Doleful stories: what's behind the welfare boom?

What's behind the welfare boom? Ask the front-line workers.

YOU'VE just come home from a hard day at work and you flip on the evening news. A reporter is interviewing a desperatelooking woman about how she will be affected by proposed state welfare cuts. The camera pans to her numerous children. The segment ends with the woman saying she doesn't know how she will manage if her grant is reduced.

After watching all this, questions pop into your head. Is this woman telling the whole story? Is she doing anything to extricate herself from her seemingly dire predicament? If she's telling us everything, is her situation typical of most welfare recipients?

For some perspective, I sat down recently with four women who know welfare up close--not welfare rooms, but four welfare workers for a rural Northern California county. We talked about the system and the people who use it. Actually, misuse is a better term in many cases; these four women are mad as H at the abuse that pervades welfare in California, especially in Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC).

With fifty years of experience between them in handling welfare cases, they've got a lot of stories to make you steam. Take, for instance, the AFDC recipient who would "separate" from her husband every time he got a job, so she could keep receiving her welfare grant. When he lost his job, they would have a miraculous "reconciliation." Interestingly, during one of their "separations" she became pregnant with his child.

Another AFDC recipient received $3,000 to $5,000 in tax-free financialaid grants for attending a community college. This woman was supposed to use the money to pay for books, supplies, child care, etc.; instead she used her grant to take an overseas vacation. That's not all. Once such individuals use up their grants, even if they spend the money on luxuries, the government must still pick up their expenses for books, supplies, etc., if they continue in a government training program.

Living High on the Dole

THERE WAS the woman on AFDC who collected thousands of dollars in mileage payments simply for traveling to and from a county program; although unemployed for 17 years, she was able somehow to afford expensive clothes, ski trips to the mountains, and a new sports car. There are the live-in boyfriends whose incomes are not counted against the welfare grants. There was the family with three members getting state supplemental income grants and four members getting AFDC, for a total tax-free income of nearly $2,000 per month (this doesn't include the food stamps, medical benefits, or other subsidies).

Of course, there are desperate cases, for which welfare is a necessity. But the welfare workers that I talked to say that abuses are the rule, and not the exception.

Do government officials care? Not according to these four women. Although a welfare worker in their county might initially deny benefits to an applicant because he or she is ineligible, it has now become commonplace for high-level administrators to ignore stated eligibility policy and reverse these denials.

Such irresponsibility isn't peculiar to one northern county. In a recent investigation of the San Diego County Department of Social Services, a grand jury found that officials had "institutionalized a bias against fraud prevention to the detriment of taxpayers and fostered exploitation of the welfare system by 'eli, nts' and some employees." The "exploitation" had wasted approximately $70 million dollars per year.

Lax standards help explain the welfare explosion in California. Since 1985, the growth rate in welfare enrollment has been more than double the rate of the stale's population growth. While there were 6.9 taxpayers for every AFDC recipient in 1980, at present trends there will be only 2.9 taxpayers for each recipient by the year 2000.

Welfare costs are ballooning. With two million people currently receiving benefits, California is spending $5.6 billion on AFDC alone, a 51 per cent increase in just the last four years.

How to stop the hemorrhaging? Certainly the workfare concept--requiring the able-bodied to get jobs as a condition of aid--holds promise; an experiment in Riverside County helped move a substantial number of people into gainful employment.

In any case, the four welfare workers I talked to strongly advocate reducing welfare benefits themselves, along the lines proposed by Governor Pete Wilson, whose initiative on the November ballot would shave grants by 10 per cent immediately. Whatever you think about the specifics of the Wilson plan, it highlights the very real disincentives in the present system. Today, a family of three on welfare in California gets an average AFDC payment of $663 per month (the average monthly payment for the ten most populous states is $399). Add other available benefits, along with costs that a welfare mother doesn't incur (child-care expenses, for instance) and it is estimated that a family of three would have to earn $1,400 per month before it would pay to get off welfare. Since the monthly minimum-wage income is $737, it's small wonder that welfare recipients have shamelessly informed the four case workers I spoke with that there's no reason to get off the dole (more than half of California's recipients have been on welfare for three years or longer; one in seven has been receiving benefits for more than 8 years).