Editor's Note

As a write this note, the news in the morning Washington Post is that the Bush administration has begun to turn its attention to the upcoming reauthorization of the welfare system.  Initial indications are that the administration will recommend that spending remain at exactly the level it has been over the past five years, approximately $16.5 billion annually.  Also proposed is a new goal for the welfare system – the promotion of marriage.  This apparently would be implemented by giving financial incentives to states and communities that adopt measures that lead to an increase in the number of low-income people who get, and stay, married.  Beyond these broad parameters, the administration’s proposals for welfare reform have yet to be spelled out.  The politics surrounding this reauthorization process promise to be as heated and emotionally fraught as any policy debate in recent years in Washington. 

 

The welfare reauthorization process is an important opportunity for members of the Public Policy Section to play a useful role in bridging the gap between research and practice.  Among our members are many scholars who have focused a considerable portion of their research activities on the implementation of welfare and impacts of welfare policies on low-income families, children, workers, and others.  This issue of Policy Currents continues the third article on welfare reform in the series of contributions that was initiated in the previous newsletter with articles by Mark Rom and Lawrence Mead.

 

In this issue, Christine A. Kelleher and Susan Webb Yackee report on the experience of welfare reform in North Carolina.  The paper focuses specifically on the ways that local officials have responded to the new sets of incentives and constraints associated with “second-order” devolution of welfare responsibilities.  Among their most interesting findings is the variation in the appetites of local officials for even more devolution of policy responsibilities to the local level.  The greatest enthusiasm for additional devolution is found not among those policy professionals who have had the closest experience with welfare reform, but among policy and political generalists within county government such as county commissioners.

 

In keeping with this series of articles on welfare reform, several new books have recently come to my attention on this topic.  Let me briefly mention three.  Gertrude Schaffner Goldberg and Sheila D. Collins sent me a copy of their new book, Washington’s New Poor Law: Welfare “Reform” and the Roads Not Taken, 1935 to the Present (New York: The Apex Press, 2001), which is a spirited analysis of the choices that have been made through the years in fashioning the American welfare system.  This book usefully distinguishes several phases in the development of welfare, including the periods during the Great Depression and the early post-World War II years, the dramatic expansion of welfare activities during the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, the various reforms that were debated and occasionally adopted during the period from 1967 through 1980, and the conservative reforms that were adopted during the Reagan and Clinton administrations.  One of the recurrent themes of the book is reflected in its subtitle, “the roads not taken,” at various junctures in American politics.  Specifically, the authors point to the need to take seriously the linkage between welfare and economic policies that might guarantee employment opportunities for poor persons.  

 

A second book that I just received is William Roth’s The Assault on Social Policy (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002).  Roth’s book broadens the focus from welfare policy to the larger array of social policies that have been developed in the period from the New Deal forward, including welfare, disability policies, Social Security, and health care.  His book is an analysis of the political forces that he sees as responsible for the limited scope of social policy in America.  In many respects, his book recalls the penetrating and often caustic arguments articulated by Thorstein Veblen almost eight decades ago.  Like Veblen, Roth points to the role of corporations in distorting the images that the public has of low-income people and in shaping public policies to skew the distribution of wealth toward the highest income brackets. 

 

I would strongly recommend that anyone interested in welfare reform pick up a copy of Rebecca Blank and Ron Haskins’ edited volume, The New World of Welfare (Washington: Brookings Institution, 2001).  This volume contains a very useful collection of articles analyzing various impacts of welfare in the wake of the 1996 reforms.  These impacts include work levels and wages, family income and poverty rates, family formation, children’s well-being, the role of fathers, and more.  As with any edited volume, not all the papers are equally well-executed or fit together especially well.  In particular, in this volume there is a disparate quality to the papers that focus on econometric analyses, those that are devoted principally to policy advocacy, and those that seek to locate the welfare reform process into a larger political context.  Yet, there is a lot of meat in the various papers in the volume.  It is well worth reading.

 

Finally, let me add that I would very much like to continue this series of articles on welfare and the issues that should inform the developing debate on the reauthorization of welfare.  I would also welcome articles on other topics.  For example, I would be quite interested in a new series of articles on Children and Public Policy, addressing questions on the politics by which children’s issues compete for attention in the policy agenda, as well as substantive issues relating to the direction of early childhood programs and children’s health policy.   If you would like to contribute an article on the topic of welfare reform, Children and Public Policy, or on a different topic, please contact me by email at kbickers@indiana.edu or by phone at 812-855-4198.

 

Best regards,

 

Ken Bickers

Editor, Policy Currents

Associate Director, Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis, Indiana University