RALEIGH – Welfare reform worked – by promoting work and personal responsibility.
In certain quarters, this basic truth is either ignored or resisted. But a failure to recognize facts does not turn them into opinions. The truth is the truth.
In the latest issue of The Cato Journal, University of Alabama political scientist Michael New performed two valuable services to the political debate over government transfer programs. First, he summarized a wide range of studies – conducted by government agencies, academics, and think tanks from across the spectrum – demonstrating that changes in welfare policy during the mid-1990s were more important than broader economic trends in explaining massive reductions in welfare caseloads.
Second, New added to the stock of knowledge with a new study testing whether differences in the specific welfare policies of individual states serve to explain differences in the rate of caseload decline. In constructing his model, New grouped states into three categories:
• Full sanction – These states immediately eliminated cash-assistance benefits to welfare recipients who did not comply with work requirements.
• Graduated sanction — These states enforced work requirements with benefit elimination, but not on the first violation.
• Partial sanction — These states enforced work requirements by eliminating benefits for adults but not for children in the same household.
North Carolina opted for a graduated sanction. Among nearby states, only Georgia, Kentucky, and West Virginia did the same. Alabama, Florida, Mississippi, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Virginia imposed full sanctions, either right after the 1996 federal reform or at least by 2000.
In his study, which employed economic and caseload data from 1996 to 2002, New found that “the welfare policies adopted by states are a key determinant of the size of their welfare caseload declines.” For every year between 1996 and 2002 that a state had the full sanction in place, New’s model predicted a 3.4 percentage point greater decline than in a partial-sanction state. Every year of graduated sanctions was also associated with a greater decline, of 2.3 percentage points.
There are broader issues of concern, of course. While reducing welfare dependency is a good thing in itself, because it is wrong and debilitating to live off of money coerced from your fellow citizens, the fate of welfare families is also important. Did welfare reform succeed only at reducing caseloads but not in increasing work and personal responsibility? Did reform result in higher rates of poverty?
No. During the period in question, welfare reform was part of a policy mix that resulted in poverty reductions and material improvement, not just in less-destructive social policy.
But that was then. As I wrote last year:
Welfare reform was the product of what the pundit class has so long elevated as the great goal of statecraft: a bipartisan compromise. As long as one recalls that its goals were modest, not revolutionary, the legislation should be seen as a success. Bill Clinton deserves credit for signing the bill. The Republican Congress deserves credit for writing the bill. Previous Republican and Democratic governors deserve credit for pioneering the idea.
So both parties properly claimed welfare reform as a significant accomplishment. Only the hard Left was left seething, a state with which they have more than a passing familiarity.
Now that the hard Left has regained some power, the rollback of welfare reform has already begun.
Hood is president of the John Locke Foundation