RALEIGH — They all said it would be a disaster.
Welfare reform, that is. Self-appointed “advocates” for the poor excoriated the Republican Congress and Democratic President Bill Clinton in 1996 for enacting changes in federal public-assistance programs that imposed time limits, work requirements, and other rules. These cruel, heartless, policies were supposed to backfire — to worsen poverty, to push families into the street, and to force welfare recipients into the workforce before they were ready, thus boosting the jobless rate.
Actual experience differed dramatically from the scary predictions. As the old Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) program became Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), more than a semantic change occurred within poor families and distressed communities. Employment soared. Poverty rates did not worsen and in many areas got better. For the first time, many American families trapped in a cycle of dependency and social pathology began to learn new skills and glimpse a different future.
The 2001-02 recession interrupted some of these positive trends, as recessions tend to do. Unemployment and poverty rates rose a bit, though things are improving again. Even in the depths of the recession, dependency on government remained lower than during previous economic booms. The cash-assistance caseload has dropped by more than half since 1996. About 3 million fewer children live in poverty today than in 1995.
Because a major element of welfare reform involved devolution, states implemented their own approaches to the problem and thus generated varying outcomes. The Cato Institute in Washington has just released a report card on state efforts at welfare reform. It qualifies as good news that North Carolina did okay — ranking 18th in the nation and earning a grade of “C.”
Strong points of North Carolina’s version of welfare reform included a further devolution of authority to counties to design their own plans and a relatively strict approach to enforcement of work requirements. A weak point observed by Cato was little progress in reducing teen pregnancy.
Of course, the mid-1990s reforms were hardly sufficient. They merely set the stage for a fundamental rethinking of North Carolina’s approach to public assistance. As much as possible, we need to reduce government’s role to that of providing a truly temporary, stop-gap safety net for the able-bodied poor — diverting them from the public streets or prisons, essentially — and ensuring that longer-term assistance is limited to the truly disabled and infirm who lack other means of support (including families). True charity cannot be coerced. It must be a private initiative of the heart, motivated by faith or compassion and delivered in ways that respect individual dignity and avoid dependency.
This is not simply a statement of limited-government ideology (though it is that, and should be). It is also a statement of practicality. The sources of chronic poverty lie primarily in individual decisions, unfortunate ones made often by young people who do not fully realize the consequences of their actions. You cannot legislate away the effects of dropping out of school, having children out of wedlock, and failing to establish strong work skills and experience. Yes, public-sector institutions contribute to the problem by not performing adequately (such as our public high schools graduating only about 60 percent of students, and many of them without a truly high-school education). But fighting poverty is about creating jobs and changing behavior — neither of them activities that governments know how to do well.
Hood is president of the John Locke Foundation and publisher of Carolina Journal.