Melissa Gutierrez October 3, 2010
Draft of Proposal of Focused Topic
The American welfare system is inefficient and not structured well. In particular, the most recent and drastic welfare reform, the 1996 PROWRA Act, and its provision which established the new rules and guidelines for federal welfare, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, TANF, are failing recipients and the country. TANF fails us by denying welfare recipients the authentic opportunity to become self-sufficient. They are denied the opportunity to become truly self-sufficient in two ways. First, the recipients are denied access to higher education or the opportunity to attend a higher educational institution. Second, the recipients are repeatedly and explicitly encouraged to become married by the government and the welfare system. Upon the examination of the text of PROWRA, specifically the language of TANF, it is explicit that the government, particularly congress and the state and local government, are denying recipients a genuine opportunity to obtain self-sufficiency, by promoting marriage as well as by denying the recipients the ability and access, the right, to pursue a higher education, which would allow the recipients the skills and training necessary to be competitive in the market place, hence economically independent. The text of TANF explicitly states that marriage and work are the ways out of poverty. Many individual states and localities choose policies that promote “work first” and ultimately believe that any job, low-wage, temporary, insecure, is a good job.
Upon the examination of the text of PROWRA, specifically the language of TANF, it is explicit that the government, particularly congress and the state and local government, are denying recipients a genuine opportunity to obtain self-sufficiency, by denying the recipients the ability and access, the right, to pursue a higher education, which would allow the recipients the skills and training necessary to be competitive in the market place, hence economically independent. Upon examining the policy history of the American welfare system, the first blatant issue is that welfare is a product of federalism, and TANF in particular grants the states more power over the structure of the system. This allows states to use eligibility criteria and sanctions in order to force women, through the enactment of TANF, into a low wage workforce and/or marriage. An analysis of the policy history of welfare illustrates the government’s intrusion into the private lives and moral choices of recipients and their legal punishments through eligibility criteria and sanction criteria as well as through rules and regulations. The government and interests groups and businesses worked together and through a conservative movement and republican control of the government, manipulated public opinion of the welfare system by the demonization of recipients by portraying them as “welfare queens” and their “illegitimate children.”
The reason that many women remain in poverty, after all, is because they lack the skills, training, and resources to obtain a good job, any job in some cases, and some don’t even have the ability to travel to appointments and training due to transportation access as well as safe and secure child care access. It is essential to understand that the right to welfare, as Mink notes, is an essential component of reproductive freedom and for vocational choice for single mother recipients. A right to obtain higher education if one can obtain it through financial aid is denied by the states based on the criteria of what constitutes an “educational training” (if it is even allowed in the 35 hour a week work requirement) is also denied is many very poor areas. Access to higher education would mean the right to have the hours one spends in a four year institution counted as part of the recipients 35 hour a week work requirement. Many states and localities determine individually for their locality the educational programs that are eligible to be counted as part of the 35 hour a week work requirement for recipients. Many of these localities do not include four year colleges as an eligible work activity, and so through the use of sanctions for noncompliance, welfare agencies deny recipients the opportunity to go to school by also making these hours ineligible for the child care that is subsidized during the hours of the work activity to be used toward the classes. Furthermore, the right to welfare is essential in protecting recipients from the strict and moral based eligibility and sanction criteria of the state and federal governments. Sanctions punish single motherhood for the poor and force single mothers into a low wage workforce and denying them access to higher education. My goal is to illustrate the inequality of recipients citizenship status compared to the citizenship status of non-recipients by illustrating the governments denial of some of the fundamental rights of American citizens have by their enactment of TANF.
