What would solve the underclass problem? Start with the consensus explanation for how the mainly black underclass was formed in the first place. As told by University of Chicago sociologist William Julius Wilson, the story goes like this: When Southern blacks migrated North, they settled, thanks to segregation, in urban ghettos. Then, beginning in the 1960s, two things happened. First, well-paying, unskilled jobs started to leave the cities for the suburbs. Second, middle-class blacks, aided by civil-rights laws, began to leave as well. This out-migration left the poorest elements of black society behind-now isolated and freed from the restraints the black middle class had imposed. Without jobs and role models, those left in the ghettos drifted out of the labor market.
But this story leaves a crucial question hanging-a question asked by John Kasarda of the University of North Carolina: How were “economically displaced inner-city residents able to survive?” Kasarda’s answer: “welfare programs.” He notes that by 1982, in the central cities, there were more black single mothers who weren’t working than who were. And 80 percent of these nonworking single mothers were getting some form of welfare, mainly Aid to Families with Dependent Children. AFDC not only provided an “economic substitute” for jobs, it provided that substitute in a form available, by and large, only to mothers in broken homes.
Bush spokesman Marlin Fitzwater had a point, then, when he blamed ghetto poverty on welfare programs. Welfare may not have been the main cause of the underclass, but it enabled the underclass to form. Without welfare, those left behind in the ghetto would have had to move to where the jobs were. Without welfare, it would have been hard for single mothers to survive without forming working families. Instead, between 1965 and 1974, the welfare rolls exploded-from 4.3 million recipients to 10.8 million. Simultaneously, the proportion of black children in single-mother homes jumped from 33 to over 50 percent.
So if welfare is what enabled the underclass to form, might not altering welfare somehow “de-enable” the underclass? Certainly, if we’re looking for a handle on the culture of poverty, there is none bigger than the cash welfare programs that constitute 65 percent of the legal income of single mothers in the bottom fifth of the income distribution. Changing welfare to break the culture of poverty will take something much more radical, however, than the mild welfare reform Congress enacted in 1988. The 1988 law-which basically requires 10 percent of the welfare caseload to attend training classes or work part-time-is expected, at best, to reduce welfare rolls by a few percentage points.
But what if cash welfare (mainly AFDC and food stamps) were replaced with the offer of a useful government job paying just below the minimum wage? Single mothers (and anyone else) who needed money would not be given a cheek. They would be given free day care for their children. And they would be given the location of a government job site. If they showed up and worked, they’d be paid for their work. To make working worthwhile, the incomes of all low-wage workers would be boosted to the poverty line by expanding the Earned Income Tax Credit.
In this regime, young women contemplating single motherhood would think twice about putting themselves in a position where they would have to juggle mothering with working. Life as it is too often lived in the ghetto-in broken homes with no workers-would simply become impossible. The natural incentives to form two-parent families would reassert themselves. But even children of single mothers would grow up in homes structured by the rhythms and discipline of work.
This is not a new idea. It’s an obvious idea even. It’s basically the approach Franklin D. Roosevelt took in 1935 when he replaced cash welfare with government jobs in the Works Progress Administration (WPA). Recently, a group of congressmen, led by Sen. David Boren of Oklahoma, proposed reviving the WPA, with about 75 percent of the jobs reserved for welfare mothers.
The objections to this idea are obvious, too. Replacing welfare with a neo-WPA would be very expensive-a reasonable estimate is around $50 billion a year. There would be ample potential for boondoggles. And the transition from the current welfare system would be harsh. Many who now support themselves on AFDC would simply fail to work. For those who wind up destitute, there would have to be a beefed-up system of in-kind support (soup kitchens, shelters, and the like).
Nevertheless, for all these pitfalls, the WPA approach has a virtue not shared by any of the other remedies offered up in the wake of the L.A. riots: it would work. Not within one generation, necessarily, or even two. But it would work eventually. Welfare is how the underclass (unhappily, unintentionally) survives. Change welfare, and the underclass will have to change as well.
