(2 of 5)
The welfare label covers a welter of programs, with differing aims and benefits. Aid to dependent children is the largest (5,609,000 recipients, $41.85 a month average per person), but there are also the programs of old-age assistance (2,019,000, $67.70 per person), aid to the blind (81,200, $91.05 per person), aid to the permanently and totally disabled (670,000, $81.10 per person), and general assistance (737,000, $44.65 per person). The system's methods are aimless, and have been an important factor in the breakup of slum families. So as not to encourage able-bodied men to stay around the house, long-standing rules in many states have barred aid to families that had a father at home. It was all right, the reasoning went, to give money to widowed or abandoned mothers and their children, but not to fathers and their children. The results: an unemployed or low-paid father could either see his family starve or he could desert. Many deserted. To make sure that wives and husbands—or women and their lovers—were not breaking the rules, welfare departments adopted the secret-police practice of knocking on the door in the middle of the night to see who was sharing the mother's bed. The Supreme Court effectively outlawed- that unsavory custom only last June. Until last July, Welfare laws refused even to recognize the psychological motive of incentive: every penny of every dol lar earned by a welfare recipient was deducted from his benefits. Welfare, in effect, imposed a confiscatory 100% tax on initiative.
The system is, in short, almost totally pernicious. Not trusting the poor to spend their own money, most departments figure their needs down to the shoestrings and hairpins. New York City, for example, will allow a family enough money for such items of furniture as a $30 couch, a $12 dinette table, and a $33 bed (single). A woman is budgeted enough each year for only one lipstick —two if she is employed—two pairs of nylons (750 a pair), and a $3 hat. She can have a $5 raincoat every two years, and a $5 bathrobe every three. The cost of calculating and checking on such items is huge; administrative expenses account nationwide for 100 out of every welfare dollar. For the poor, the psychological cost of this paternalism is almost as bad as the large P that was sewed on the clothes of everyone receiving relief money in colonial Pennsylvania.
Filling the Gaps
Yet the most damning indictment of welfare is not that it is inefficient or costs too much. Enormous as the expenditures are, they provide help for only a third of the 26,900,000 Americans who suffer from poverty. The rest must make do by themselves. "The gaps are too many," says Charles Schottland, dean of Brandeis' school of social welfare. "The system has failed because there are too many people falling into the cracks." A concerted attempt to fill the gaps has been one of the prime causes of today's welfare problem. People who have always been eligible for welfare are now signing up, while many who are already on welfare are asking for benefits that were always available but rarely requested.