The text of TANF explicitly states that marriage and work are the ways out of poverty. Many individual states and localities choose policies that promote “work first” and ultimately believe that any job, low-wage, temporary, insecure, is a good job. Despite evidence that women who obtain a higher education have an almost 100% rate of remaining off of public assistance, the numbers of recipients in college has dropped, as noted by authors Ellen Reese and Felicia Kornbluh. This is due to the fact that local welfare agencies promote work as opposed to long term economic security and authentic self-sufficiency. This is due in part to pressure from the federal government, since TANF is partly funded by a federal block grant, and the federal government provides financial bonuses to states that lower recipient’s birth rates and abortion rates simultaneously by promoting abstinence and marriage. Furthermore, the federal government ranted the states the most freedom they’ve had with welfare since the New Deal through the enactment of TANF, allowing states to deny access to education, services, and healthcare. Additionally, the states via the power granted to them by the federal government are allowed to deny the rights of citizens to recipients, such as reproductive freedom and vocational freedom, this means that TANF explicitly violates equal protection of the law. This violation is a denial of equal opportunity, of equal citizenship, by the coercion of recipients to get married and become financially dependent on their husbands, and/or to become workers who are trapped into a low wage work force due to the denial of a higher education and/or adequate training that would have enhanced the recipients opportunity of self-sufficiency.
The relevance of these reasons is to illustrate the flaws of the welfare system that affect our economy and the future of our country. The text of TANF is federal law, it dictates the lives of the recipients and denied rights once held by recipients, rights that were fought for and gained through the welfare rights movements of the 1960’s. Through the enactment of TANF, the federal entitlement to welfare that was created by FDR was abolished as well. Without an adequate education, recipients will cycle on and off of welfare and remain in poverty, a condition that will affect all American taxpayers and the quality of our society. Furthermore, by treating recipients as legal and social sub-citizens, the government is implicitly legalizing racial and class-based hierarchies as well as the legal perpetuation of male dominance.
The kind of evidence that I will use to support these reasons are books, articles, statistical data, interviews, and research of the text of the TANF act as well as research of the three states, I am in the process of doing more research to determine which states will best illustrate my argument. I will use books to support my argument of unequal citizenship of the recipients through the enactment of TANF. Gwendolyn Mink discusses in great depth the argument that TANF creates sub-citizenship through its coercion of recipients and denial of citizenship based rights such as reproductive and vocational freedom, all though she mainly advocates a poor woman’s right to be a homemaker, and advocates economic recognition of caretaking. I rely on her analysis of recipient citizenship status as a denial of equal citizenship as support for my argument.
Ronald Dworkin discusses the concept of “external preferences” in his piece On Liberty. “External preferences” is the legal denial of equal citizenship through legislated morally based preferences that impose one version of the good life on all citizens, and does not respect the differing conceptions of the good life as equal. By denying recipients the access to services and an education based on their private moral choices to be single mothers, through the enactment of TANF, the government is imposing conservative moral preferences of individuals. Felicia Kornbluh’s The Battle for Welfare Rights will be analyzed to illustrate the necessity of social movements in order to obtain or maintain rights. Kornbluh analyzes many states, but pays particular attention to New York, and discusses policies and grassroots movements such as NRWO, which formed to fight for a right to welfare. She goes into detail discussing strategies, successes, failures, and organizational tactics for improving access to welfare benefits as well as the system itself. Ellen Reese’s Backlash Against Welfare Mothers, Past and Present, will be analyzed to support my argument as well. I would like to use my argument to build off of some of Reese’s main claims. Reese discusses in great detail the conservative movement to change welfare, the barriers that TANF creates to limit or deny access to higher education, and a policy analysis of welfare as well as an analysis of the welfare rights movement. Reese also analyses the movements and backlashes of government in response to the gain of welfare rights. In the end, Reese calls for a new new deal, for the working poor.
I will analyze welfare policy history, the history of the welfare rights movement as well as conservative “backlash” to both of these events through books, articles, and congressional and public debates on welfare. I will use articles to cite opinions and statistics to illustrate the number Through analyzing the text of TANF, as well as through an analysis of federal and three individual states eligibility and sanction criteria, as well as an analysis of the statistics of people sanctioned off of welfare, full and partial sanctions, and rates of return to welfare/people staying in poverty of recipients who went to school vs. recipients who did not go to school.
