Dear Jonah and Ron,
I was braced for the worst with Jason DeParle’s book. He opposed the 1996 reform and did his best, while on the New York Times welfare beat, to stop it. Like TheNew Yorker’s Katherine Boo, he’s a terrific reporter who can tell the stories of poor people without reducing them to stereotypes—but like Boo he sometimes takes cheap shots at the Washington policymakers who allegedly don’t know about these real people whom their policies affect. And at times, in the run up to American Dream, he seemed to be flirting with the implausible-but-attention-getting position that the dramatic 1996 changes didn’t really have much effect at all.
In all of this I was wrong. DeParle was somehow able to put his investment in opposing reform aside and render a clean judgment. One headline for this book, then, would be “STAR NY TIMES WELFARE CORRESPONDENT NOW THINKS 1996 WELFARE BILL WAS A GOOD THING.” He doesn’t take many cheap shots at Washington policymakers, in part because the Washington policymakers—especially conservatives like Robert Rector who predicted work requirements would cause welfare caseloads to plummet—turned out to be right about a lot of things. At the same time, he opens up the lives of his subjects in a way that—as Jonah notes—challenges easy left and right assumptions about them.
One of those, I agree, is the assumption (on the left and in some circles of the right) that welfare recipients can’t and don’t work while on welfare—that they are isolated from the working world. One of DeParle’s big insights is that the finances of welfare mothers are like a “three legged stool”: They get money from welfare, they get money from secretly working while on welfare, and they get money from boyfriends and family. A big reason DeParle’s subjects don’t think welfare reform was an epic, central event in their lives is that, to them, it didn’t replace “welfare” with “work” in some night/day switch—it simply took away one leg of the three-legged stool. Their lives are chaotic and troubled; they’re constantly facing major, sudden setbacks—losing welfare was just another one, and maybe not the most important to them. But they are also resilient and—in Angie and Jewell’s cases—heroic. They see themselves as survivors, and they adapted by increasing their work.
I’m not sure DeParle couldn’t have found other welfare mothers who didn’t work, for whom work was an utterly alien experience. But he convinced me, at least, that the three-legged stool was closer to the norm than the never-working welfare-mom stereotype.
But that’s not the only assumption he destroys. His impoverished moms also:
a) move to Wisconsin for its higher welfare benefits, undermining the traditional left argument that higher benefits won’t act as a “welfare magnet” drawing immigrants to generous states;
b) game the system, moving into homeless shelters before getting apartments because then the Red Cross pays the first month’s rent, thereby undermining the left argument that helping the homeless doesn’t create a perverse incentive to become homeless;
c) have babies out of wedlock not because they don’t know about or have access to contraception (the standard family-planning line) but because they got “pregnant on purpose, thinking a child would bring … something to love.”;
d) engage in a wide variety of self-destructive behavior, including taking drugs, drinking, petty theft, fighting–and, on two key occasions in Angie’s career, using a tax-credit windfall to buy new furniture instead of buying the new car, or renting the new apartment, that would enable her to get a better job; and
e) have a pretty questionable bunch of men in their lives—pimps and drug dealers who think buying the occasional batch of diapers is stepping up to fatherhood.
It’s DeParle’s achievement to detail all these impolite truths while catching you up in these women’s lives and revealing their underlying strength. It helps that he’s picked an appealing central character in Angie, the nurse’s aide, who has a hilarious, no-B.S. mouth on her (e.g., of her live-in man, Marcus: “Motherfucker just not faithful”). I’m convinced that when this book is read decades from now it will be for its eye-opening descriptions of the turbulent daily lives the welfare-to-workers actually lead. Here’s a sample:
Marcus got home at 1:00 a.m., full of Courvoisier. Angie rode up ninety minutes later, with Tony [a co-worker she’s interested in] at the wheel. Marcus swore he saw her kissing him! … Suddenly Marcus was banging on the car window and running for his shotgun. As Angie climbed the steps, Marcus was shooting at Tony’s taillights. Angie brushed past him with a laugh. Hadn’t she warned him that her day was coming? She taunted him with an R. Kelly song about feminine revenge—”When a Woman’s Fed Up”—and locked herself in the bathroom. The next thing she knew, Marcus had blasted a hole in the ceiling outside the door.”I was thinking, ‘Damn! This motherfucker’s trying to kill me!’ ” Angie said.Kesha [Angie’s daughter by Greg, a drug dealer who is in prison] grabbed a skillet. Von [her son] used his fists. Marcus dropped the gun, and as Angie came out grabbed her by the throat. “When a woman’s fed up!” she sang again. Marcus sobbed with rage. Redd [another son] ran to the pay phone and called the police, who found Angie on the porch in the rain, swinging at Marcus with a broom. They wrote it off as a drunken lovers’ squabble and sent Marcus on his way. Up all night, the kids stayed home from school the next day. … “Freedom!” Angie announced the next afternoon. “He can’t come back no more. …” A few days later, Marcus was back, sweeping the kitchen as though nothing had happened.
