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The failure of the U.S. welfare system is also, in large measure, a defeat for liberalism—not for its goal or faith but for its methods. The system was begun as an absolute necessity and did stave off disaster in the Depression. In 1935, when unemployment had reached 11.11% of the population. Congress passed Franklin Roosevelt's Social Security Act. It included aid to the unemployed, the old, the blind, and children dependent on adults who could no longer care for even themselves. Unemployment-insurance benefits were, and still are, a dismal way station for many on the road to total dependence. When the temporary payments stop, the only recourse is welfare.
Since the 1935 legislation, additions were made in an unending series, from food distribution to public housing and rent supplements, until the whole began to seem like a giant jigsaw puzzle with parts that would not fit together. Several of the programs have been successful, and are almost universally accepted. Few today would question Social Security retirement benefits; while Medicare had a troubled beginning, it helped establish the principle of national health insurance, which is now substantially backed by both Republicans and Democrats. Yet the whole vast structure remains patched, haphazard and almost impossible to grasp, let alone control—a disorganized welfare state within a state.
Even now there is no universally accepted definition of the programs that actually constitute the welfare system. But there are six basic elements that HEW considers the core of welfare: Medicaid; Old Age Assistance (OAA); Aid to the Blind (AB); Aid to the Permanently and Totally Disabled (APTD); the fastest growing, Aid for Dependent Children (AFDC) and General Assistance, a locally used catchall category.
For none of these programs has there ever been a national, uniform standard. Though the Federal Government pays approximately half the cost of all the basic programs except General Assistance, how much an individual receives is determined by what his state is willing to spend. In Mississippi, a mother and three children under AFDC must live on $840 a year; in New Jersey, the same family would receive $4,164, with no other circumstances of their lives changed. Washington sets some of the rules. To get at the funds, the states and localities meet the rules, often grudgingly, and then set some of their own. Rarely is bureaucracy flexible enough to encompass complex human situations. Often regulations that were sensibly written to prevent abuses end up strangling the system. A collage of the absurdities the rules have wrought:
> In New York, one category of assistance that might be expected to remain relatively constant, aid to the permanently disabled, has more than doubled in the past ten years. The explanation: under state rules, heroin addicts are considered permanently disabled, a judgment with which it is difficult to argue. To get aid, the addict must register for treatment, but—catch-22—everyone knows that treatment is hard to get, and of questionable effectiveness. The money goes largely