My analysis will focus primarily on the past fifty years, yet I will also go back to FDR and the New Deal to emphasize certain aspects of my argument, such as the racist nature of the welfare system. I will also use FDR’s New Deal to illustrate the establishment of an entitlement for poor people to public assistance, and I will discuss how TANF abolished this 60 yearlong entitlement to welfare and replaced it with workfare, a wage supplement, as opposed to an income maintenance program as welfare has been. But I will mainly focus on the past 50 years, beginning at the welfare rights movement and I will discover and analyze the time period in which access to higher education became an issue. Once I discover the time period, I will analyze the struggle to access higher education in depth to determine when or if there is federal access for recipients and which states out of my three deny/restrict access to higher education.
In my field, there is a lot of legal analysis, especially in pre law, such as analyzing Court cases, Congressional hearings and debates, Law review articles and scholarly articles, Presidential addresses and policy analysis. In political science we also analyze these areas, but we also build theories, either extending a theory that is already in the field or we introduce a new theory, usually we build off of other people’s research, like taking it to the next step or bringing it up to date or applying theories to current issues.
Mink, Gwendolyn: Welfare’s End Cornell University Press; Ithaca, 1998.
This denial of an opportunity for recipients to become self-sufficient members of society is problematic for many reasons. The most important being the fact that TANF contradicts its own mission statement. TANF states that is was created to assist families in obtaining self-sufficiency, this is in theory. In practice, through the grant of state power, eligibility criteria, sanction criteria, recipients loose the rights they had as citizens before entering the welfare system. When dealing with citizenship, I will be addressing the type that is based on the theory of the “right to have rights.” Meaning, the right that welfare recipients have as citizens to still enjoy the full rights of citizenship they enjoyed before entering the welfare system. In other words, meaning that recipients won’t have to give up their full citizenship and exchange it for sub-citizenship, a denial, loss, or restriction of their rights, upon entering the welfare system. The text of TANF is federal law, it dictates the lives of the recipients and denied rights once held by recipients, rights that were fought for and gained through the welfare rights movements of the 1960’s. Through the enactment of TANF, the federal entitlement to welfare that was created by FDR was abolished as well. Additionally, the states via the power granted to them by the federal government are allowed to deny the rights of citizens to recipients, such as reproductive freedom and vocational freedom, this means that TANF explicitly violates equal protection of the law. This violation is a denial of equal opportunity, of equal citizenship, by the coercion of recipients to get married and become financially dependent on their husbands, and/or to become workers who are trapped into a low wage work force due to the denial of a higher education and/or adequate training that would have enhanced the recipients opportunity of self-sufficiency. The coercion of marriage and work is explicitly done to recipients in America; non-recipients do not get economically punished for choosing not to live society’s dominant ideal of the nuclear family structure. Recipients are denied equality through their treatment by the government versus non-recipients treatment by the government, meaning the loss of some of the recipient’s rights just by becoming recipients, they enter into sub-citizenship. Recipients are also denied equality amongst each other, through location of the recipient. There exists equality between states; the rules in one state could not apply in the next. Family cap is an example of this, in some states, recipients are denied aid for additional children they bare while receiving assistance. In New York however, there is no family cap provision. There can even be differences within a given state, for example, the meager benefits one receives in NYC are nothing compared to the benefits a recipient in Westchester county receives.
