On Being

The War on Welfare
By the mid-1970s, the Great Society programs had not lived up to their promise and the general perception grew that they had failed. Black poverty in the inner city was highly visible and growing rapidly, which threatened white voters. Most liberal voices had withdrawn from the debate over black poverty. The political mood shifted dramatically, and American government—from local to Federal level—has waged war on welfare since.

Due to the many factors considered earlier, poverty in the large cities worsened into the mid-seventies. As a result of this increasing poverty, the exodus of the middle-class suburbs, and the flight of industry to the Southwest and abroad, the tax base of the American city declined at the very same time that the need for services was increasing. As the cities declined, their credit ratings slipped, and state voters became less willing to subsidize their losses. Voters in most states also rescinded their support for general relief to the poor, which disproportionately affected the cities.

As affluent people left, the cities lost much of their political power. The Federal government had previously given considerable assistance to the cities, accounting for approximately 22% of urban expenses. In the early 1980s, however, the Federal government decided that supporting the cities was a state responsibility and so cut its support back from 22% to about 6% of city expenses. The states received these previously allocated urban funds as "block grants" intended for the cities. Given the loss of urban political power, the states merely substituted the Federal money from the block grants for their own, so the total state dollars to cities remained the same, meaning that the cities had to absorb the Federal cuts in their entirety. The effect was deadly! Schools collapsed, crime and violence soared, city services (especially social services) declined precipitously.

As a result of their increasingly troubled status and the tax-cutting mood of the country, most city governments were forced into austerity budgets. Since many other government functions (maintaining the roads, police protection, picking up the trash, etc.) require a constant level of funding regardless of the government's decisions, the social welfare budgets were most directly affected. The cities were forced to cut many of their direct services to the poor: general relief, housing assistance, medical assistance to the majority of poor people not eligible for Medicaid, child protection, and so on.

State and local governments had always provided some level of assistance to poor people: general assistance programs for those not eligible for Federal money, medical assistance for those not eligible for Medicaid, and so on. Most of these programs had originally been given to people on the basis of their income alone: if you were poor enough, you received the benefits. During the seventies, the states and cities began restricting eligibility to "unemployables." Although the definition of "unemployable" varied from locale to locale, the restrictions generally meant that childless, able-bodied adults were no longer eligible for help. It didn't matter whether there were appropriate job openings or not. If you were able to work you couldn't receive benefits even if you couldn't work. The other tack was to tighten the regulations restricting eligibility, excluding, for instance, those who were unable to work because of alcoholism or drug addiction. Thousands of people lost their eligibility, and benefits for most others declined.