It was largely lost amid the glut of post-election news, but last week an important political figure called for a major cutback in social-welfare benefits. In doing so, he denounced welfare as a program that created “a cycle of generational poverty, government dependency, and economic disparity.”
It was not a newly elected Republican or a leader of the Tea Party movement, nor was it a conservative talk-radio host or a Fox News commentator. It didn’t even come from analysts at the Cato Institute. Instead that pronouncement, and the legislation to back it up, came from former Washington mayor Marion Barry, currently a city councilman, who has introduced a bill to impose a strict five-year time limit on welfare benefits in the District of Columbia.
Advertisement
The 1998 federal welfare-reform law imposed such a time limit nationwide. But it allows states to use local funds to continue to provide benefits after recipients hit the federal limit. The District of Columbia was one of the few jurisdictions that chose to do so. It is estimated that as many as 40 percent of D.C. residents who receive welfare do so for longer than five years, nearly a third for more than eight years. The bill would cut off not just cash payments under the Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF) program, but also child care, housing subsidies, and other benefits paid for with city funds.
As many as 8,000 D.C. residents would immediately lose benefits if the council were to approve the legislation.
It is important to note that Barry represents the city’s poorest neighborhoods. His city-council ward is 93 percent African-American, unemployment is over 25 percent, and more than one in three residents live in poverty. Two-thirds of families in his ward are unmarried women with children. And Barry’s co-sponsor on the legislation, councilwoman Yvette Alexander, represents a nearly equally impoverished area.
They have seen firsthand the failures of welfare.
After all we’ve been throwing money at poverty ever since Lyndon Johnson first declared war on poverty in 1965 — more than $13 trillion so far, with state and local governments laying out another couple of trillion. This year alone, federal welfare spending will exceed $600 billion, to fund 122 separate anti-poverty programs. During his first two years in office, President Obama has already hiked welfare spending by more than $120 billion. And that comes on top of an $80 billion increase under President Bush.
But all those programs and all that money has done little to raise people out of poverty. Instead, as Barry pointed out, welfare “enslave[s] residents in joblessness and dependency on the government rather than lifting them up and giving them an opportunity to achieve self-sufficiency.”
Tommy Wells, a Washington city councilman who opposes the bill and expects to block it in committee, admitted his frustration that “we have generational poverty, and people seem to subsist on these services and we are not able to get them off.”
The real ways to fight poverty are not a secret. It’s not about giving people money in a vain attempt to make poverty more comfortable — it’s about creating conditions on the ground that enable people to take control of their own lives, to enable them to rise above poverty and to become self-sufficient.
President Obama and the Democrats in Congress never tire of telling us how much they care about the poor. If so, perhaps they should listen to Marion Barry.
If Mr. Barry sincerely wishes to help his constituents, he might begin by repaying some of the money he's stolen, then make a full confession to the U.S. Attorney about his use of municipal funds for drugs and prostitutes.
Until he does this, his opinion has little value.
Afterthought: his opinion has no value in any event.
This reminds me of an incident I remember from when Barry lost his first re-election campaign for mayor and the new mayor was trying to straigthen out the financial mess he had left. I was listening to a talk-radio show on which either the new mayor or one of his aides was explaining that the city budget would have to be cut drastically. They got one call from a young black man who begged that they not cut their summer jobs program (in which the city provided "deserving" young people with summer jobs that paid a decent wage but didn't require much effort). It's a great progam, this dude said, I know, I've been participating in it for five years! I thought, excuse me, isn't one of the purposes of this program supposed to be to teach you the job skills so that you can get a good year round job? If you are still just working in the summers after five years, isn't it a failure, at least for you? Another example of how programs designed to help people can sometimes cripple them instead by fostering dependency on a handout.
I have worked for over 35 years investigating fraud in public assistance programs such as TANF, food stamps, Medicaid, subsidized housing and child care. I have seen first hand how these programs foster a dependency as powerful as any illicit drug. Worse still is the entitlement mentality that has been created among many if not most recipients of public assistance.
Still, to me the most discouraging aspect of all this is the rampant fraud. We just concluded an investigation in the food stamp program (now called SNAP) where a "retailer" authorized to accept food stamps was instead buying buying benefits for 50 cents on the dollar. In other words he would swipe the food stamp EBT card for $100, give the recipient $50 and pocket $50 himself. Many of those selling their benefits were single moms who were also receiving the whole array of assistance programs. Still they still felt the need to sacrifice food intended for their children. Many others were street people who were likely financing their drug or alcohol habits. Interestingly,we continue to hear media reports of hunger in America.
Oh, by the way, this "retailer" whose business was fresh seafood, did over $250,000 in food stamp business in a year, yet only purchased about $4000 of seafood. Must have been some good shrimp!
