• U.S.

THE MYTH ABOUT WELFARE MOMS

5 minute read
Michael Kramer

WHO’S THE LATEST PUBLIC ENEMY NO. 1? THE unwed mom. “The epidemic of illegitimacy is our most serious social problem,” says Bill Clinton. “It drives everything else,” says Charles Murray, the conservative sociologist–“crime, drugs, poverty, illiteracy, welfare, homelessness.”

What to do? Most everyone, it seems, has the same answer: cut off payments to mothers who have additional kids while on welfare. “There’s no question,” the President said in 1993, that reducing welfare benefits “would be some incentive for people not to have dependent children out of wedlock.”

“Nonsense,” says Daniel Moynihan, the New York Senator and a leading expert on social decay. “We really don’t know what to do, and anyone who thinks that cutting benefits can affect sexual behavior doesn’t know human nature.”

Guess who’s won this argument so far. Ten states have already slashed payments to welfare moms who bear more kids, and Congress may soon mandate the same measure nationwide. Yet Moynihan is right, as a new study proves.

The rush to judgment on this issue began in 1992, when New Jersey enacted its “family-cap” law. Since Aug. 1, 1993, women on welfare who have another child are denied additional cash assistance, an amount that varies from $64 to $102 a month depending on family size. Profound “positive” effects were claimed for the new law almost immediately. The key analysis was conducted by June O’Neill, who now directs the Congressional Budget Office. O’Neill, who had been hired by New Jersey to defend a lawsuit aimed at overturning the law, found “strong evidence that the family cap … generated a significant change in the decision of single mothers to have an additional child.” How significant? The reduction in births among women aware that their benefits would decrease ranged up to 29%, she said.

Other social scientists were incredulous. “Her work contradicted everything that had come before,” says Sheldon Danziger, a public-policy professor at the University of Michigan. As experts scratched their head, most politicians salivated. O’Neill had confirmed a “silver bullet” solution to a vexing social problem. Only New Jersey’s Republican Governor, Christine Whitman, courageously refused to endorse O’Neill’s conclusions, preferring to wait for the results of a larger and more objective investigation.

That study, a five-year inquiry by a group of Rutgers University researchers, has now produced its first in-depth report of the family-cap policy. It directly contradicts O’Neill’s findings. After closely monitoring 4,428 mothers–2,999 who were penalized if they had more children while on welfare and a control group of 1,429 who were not–the Rutgers team says there is “no reduction in the birthrate of welfare mothers attributable” to the family cap. The dissonance between O’Neill and Rutgers is largely explained by three factors: a general decline in births; a slight decrease in illegitimacy, perhaps imputable to the growing rage against bearing children out of wedlock; and, above all, a reporting delay predicted by independent researchers when O’Neill announced her conclusions late last year. “It seems that many women mistakenly thought they’d be cut off from welfare altogether if they had another kid,” says Michael Laracy, who studied welfare policy for New Jersey for 17 years. “When they realized they’d only lose the additional cash payments but could still get food stamps and Medicaid, they reported their new births.”

What does O’Neill say of the Rutgers work? “There are lots of ways to look at data, and I haven’t seen their report,” she says, although a copy was sent to her last week. Charles Murray, who glowingly accepted O’Neill’s work when it first appeared, now says, “I never thought some small family-cap disincentive would work. I think the key to what’s happening here is the growing stigma that’s attaching to illegitimacy across the population.” The Heritage Foundation’s Robert Rector, who more than anyone else used O’Neill’s work to urge copycat laws elsewhere, says, “I never expected O’Neill’s results in the first place, but even if she’s wrong, giving new money for new babies just sends the wrong moral message and should be stopped on those grounds alone.” Laracy is focused on the kids and argues just the opposite: “Cut off from benefits, they’ll be worse off, with a greater chance to be abused, to be ill fed and to do poorly in life.”

Two federal politicians are pushing hardest to extend family caps everywhere. Missouri Representative Jim Talent is honest enough to say, “We may have to revisit the scholarly underpinnings of our argument, but on the other hand, everyone has a study, right?” Florida Representative Clay Shaw, who pushed the family cap through the House, simply ignores the Rutgers findings: “We have found through our studies that there are kids out there who are having children because of the cash they’re going to receive.”

With the welfare bill stalled in the Senate as lawmakers fight over allocating a smaller pot of money, Shaw’s facts-be-damned attitude drives Moynihan to distraction. “Knowing what you don’t know is a form of knowledge and the beginning of wisdom,” he says. “If nothing else, the Rutgers work should finally cause us to slow down and consider what we’re doing.” And how much would Moynihan bet that his colleagues follow his advice? “Oh,” he says, “about nothing.”

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