Joel E Handler and Yeheskel Hasenfeld, Blame Welfare, Ignore Poverty and Inequality, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Pp. 416. $80.00 cloth (ISBN 9780521870351); $29.99 paper (ISBN 9780521690454).
Law and History Review, Summer 2009
Joel Handler and Yeheskel Hasenfeld have provided a great service to everyone who cares about social policy in the recent United States. In Blame Welfare, Ignore Poverty and Inequality, they bring historical sensibility and comparative perspective to bear on a detailed recording of policy changes and their effects. Very little of the book occurs in courtrooms. Like the rest of the vast oeuvre of law professor Joel Handler, this work makes the important, although implicit, argument that law happens as much in statutes. in administrative determinations, and in far-flung offices of decentralized bureaucracies as it does in court and must therefore be studied in these locations. Hander and Hasenfeld, a professor of social welfare, bring especially welcome attention to the frontline discretionary authority of welfare caseworkers and their superiors---authority that generations of welfare reformers have promised to eliminate, but which seems inevitable in a system, that is designed as much to sort and judge its potential clients as it is to provide them with financial aid.
As indicated by its title, the book argues that public attention has been mistakenly placed on the so-called welfare crisis, when the focus of attention should have been on the persistence of poverty. They refuse to segregate the "welfare poor" from low-wage workers in their analysis, and instead emphasize the links between the two groups and their shared vulnerability. In a particularly insightful passage, they argue: "In a very important sense, the term 'poverty' is misleading. It not only is seriously inadequate, but it gives the impression that it is a bright line: below it is bad, above it 'everything is OK' , , , People move in and out of 'poverty,' but they rarely move very far, and one bump sends them back below the poverty threshold" (320).
Most mainstream politicians have devoted themselves to drawing lines between the pathological poor and decent workers. One consequence of the line-drawing is that, in a general context of diminishing support, the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC)--a cash payment to "working poor" families that emerged from the wreckage of efforts in the 1970s by welfare rights activists and President Nixon to create a universal income guarantee-has risen in value by 232% in the past decade, as compared with a two percent decline in the value of other cash assistance (81). By contrast, the cash transfer program primarily for mothers and children, formerly Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) and now Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), has continued a long decline. As Handler and Hasenfeld remind the reader, not only did the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996, which killed AFDC and birthed TANF, limit aid to five years and impose new work requirements, it also cut other social welfare programs that were seen as handouts to the nonworking poor. Food Stamp aid, for example, which has helped sustain nearly half of all U.S. children at some point in their lives, declined overall; most legal immigrants Jost access to Food Stamps, although the benefits of some were restored in 1998 (91). The 1996 law eliminated disability insurance for people addicted to drugs or alcohol and changed the definition of child disability under the Supplemental Security Income program such that over half of the children with benefits lost them (78-79).
The only weakness I find in the book has to do with its treatment of sex and gender. Hander and Hasenfeld write about the "welfare queen" fantasy, are perspicacious about the limitations of child support as an alternative to welfare for low-income mothers, detail the failures of the child-care market, and posit as the central thesis of the book "that the country has demonized poor, single mothers" (2). All of this is superb. My objection is that Handler and Hasenfeld do not treat sex and gender norms, or power relations based upon sex or gender, as fundamental causes of poverty or of social policy changes. To understand how our society reached the point it did in 1996, when a Democratic President signed a welfare reform law whose preamble began with the ostensible irrelevance, "Marriage is the foundation of a successful society" (282), I believe we need to understand something particular about gender relations in the modem U.S.; we need solutions that speak directly to the profound gender trouble in which we have found ourselves (as well as to our racial trouble, our immigrant trouble, the low-wage labor market, the skewing of the income structure, weaknesses in the tax code, and the need for more genuinely redistributive social policy).
Overall, Blame Welfare, Ignore Poverty and Inequality is a fantastic compendium of research and analyses of recent anti-poverty policies in the United States. Handler and Hasenfeld seem to have read everything and they care about everyone, including groups that have been pushed to the social margins and assigned to ever more profound levels of poverty by recent economic and policy changes.