Welfare

In the current welfare debate, there is much misperception of the history of welfare. While a comprehensive history is impossible here, several important points must be clarified. There is, for example, an enduring myth that earlier in American history care of the poor was private, through charities and individuals taking care of their neighbors. In fact, welfare22 in America has always been a combination of public and private assistance. In the late 18th and early 19th centuries, for instance, city governments sometimes gave "general relief" (albeit meager) to poor people during hard economic times (usually in order to stave off riots or other civil disturbances). The poorhouses of the 19th century were attempts (albeit most often spectacularly unsuccessful) to reduce the cost of welfare by bringing all the poor under one roof and creating self-sustaining communities. After the Civil War, the Federal government offered veterans benefits (including survivor benefits to families) to those who had participated in the war (and later to all veterans). The first "widows' pensions" were to the wives of those veterans. In fact, pensions to veterans and their families were 18% of the total Federal budget just before World War I, when the program was discontinued. The current mixture of public and private assistance has been going on since the beginning of the Republic.

The function of welfare has not been limited to the alleviation of distress. Historically, welfare has also functioned

• to regulate labor markets by controlling the supply and price of labor through manipulating incentives to work. (If benefits are relatively high, for instance, workers become unwilling to take low-paying jobs and will demand higher salaries, so the supply of workers will shrink. If benefits decline, the supply of workers increases and they will work for lower wages.)
• to "improve people" by regulating their behavior as a condition of relief. As part of Welfare Reform, for instance, some states deny an increase in benefits for additional children born while the mother is on welfare in order to discourage welfare mothers from having more children.
• as a mechanism for political mobilization. Public officials have frequently used local welfare payments for political purposes, distributing them to secure the votes of the poor. Ronald Reagan used his opposition to welfare as a strategic part of his campaign in the 1980s.
• Since 1960, welfare has been used as a way of reversing past racial injustice. One can see each of these purposes operative in the current debate over welfare.

The debate about who "deserves" public assistance dates back to the beginnings of modern welfare about 500 years ago in Europe. Society has always tried to separate the "deserving poor" (those who are poor through no fault of their own) from the "undeserving poor" (those who are considered to have brought their poverty upon themselves due to substance abuse, laziness, unwillingness to work, promiscuity and so on). Society generally tries to confine whatever private charity and governmental assistance it provides to the "deserving poor," while insisting that the "undeserving poor" improve their character as a condition of receiving relief.


Footnotes
²² The term "welfare" can be confusing, for it has historically meant any form of public assistance to people in economic trouble. Local relief payments, certain disability payments, medical assistance, aid to families and so on are all "welfare." Today, however, the term often refers specifically to public assistance to single-parent families (now called Temporary Assistance to Needy Families [TANF], previously called Aid to Families with Dependent Children [AFDC]).