You really want to hear some horror stories? Work for social services or something connected to it. I was the assistant to the director of an outreach program from 1997 to 1998. Case workers aren’t allowed to disclose identifying details, but they are allowed to talk about some aspects of their cases.
Many of our clients were illegal or semi-legal aliens. They were very rarely a problem. They needed help, they got it, they moved on. Few of them stayed on assistance programs for extended lengths of time. Then, there were the others.
One of our social workers had to visit a client’s apartment to check on living conditions, as is required by law in some cases. There were 13 kids, plus the mom, living in a two room apartment. One of the daughters, 16, had had a baby, who was about 2 at that time. Her 14 year old sister was pregnant. The woman claimed, if I remember right, five different fathers for her children, all of them were either pretty darn poor or on welfare like her. The social worker, in reviewing her case, found that she’d been doing a scam where she’d trade food stamps for money, which she would then use to go shopping with.
There are people who abuse the system, I’ve met them. There are people who would not be able to have so many children if the state did not pay for it, I’ve met them too. The situation we had with welfare created a culture of dependency and passed it on to generations of people, many of them pretty darn prolific generations. Most of them would never get out because it was so easy to stay there. Not pleasant --not by any stretch of the imagination-- but easy. It’s hard to reach outside the culture you grew up in. It’s hard to take risks to change your situation when you are saved from outright desperation by a government safety net. You don’t try too hard because you know you don’t have to. After all, your social worker will help manage your crises.
I haven’t worked in that field for a while, so things might have changed significantly. I was there when welfare reforms started --my program was a pilot program, so we were at the forefront of that-- but I didn’t get to see what the results were. In my time there, my views toward welfare changed significantly. I’d thought it was basically a good thing before I started working there. After, I thought it was one of the most harmful social programs we’ve ever created.
For the record, I grew up pretty poor, as did both of my parents. My parents bought land in the country and built their own house so that they could have a decent place to live. They were living in a shitty part of the Bay Area until then, and from what I understand, building house ended up being cheaper than rent after a fairly short time. My father sometimes worked as a contractor and built the house himself with the help of some of his friends from work. We grew some of our own food to help stretch our money. I don’t remember going hungry, but the diet did get pretty monotonous sometimes. We actually needed the meat my dad got from hunting. I’ve eaten rabbit because we used to raise them for food.
We were on government assistance for a while when my dad got laid off from a job he’d gotten at GM after only a year or so on the job. They took a chance and my mom started a business. I have no idea how they managed to scrape up the money. It took a few years before that was successful enough to provide more than the basics, but we got off the food assistance program as soon as possible. Still, up until I was about 10, I remember having to get clothes from thrift stores, not because it was cool, but because that’s all we could afford.
The difference between the people who stay on welfare and my family is cultural, in my opinion. My dad’s mother grew up in Tennessee during the Depression. We’re talking barefoot because you can’t afford shoes, hand-built shack, stealing chickens poor. They never accepted any government handouts; told the “gubment” where to stick it. My mother’s mother somehow managed to raise 5 kids mostly on her own working as a secretary. One grandfather was a semi-literate machinist, the other was a smart, but very unsuccessful person. Something my grandparents managed to instill in (most of) their kids was a strong work ethic and a strong distaste for accepting government assistance. My parents passed it on to us.
Welfare, the way I knew it, virtually guaranteed that nothing similar would happen in families raised on welfare. There were disincentives to work, since your wages would cut into your benefits, or in some cases eliminate them. There was no penalty for having more kids, you just get more assistance to take up the slack, unlike someone who works for a living. People say, “do it for the kids,” but what you’re really doing is creating many more poor kids, many of whom are going to grow up and become welfare-supported parents of a new generation of dependents.
I hope the reforms that have happened will change some of that, and I hope there are further reforms planned. I think it’s sick that we lost what could have been some great people to that social sinkhole because the government decided that being nice was better than being realistic. Some of those welfare kids could have been so much more if they’d had the right outlook on life and had grown up in an environment that encouraged them to try, to plan, to manage their problems on their own. There are some situations in which helping is the greater harm.
