Womens Interests'Tis the Season for Candor About Gov't Handouts
More middle-class people are accepting federal cash supports and food stamps, prompting Mimi Abramovitz to remind us that middle-class and corporate benefits that aren"t usually described as public assistance also cost tax payers plenty.
Editor"s Note: The following is a commentary. The opinions expressed are those of the author and not necessarily the views of Women"s eNews.
What a difference an economic crisis makes.
Now each day the brutal job market is throwing more men, white people and two-parent households into poverty and onto the welfare and food stamp rolls--some for the first time.
The new poor are showing up on the old welfare rolls causing a surge nationwide. Still below earlier peaks, the numbers are reportedly up a soaring 14 percent in hard-hit states such as Ohio, where the director of a community coalition explained that they used to see the same people come in for help, but now it"s a lot of newcomers. In Fort Myers, Fla., nearly 40 percent of the 812 welfare applicants in October had never before asked for help.
The food stamp program, which also serves the new poor, is adding some 20,000 people a day. More than 36 million, or 25 percent of the population in 240 counties nationwide--that"s 1 in 8 Americans and 1 in 4 children--use the program to stave off hunger, according to The New York Times. A male head of a household who applied told the Time"s reporter how his mind had changed.
"I always thought it was people trying to milk that system. But we just felt like we really needed the help right now," he said.
Once Regularly Demonized
For years, women relying on federal cash supports were regularly--and wrongly--demonized as lazy, immoral cheats.
You also heard well-paid pundits such as Charles Murray, resident scholar at the Washington -based American Enterprise Institute, insist that "poverty results from a lack of personal responsibility."
Critics such as Heather MacDonald and Steven Malanga, columnists for the City Journal published by the Manhattan Institute, a conservative think tank in New York City, shared a similar sentiment, saying things like "children of women on welfare become teen mothers and criminals."
Then there was the "welfare queen" slur that Ronald Reagan made viral with his tale of a woman who "ripped off $150,000 from the government, using 80 aliases, 30 addresses, a dozen Social Security cards, and four fictional dead husbands."
These false yet powerful images fueled welfare reform and other policies that penalized poor women in need for seeking federal cash supports, food stamps and public housing.
Today these negative comments have more or less died down as middle-class people in small rural towns, sprawling suburbs and big cities have lost their jobs, savings and homes and turned to the government for aid.
Stigma Fading
As the new poor fill the rolls, the vitriol that used to be sprayed at single mothers who needed public assistance seems to be fading.
Instead of bemoaning the added cost, Sara Murray, a Wall Street Journal columnist, sympathetically declared that "the recent rise in welfare families across the country is a sign that the welfare system is expanding at a time of added need." It was also notable that the longstanding racialized hostility to welfare did not surface when President Barack Obama"s stimulus package included dollars for states to meet the program"s rising cost.
Faced with the ravages of the economy, Congress destigmatized the food stamp program by changing its name to Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program, or SNAP, hoping to attract the new poor.
Going beyond the unprecedented extra welfare dollars in the stimulus package, word has it that Democratic majorities in Congress may also suspend welfare reform"s punitive time limits and work requirements when they renew the federal law in 2010. And we can also hope lawmakers will fund supports for practical education and child care, options that can lift many women out of poverty.
As more people come to rely on public benefits, this is a good time to look around and
notice the extent to which many people beyond single mothers routinely get a break from the government but do not think of it in this way.
The former working- and middle-class adults who are receiving extended jobless benefits, "cash for clunkers" and the upcoming "cash for caulkers" do not think of themselves as "on welfare." Nor does the public begrudge them their public assistance.
The same goes for the 52 million seniors who were collecting monthly Social Security checks in 2009. Social Security--a cash assistance program for the middle class as well as the poor--was sold as a repayment plan back in the 1930s. The reality is that the taxes taken out of our wages each week won"t repay us. They"ll pay benefits to workers who have already retired and it"s easy for many beneficiaries to take more out of the system than they ever pay in.
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