To exercise some of our most fundamental rights, we need to be assured that we have access to other rights. The reason that many women remain in poverty, after all, is because they lack the skills, training, and resources to obtain a good job, or any job in some cases. This is an example of having the right to equal opportunity of citizenship. A right to obtain higher education if one can obtain it through financial aid is denied by the states based on the criteria of what constitutes an “educational training” (if it is even allowed in the 35 hour a week work requirement) is also denied is many very poor areas. In NYC for example, while non-recipients who are poor and can get Pell and TAP are allowed to go to school, recipients who get Federal Pell and state TAP are told that they cannot go to school, because welfare doesn’t recognize their right to equality. Some recipients don’t even have the ability to travel to appointments and training due to transportation access as well as safe and secure child care access. They need the right to safe and secure childcare and the right to adequate transportation if none is available in order to even comply let alone exercise true vocational freedom. My goal is to illustrate the inequality of recipient’s citizenship status compared to the citizenship status of non-recipients by illustrating the government’s denial of some of the fundamental rights that American citizens have by their enactment of TANF. Furthermore, by treating recipients as legal and social sub-citizens, the government is implicitly legalizing racial and class-based hierarchies as well as the legal perpetuation of male dominance. Gwendolyn Mink discusses in great depth the argument that TANF creates sub-citizenship through its coercion of recipients and denial of citizenship based rights such as reproductive and vocational freedom, all though she mainly advocates a poor woman’s right to be a homemaker, and advocates economic recognition of caretaking. I rely on her analysis of recipient citizenship status as a denial of equal citizenship as support for my argument. Also, Ronald Dworkin discusses the concept of “external preferences” in his piece On Liberty. “External preferences” is the legal denial of equal citizenship through legislated morally based preferences that impose one version of the good life on all citizens, and does not respect the differing conceptions of the good life as equal. By denying recipients the access to services and an education based on their private moral choices to be single mothers, through the enactment of TANF, the government is imposing conservative moral preferences of individuals. The government, interests groups and businesses worked together and through a conservative movement and republican control of the government, to manipulate public opinion of the welfare system by the demonization of recipients through the portrayal of them as “welfare queens” and their “illegitimate children.” This is an example of an external preference, that preference of the Republicans, being the nuclear family and work first, which manifested into bad policy, that is bad governing and I will illustrate why. Furthermore, this demonization of recipients creates a problem for mobilization due to the stigma created, and it also creates a barrier for people to truly understand the welfare system. Felicia Kornbluh’s The Battle for Welfare Rights will be analyzed to illustrate the necessity of social movements in order to obtain or maintain rights. Kornbluh analyzes many states, but pays particular attention to New York, and discusses policies and grassroots movements such as NRWO, which formed to fight for a right to welfare. She goes into detail discussing strategies, successes, failures, and organizational tactics for improving access to welfare benefits as well as the system itself. Ellen Reese’s Backlash Against Welfare Mothers, Past and Present, will be analyzed to support my argument as well. I would like to use my argument to build off of some of Reese’s main claims. Reese discusses in great detail the conservative movement to change welfare, the barriers that TANF creates to limit or deny access to higher education, and a policy analysis of welfare as well as an analysis of the welfare rights movement. Reese also analyses the movements and backlashes of government in response to the gain of welfare rights. In the end, Reese calls for a new new deal, for the working poor.
Upon examining the policy history of the American welfare system, the first issue is that welfare is a product of federalism, and TANF in particular grants the states more power over the structure of the system. This allows states to use eligibility criteria and sanctions in order to force women, through the enactment of TANF, into a low wage workforce and/or marriage and to attempt to control recipient fertility. Furthermore, TANF is partly funded by a federal block grant, and the federal government provides financial bonuses to states that lower recipient’s birth rates and abortion rates simultaneously by promoting abstinence and marriage. Both the state and the federal government are denying recipients the full rights of cit citizenship hence are treating the recipients as sub-citizens. An analysis of the policy history of welfare illustrates the government’s intrusion into the private lives and moral choices of recipients and their legal punishments through eligibility criteria and sanction criteria as well as through rules and regulations. Furthermore, the federal government granted the states the most freedom they’ve had with welfare since the New Deal through the enactment of TANF, allowing states to deny access to education, services, and healthcare.
