THE U.S. welfare system is a living nightmare that has reached the point of the involuntary scream and chill awakening. The nation spent about $14.2 billion on welfare last year, more than twice the outlay of only five years ago. Yet the 13.5 million Americans—6.3% of the population—who received that aid are only half the estimated number of the needy and eligible. Increased by the recession and the growing activism of welfare rights groups, the rolls continue to grow in every part of the country. After 35 years of legislation and programs, the world's wealthiest nation seems caught in a paradoxical trap: the more the U.S. spends on its poor, the greater the need seems to be to spend more still.
The need to pay for welfare has stretched some cities to the edge of bankruptcy; some states are being forced to choose between the poor and the public schools or other essential services. Moreover, the U.S. is distributing aid through an administrative system that might have been designed in a demented collaboration between Franz Kafka and Rube Goldberg. Federal, state and local regulations regularly overlap, producing a punch-card maze from which escape seems impossible. The situation is, as the President said in his State of the Union address, "a monstrous, consuming outrage."
The outrage affects Americans in opposite ways, resulting in an antiphonal chorus of anger. On one side, in helpless dependence, welfare recipients complain that they do not get enough to sustain a decent life. Welfare Organizer Mrs. Johnnie Tillmon vehemently attacks the Administration's proposed Family Assistance Plan as "inadequate and ridiculous. You don't give people dirt to encourage them to work. There's not much incentive in that." On the other side, in the grip of inflation and rising taxes, those who pay the bill complain that too much is being given away to millions who are probably shiftless and lazy. In that view, welfare money means, as Ronald Reagan puts it: "A tax increase next year, the year after and the year after that, and on into the future as far as we can see." Thus the worst thing about the price tag of $14 billion is that it satisfies no one; under the system it is unblessed both to give and to receive.
The Somber Count
So great are the numbers that they numb: no mind can do the sums of individual anguish, privation and frustration that make up the whole. In Chicago, Welfare Director David L. Daniel says that the Cook County rolls will increase from 485,000 at the end of 1970 to 625,000 this year. In Newark, 25% of the population is getting aid, and Essex County Welfare Director Philip K. Lazaro says: "We are on the brink of financial disaster." In Los Angeles, the case load is now above 800,000 and rising by 10,000 to 15,000 a month.
The drastic rise is almost uniform across the states, regardless of geography and size. In the Northeast, Pennsylvania's welfare costs have gone from $314 million in 1967 to an estimated billion dollars this year, and its welfare population has more than doubled; in Massachusetts, 3.9% of the population received help five years ago, while 8.6% get it now. In the Southwest, Texas saw its welfare rolls grow 67% in one year after a change in the laws. In the Midwest, Michigan expects to have one citizen in seven on welfare by 1972; last month Governor