Rethinking welfare -- again

DURHAM -- Ten years ago this week, President Clinton signed welfare reform legislation that is regarded as a success by people across the political spectrum. But progressives who celebrate this law are in fact unwitting accomplices in a larger conservative enterprise. They are helping build the case against the very things they say they support, including the fight against poverty.

Clinton's welfare reform limited the amount of time a poor person -- typically a woman raising young children -- could receive government aid. It required her to be in the labor market and limited the time she could spend in training or education. Regulations issued this year intensify those requirements.

Although these ideas now seem to be commonsensical, they represent a radical reversal of once widely accepted views about poverty.

How did a policy that would once have been reviled garner such acclaim? The answer begins much earlier than 1996. Indeed, Clinton's program represented the culmination of a more than 30-year campaign against the idea of using the government to end poverty.

After World War II, many intellectuals and policy-makers held beliefs about poverty that were nearly the opposite of mainstream assumptions today. The most important economist of the period, John Kenneth Galbraith, wrote that poverty and unemployment were inevitable aspects of modern society, and said the government should give people money when they were not working.

These ideas were popular with conservatives as well as progressives. Milton Friedman, the economist who advised Republican presidential nominee Barry Goldwater in 1964, agreed with most of them. Friedman proposed a program in which every adult whose income fell below a certain level would simply receive a check from the federal treasury. He did not demand that recipients join the labor market, nor did he limit education or the length of time people could receive assistance.

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The case against public assistance started in the conservative fringe and moved from margin to mainstream because of the fractious politics of the 1960s. Whites in the South and the North turned against welfare as part of their turn against the civil rights movement. And, as the country divided over the war in Vietnam, the "welfare crisis" became one of the few issues about which voters could agree.

Mainstream Republicans distanced themselves from William F. Buckley in 1965 when he called for the relocation of welfare recipients outside the city limits as part of his campaign for mayor of New York. (His words: "No workee, no dolee.") But one year later, California gubernatorial candidate Ronald Reagan used the welfare issue in his successful campaign against the incumbent, Edmund "Pat" Brown.

Reagan's victory indicated that welfare was an issue on which elections could be won, and politicians took notice. Thirty years before Clinton, Democratic President Lyndon Johnson signed a major welfare reform law that included the first national work requirement. A short time later, President Nixon reversed his earlier support of welfare and made a laughingstock out of presidential hopeful George McGovern, who had proposed a cash benefit program much like the one Friedman had favored.

By the early 1970s, the debate on welfare was virtually over. The most prominent liberal Republican in the country, New York Gov. Nelson Rockefeller, became an anti-welfare leader. Only a few years after shunning Buckley, Republicans such as Rockefeller started to recycle his proposals. Mainstream Democrats backed away from McGovern much as Republicans had once held Buckley at arm's length.

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On this anniversary of welfare reform, it is important to remember how much opinion about public aid has changed in a relatively short time.

Galbraith and Friedman knew that our economy creates wealth and poverty at the same time, and that the government had to address the issue of poverty. I believe our first obligation as a society is to sustain all citizens above the level of subsistence. Our second obligation is to enable parents to raise their children in a healthy way. And our third is to ensure that people who are ready to educate themselves have opportunities to do so. Any welfare reform worthy of its name must include these three components.

Today, those ideas are the ones that seem radical. But the history of American attitudes toward welfare reform shows that what seem like bedrock ideas can change quickly. Surely we can start today to shift those accepted notions once again and mold a more humane, rational policy for fighting poverty.

(Felicia Kornbluh is assistant professor of history at Duke University and author of the forthcoming book "The Battle Over Welfare Rights: Poverty and Politics in Modern America.")