Sanctions and eligibility criteria punish single motherhood for the poor and force single mothers into a low wage workforce and denying them access to higher education. In essence, they are denying the option of single motherhood as economically feasible and legally protected. Many states and localities determine individually for their locality the educational programs that are eligible to be counted as part of the 35 hour a week work requirement for recipients. Many of these localities do not include four year colleges as an eligible work activity, and so through the use of sanctions for noncompliance, welfare agencies deny recipients the opportunity to go to school by also making these hours ineligible for the child care that is subsidized during the hours of the work activity to be used toward the classes. Despite evidence that women who obtain a higher education have an almost 100% rate of remaining off of public assistance, the numbers of recipients in college has dropped, as noted by authors Ellen Reese and Felicia Kornbluh. This is due to the fact that local welfare agencies promote work as opposed to long term economic security and authentic self-sufficiency.
It is essential to understand that the right to welfare, as Mink notes, is an essential component of reproductive freedom and for vocational choice for single mother recipients. Through TANF’s work first policy, denial of higher education, promotion of marriage, and family cap policies, these freedoms are denied by the welfare system. Through a right to assistance though, a woman could in theory be independent, until the system is altered, it will be just that, a theoretical right. The right to welfare if administered properly (the system and the right) would allow for the true exercise of reproductive and vocational freedom, but presently, the system denies these rights to recipients. Access to higher education would mean the right to have the hours one spends in a four year institution counted as part of the recipients 35 hour a week work requirement. Furthermore, the right to welfare is essential in protecting recipients from the strict and moral based eligibility and sanction criteria of the state and federal governments. Without an adequate education, recipients will cycle on and off of welfare and remain in poverty, a condition that will affect all American taxpayers and the quality of our society.
To make my argument, I will examine books, articles, statistical data, interviews, and research of the text of the TANF act as well as research of the three states, I am in the process of doing more research to determine which states will best illustrate my argument. I will use books to support my argument of unequal citizenship of the recipients through the enactment of TANF. My analysis will focus primarily on the past fifty years, yet I will also go back to FDR and the New Deal to emphasize certain aspects of my argument, such as the racist nature of the welfare system. I will also use FDR’s New Deal to illustrate the establishment of an entitlement for poor people to public assistance, and I will discuss how TANF abolished this 60 yearlong entitlement to welfare and replaced it with workfare, a wage supplement, as opposed to an income maintenance program as welfare has been. But I will mainly focus on the past 50 years, beginning at the welfare rights movement and I will discover and analyze the time period in which access to higher education became an issue. Once I discover the time period, I will analyze the struggle to access higher education in depth to determine when or if there is federal access for recipients and which states out of my three deny/restrict access to higher education. Through analyzing the text of TANF, as well as through an analysis of federal and three individual states eligibility and sanction criteria, as well as an analysis of the statistics of people sanctioned off of welfare, full and partial sanctions, and rates of return to welfare/people staying in poverty of recipients who went to school vs. recipients who did not go to school. I will analyze welfare policy history, the history of the welfare rights movement as well as conservative “backlash” to both of these events through books, articles, and congressional and public debates on welfare. I will use articles to cite opinions and statistics to illustrate the number.
Dworkin, Ronald: On Liberty
Mink, Gwendolyn: Welfare’s End Cornell University Press; Ithaca, 1998.
Kornbluh, Felicia: The Battle for Welfare Rights University of Pennsylvania Press; Philadelphia, 2007.
Reese, Ellen: Backlash Against Welfare Mothers, Past and Present University of California Press, 2005.
Through TANF, the federal government gives the states the ability to impose moral based eligibility requirements. Restrictions placed on recipients by TANF welfare policy are placed carefully in an implicit manner, because the government must respect the Constitution and cannot force labor of lifestyle (reproductive, relationship) demands on recipients explicitly. So the states and individual counties impose these morality based requirements which coerce recipients into certain personal relationships and jobs. For economic purposes, the effects of the “labor market,” and wages, welfare was turned from an “income maintenance program” to a “wage supplement.” (Somewhere in intro)
