, the welfare issue is
simply an opportunity to score points at the expense of a powerless and
unpopular group.

All of this is not to say that everything is fine with welfare. Welfare is in
dire need of reform.  It is time to change the regulations, still in place in
many states, that reduce the welfare grant nearly one dollar for each dollar
earned, weakening any incentive to find paid work.  It is time to raise
benefits, which are currently so low that the United States does worst among
western industrial nations in lifting people out of poverty.  It is time to
build effective systems of health coverage, child care, and training--not just
for the welfare population, but for the entire workforce.

But the politicians in Washington, and in the statehouses, are not talking
about this kind of reform.  And that makes me one angry white man.


        Chris Tilly, a professor of Policy and Planning at the University of
Massachusetts at Lowell, is the co-author of "Glass Ceilings and Bottomless
Pits: Women, Income, and Poverty in Massachusetts."


        tillyc@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx