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 Recent commentary from National Journal: Media: Reasons to Be Cheerful (May 14, 2002) Media hand-wringing over excessive coverage of Robert Blake is misplaced; few Americans are tuning in. By William Powers Legal Affairs: Enough Already! Confirm the Worthy Nominees (May 14, 2002) Why have eight of Bush's first 11 appellate nominees languished for more than a year? By Stuart Taylor Jr. Political Pulse: Power to the Swing Voters (May 14, 2002) The elderly, like the farmers, are learning the benefits of being loyal to no party. By William Schneider Media: Ozzy and Karen (May 7, 2002) As the coverage of The Osbournes and Karen Hughes suggests, the media interpret family life in strange ways. By William Powers Legal Affairs: It's Time to Stop Packing Prisons With Two-Bit Crack Users (May 7, 2002) The Justice Department argues that crack penalties are just right. The Justice Department is wrong. By Stuart Taylor Jr. Political Pulse: When Abstinence Breeds Contempt (May 7, 2002) The French who didn't vote made Le Pen's second-place finish possible. By William Schneider Social Studies: The Middle East Is a Disaster, but not an Emergency (May 7, 2002) The risks of sending peacekeepers are enormous, greater than the proponents have acknowledged. By Jonathan Rauch More from National Journal. |
On Books 
A Script for the Welfare Drama
A reviewer takes a crack at The New World of Welfare, edited by Rebecca Blank and Ron Haskins. by Corine Hegland .... The New World of Welfare Edited by Rebecca Blank and Ron Haskins Brookings Institution, 514 pages, $19.95 Remember the theatrics over welfare reform in 1996? The image of the Cadillac welfare queen and the stories about the half million children who would be forced to live on the streets? The three Health and Human Services officials who quit after President Clinton signed the bill overhauling the welfare system? This year, Congress is revisiting the welfare morass and deciding whether to reauthorize the sweeping Temporary Assistance to Needy Families legislation. You can already hear the buzz of stage preparations: Sixty percent of those who've left the welfare rolls are working—but only 45 percent of them are working full-time. The poverty rate among children has fallen by more than 50 percent—but fewer than 50 percent of the families leaving welfare who are eligible for food stamps get them. There's even a script for the new spectacle: The New World of Welfare, edited by Rebecca Blank and Ron Haskins, who's the current White House adviser on welfare. In this hefty tome, 54 top social scientists and policy specialists wrangle over poverty in America and the evolving shape of welfare programs. The scientists have a lot to say. When it passed the 1996 welfare changes, Congress approved spending more than $85 million on data collection and research, and private foundations supplemented this bonanza with even more money. As a result, there's been an explosion of poverty research in the past five years. Faced with an overabundance of material, Blank and Haskins have assembled a mostly coherent portrait of contemporary welfare. Their inspired format pairs researchers of opposing ideologies in papers and responses, which sift the numbingly complex research into clear areas of consensus and contention. Almost all of the contributors agree that the grand experiment in turning welfare over to the states and making it work-focused and time-limited has so far worked much better than liberals thought it would. (Some of the conservative authors work in a few rhetorical jabs, although most refrain.) Welfare caseloads have plunged by half, mostly because people are working. But many families aren't getting the square meals and medical help they should, and some families are clearly floundering in the new system. The contributions of Haskins and Wendell Primus add up to a national portrait of poverty and form a singular chapter in the book. Haskins, the conservative who drafted much of the welfare reform legislation, and Primus, the liberal who resigned from HHS after Clinton signed the bill, agree, mostly, on the contours of contemporary poverty. They just disagree—respectfully—on whether that picture means welfare reform is working or not. The book's bits of friction arise in policy arguments over what the social scientists' numbers mean. With the exception of a tangle over immigration policy, there are very few ideological skirmishes. Haskins and George Borjas both make good historical arguments for the problems inherent in granting full benefits to immigrants. Blank and Michael Fix make equally strong arguments in favor of awarding, at the very least, food stamps and Medicaid benefits to some immigrant families. Two chapters and other comments on families and fathers—the writers include Charles Murray, Rebecca Maynard, Wade Horn, Isabel Sawhill, and Ronald Mincy—should be required reading for all participants in the reauthorization fracas about the importance of marriage. One of welfare reform's explicit goals was to promote marriage and prevent out-of-wedlock births. But because governments don't really know how to do that effectively, both the states and the feds have mostly ignored that goal in favor of the more manageable one of promoting work. The authors here, both liberal and conservative, make a compelling case for fathers' importance to children's well-being. They make equally compelling cases that society doesn't know how to require or encourage fathers to care—most of the programs they examine don't work very well. All agree on removing the few remaining "marriage taxes" for poor families, but differ in the emphasis they put on further experimentation and further funding, as well as on how to increase fathers' employability and to decrease teen birthrates. A list of contributors with their current institutional affiliations appears at the back of the book; brief biographies with the chapters would have been much more useful. The authors are not graduate students entering the debate: Each has a well-respected body of work, either in policy or research, and many have become identified with particular viewpoints. The first chapter, in which Blank and Haskins set out the major issues in welfare reauthorization and their own recommendations, stands out because they disclose that Blank was on Clinton's Council of Economic Advisers for three years, and that in 1996, Haskins was the staff director of the House Ways and Means Subcommittee on Human Resources. A summary of Susan Golonka's experience with the National Governors Association alongside her discussion of how the states have implemented the welfare law, or a description of Charles Murray's pioneering and controversial work on urban poverty, would have provided welcome context for their remarks. Minor quibbles, though, for a book so brilliantly clear about the confusing new world of welfare.
What do you think? Discuss this article in the Politics & Society conference of Post & Riposte. More from National Journal. More on politics and society in Atlantic Unbound and The Atlantic Monthly. Corine Hegland is a National Journal reporting intern. Book reviews appear every week in National Journal, a weekly magazine covering politics and government published in Washington, D.C. For information on National Journal Group publications, see NationalJournal.com. Copyright © 2001 by The Atlantic Monthly Group. All rights reserved. |
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