“Panhandling’s not a fucking full-time job,” I heard the young professional shoot in the direction of the homeless lady slumped on Jackson Avenue the other day. Every employed guy on the street who could hear over his iPod probably felt a twinge of guilt. If Hillary Clinton had been on that corner and managed to shed a tear, we might as well have handed her the election.
Criticizing the poor for being jobless isn’t new; neither is giving them money. But what do you say to the 3.7 million American households who in 2005 lived below the poverty line even while holding down a real full-time job?
In an increasingly welfare-phobic culture, a new wave of anti-poverty policy suggests that a “business-friendly” approach might be the answer. Instead of just giving the poor money, these programs use handouts to encourage behaviors that might “break the chain” of poverty.
Northwestern education and social policy professor Greg J. Duncan joined three colleagues last month to propose just such a program. It’s called New Hope, and it’s based on a similar plan tested in Milwaukee in the mid-1990s.
The idea is deceptively simple. As long as a worker can document full-time work (30 or more hours per week), he qualifies for an earnings supplement, health insurance and childcare benefits. So if your income falls below the poverty level, you get a monthly check in the mail. The subsidy is phased out once the person’s outside income reaches 125 percent of the poverty level.
And the reasoning is not new. In 1994, Minnesota successfully overhauled its welfare system by training caseworkers to move beyond being bureaucratic paper-pushers and to “approach their job with enthusiasm.” Last summer, Mayor Bloomberg used his own money to begin financing a bold two-year test initiative called Opportunity NYC, which pays its low-income families for completing tasks like getting a library card or scheduling a parent-teacher conference. The technical term for these handouts is “conditional cash transfers,” and their intent is to engender new attitudes that parents will hopefully pass onto their children.
But, unfortunately, sympathetic rhetoric is about the only help these new proposals can offer. (Tellingly, Duncan’s 30-page paper mentions the word “respect” six times.) “Our New Hope policy is a social contract rather than a welfare program,” the authors say in the opening page (PDF). But there are no charts, no statistics – nothing that empirically indicates that “respect” begets better work programs or higher wages after the earnings supplements stop coming.
Duncan’s proposal can’t possibly defend the layers of bureaucracy and paper – two evils the authors profess to hate – that it would add to an already overtaxed welfare system. New Hope and similar programs claim to be simple, but the extra barriers might not be worth the minor returns.
Though the programs aim to wean participants off the handouts, there are no long-term guarantees that they won’t dip back down. As it is, the only infallible “conditional cash transfer” would be one that ensures a full-time employee is rewarded for his efforts by a livable wage. Instead of avoiding the embarrassment of welfare, these new programs insult families with a pity check that says, simply, “Sorry, but your best efforts weren’t quite good enough.”
The reasoning behind pro-work programs is fundamentally faulty. As New York magazine pointed out in its October feature on Bloomberg’s program, it’s people who would’ve already been doing all their good deeds – working full-time, taking the kids to the doctor – who will go through the additional hassle of filling out more paperwork to reap the rewards of New Hope and Opportunity NYC.
Duncan’s motive-driven approach is commendable for at least thinking about poverty over the long run. But wouldn’t it make more sense to confront the problem at its source? Tax incentives to small businesses so that they can afford higher wages might sound acceptable to the right. For the left, more effectively subsidizing necessities like childcare to free up families’ incomes is an enticing option. But throwing the burden, both financial and bureaucratic, on the backs of full-time workers earning sub-par incomes isn’t just irresponsible – it probably won’t work.