I agree with Jonah that people like Angie should have health insurance and job training. (A higher minimum wage probably won’t help her much—she’s already making almost twice the current minimum. And she already lives in a state with a generous tax credit.) But health care’s the easy question! The harder question is what to do about the men these women live with. The obvious financial solution for Angie, after all, is to team up with another breadwinner. And the solution for future Angies is to actually marry the fathers of their children! Ultimately, the hope of welfare reformers was that requiring poor single moms to work would itself lead to increased marriage. If replacing welfare with work changed the culture of poverty, that would be a triumph even if economically it was a “wash” for an individual single mom like Angie.
There’s some evidence, noted by DeParle, that a big transformation is beginning to happen. The percent of black children born out of wedlock has finally started to decline, slightly, and more are living with two parents. But American Dream also dramatizes how difficult progress will be—it’s hard to see many of the “inner city men” in this book turning into married fathers, even if we somehow “raise the earnings” of those who are legitimately employed. At the moment, we’re left with a matriarchy of working single moms. I think that’s an improvement, as does DeParle, and I think you can make an argument that it will lead to something better—as these women, or their daughters, begin to demand more of the men in their lives, as their communities are changed by the millions of working women who now never go on welfare in the first place. But that’s an argument we should have.
Jonah cites DeParle’s “disappointment in the Bush administration for choosing extreme work participation rules,” and DeParle does make some noises in that direction. But DeParle also complains, on page 220, that under the current system states don’t have to do much once people are on welfare. “Only ten states had to meet a work goal of 10 percent or more … most states had to do … nothing.” Governors have been able to coast to lower caseloads—and glowing press clips—by letting work requirements discourage people from even applying for welfare. Once they’re on, “hundreds of thousands of the most troubled families [are] left to idle on the rolls,” DeParle notes. That’s the problem the Bush administration’s greater “work participation rules” are designed to remedy. Maybe Bush’s proposed 70 percent work rate is too high. But the Bushies have to set a high initial number when they are negotiating with Senate Democrats who’ve been trying to water down work requirements. And a high “work rate” might be a good thing if it prods some states into providing last-resort community service jobs.
Meanwhile, DeParle is surprisingly sympathetic to the Bushies’ controversial ” ‘marriage initiative,’ a plan to redirect $300 million a year of welfare money into marriage promotion efforts, ranging from advertising campaigns to courses on budgeting and conflict resolution. Much of the Left responded with derision, and the obvious criticisms were true: it was totally untested, the decision to marry is deeply personal, some communities lack marriageable men. But similar things could have been said about teenage pregnancy, which government and civic campaigns in the 1990s helped cut by 30 percent.”
I’m much more skeptical of the proposed marriage propagandizing than DeParle is—I’m sticking with the idea that the need for mothers to work will itself encourage marriage over the long run. I leave it to Ron to join DeParle in defending Bush on this.
In any case, the big unresolved issue is what now happens to “inner city men.”
—Mickey
P.S.: I should note that while DeParle does a brilliant job weaving his D.C. “policy” story with his Milwaukee “people” story, his D.C. story wildly underplays Ron’s role in both writing the 1996 welfare law as a House staffer and selling it to the Republican Congressional leadership. I assume that’s because Ron wanted his bosses to get all the credit.
