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Last revised: March 31, 1997

NOBODY'S BODY BUT MINE

Women, Kids and Welfare: Are We a Nation of Child-Haters?

by Beth Grimes

Never let it be said that our political leaders in Washington, D.C. lack sympathy for those they perceive as needing the help of government. Most of our Congress, together with President Clinton, have shown themselves to be quite generous with taxpayer money to entities they consider deserving of public aid. Their favorite recipients, as usual, are military contractors and other "needy" corporations.

Poor people and their children are a different matter. The welfare "reform" law, which Congress passed and the President signed last year, guarantees an increased level of misery to millions of kids whose only crime was failing to choose sufficiently affluent parents. AFDC has always provided a brutally unlivable amount of money for a single parent-headed family. Now even this inadequate stipend is to be reduced and time-limited out of existence.

There is a public perception that a large portion of the U. S. budget has been going to fund welfare payments, such as Aid to Families with Dependent Children. The truth is that no more than 3 percent of federal discretionary spending has been for such programs.

In contrast, the military budget soaked up the lion's share of the country's expenditures every year in recent history. President Clinton's request for $254 billion this year, in addition to the added billions promised by Congress, mean that our military spending will stay right up there near Cold War levels. One wonders how many kids could be fed, housed and clothed by that amount of money!

A $254 billion military budget is nearly seventeen times as large as the combined spending of the six countries considered by the Pentagon as our likely adversaries: North Korea, Iran, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Cuba. Military programs, in fact, take as much as all other portions of the budget put together! While inner-city schools deteriorate and 21.8 percent of our children live in poverty, up from 15.1 percent in 1970, we squander obscene sums on weapons systems.

The military-industrial complex is not the only hog at the federal trough. An estimated $150 billion in corporate welfare goes to American companies - more than AFDC, student aid, housing, and all other direct public assistance combined.

This "welfare" is in the form of direct federal subsidies and tax breaks. Some of the more egregious examples: $300,000 to Disney Corp. to improve fireworks at Disney theme parks (Disney's 1995 profits were more than $1 Billion). $4.2 Million was spent to help Ernest and Julio Gallo Winery market products abroad. And that was just last year. Gallo contributions to former Senate Majority Leader and Presidential Candidate Bob Dole's campaigns, his Political Action Committee, and to the Dole and Better America Foundations, added up in the last ten years to about $1 Million. Between 1986 and 1994, $23.8 Million went to Gallo via the Market Promotion Program in the 1985 Farm Bill which Dole helped pass. A nice return on their $1 Million investment in the Senator. Is this a great system or what?

Defense contractor Lockheed Martin expects to receive $1 Billion from Uncle Sam to help pay for the $10 Billion merger of Lockheed and Martin Marietta. Sixteen Million in bonuses will be paid to the merged corporation's CEOs. Nearly 50,000 of the conglomerate's employees have been laid off during the past five years, by the way.

While our political leaders insist on personal responsibility for our poorest, most vulnerable citizens, they fail to require our largest profit-making enterprises to take corporate responsibility for their own financial well-being. Not to mention their responsibility to help the economic system from which they benefit so hugely by paying a reasonable share of taxes. As of 1994, corporate income taxes were only 11 percent of Federal receipts, down from 23 percent in 1967.

President Clinton has held up Wisconsin's law called "Wisconsin Works" (W-2) as a shining example of how our nation can end "welfare as we know it". Among its provisions are: new mothers will go to work when the baby is 12 weeks old (the state will help pay for child care) and the disabled will do as much work as they can handle. Of course, other, more humane conditions of W-2 are that workers who have moved off welfare will retain health and child-care benefits as long as they need them. But critics of W-2 contend that child care will not be adequate and question Wisconsin's estimate that two-thirds of welfare recipients will get private sector jobs. They wonder what will happen if the state's low unemployment rate rises in a recession.

How is W-2 working out to date? According to a report in the Associated Press on December 24, 1996, "Hundreds of families have jammed homeless shelters in Wisconsin this freezing holiday season as a result of the state's welfare reform efforts". A check of homeless shelters found 500 people competing for the 400 beds available at Milwaukee's five family shelters. More than three fourths of them had lost welfare benefits. The AP found that a state hotline set up to help welfare recipients with problems continually rings busy.

Clearly, "Wisconsin Works" doesn't work for everyone.

Given the amount of hardship to be imposed on kids, can we conclude that Americans simply hate children and that we all cheer at the prospect of making them suffer? Perhaps we just despise mothers - some of them anyway - and this attitude extends to the children. Maybe public sentiment about "welfare mothers" comes from an outmoded perception that mothers are either "good" women (married or widowed and at least middle-class) or "bad" women (never-married or divorced and poor). Consider the different ways our government deals with each kind of parent.

The mother of two whose husband has died and was covered by Social Security, receives survivor benefits in an amount sufficient to enable her to stay at home with her children when they are young. She also has the freedom to work outside her home, if she chooses, once her kids are old enough for her to safely leave them. Unlike welfare, her benefits are not reduced by her earnings.

Contrast this with the punitive treatment of the poor mother who must depend on Aid to Families with Dependent Children - which is about to becomeTemporary Aid to Needy Families. The AFDC/TANF Mom is awarded a poverty-level amount and told to look for a job.

If we didn't know that America is a classless, egalitarian society, we might perceive a certain class-based, misogynist bias in the differing approaches to the needs of the two kinds of families. The widow with a Social Security based living allowance was married to a man who had access to a job and the ability to pay into the system. Unlike many of the fathers of AFDC families.

It is in our children's formative years that they most need the stability that only a full-time, loving parent can give them. If the child has a secure matrix from which to move into the larger world of school and community, he or she thrives and succeeds.

Don't the kids of a welfare recipient need her as much as the kids of a widow need their mother?

We hear a great deal about "family values". Where is the call to simply "value families" - all families? Where is the cry for us to love and honor children - each and every one of them - by making sure their mothers are respected and their families' needs are met?

Sources for this column are: "The Buying of the President" by Charles Lewis and the Center for Public Integrity; Report in the Boston Globe by Aaron Zitner and Charles M. Sennott; "Really Ending Welfare" by Joanne Jacobs in the San Jose Mercury News, a Knight-Ridder newspaper; "The Defense Monitor" April/May, 1996 issue published by the Center for Defense Information; the U.S. Census Bureau; Associated Press story of December 24, 1996, on the Wisconsin Welfare System, reprinted by Children's Defense Fund.

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