Melissa Gutierrez November 3, 2010
The American welfare system has through out history and currently through the enactment of TANF, denied recipients the opportunity to obtain self-sufficiency or independence. One way this is done is through the promotion and focus of work first, which denies recipients the opportunity to pursue a higher education and forces them to take any low-wage position they can in the place of welfare. Therefore the recipient is stuck in a cycle of poverty between wages and welfare, due to their inability to gain marketable skills that would allow them to command a permanent or higher paying position. This unequal opportunity to pursue a higher education between recipients and non-recipients is a example of unequal citizenship status between recipients and non-recipients.
Another way that recipients are denied an opportunity for self-sufficiency is through TANF’s funding of marriage promotion. In the form of financial inscentives such as bonuses for married couples and bonuses for states who keep down out of wedlock child rates, TANF allows the government to promote marriage through federal funding. Marriage promotion fosters economic dependency in recipients on their husbands. Furthermore, it promotes the nuclear family as legitimate and ideal while stigmatizing poor single mother headed families as illegitimate. As political theorist Ronald Dworkin would note, the American government has legislated “morality based external preferences.” This imposition of morals doesn’t respect a citizens “moral independence” to be a single mother. TANF is an example of the government not “being neutral” to “varying conceptions of the good life.” Congress is choosing to divert funds from something Conservatives don’t support, single motherhood, and reallocating it in something they do agree with, an external preference, marriage promotion. This is explicitly saying that the government is economically disenfranchising single motherhood by using TANF funds to promote marriage as opposed to crate services that would help them therefore violating their right to privacy, their liberty to choose marriage or not. The government is violating their right to privacy by implicitly coercing or “quasi-coercing” recipients to become married and denying the choice of single motherhood as legitimate. The government is not respecting individual recipient’s versions off a good family, it is imposing the dominant social norm of a nuclear family as the “foundation of a healthy society” and all things outside of this norm would be subject to economic sanction.
TANF’s missions statements, which lines the walls of welfare offices across the country, is to promote self-sufficiency and independence. There is a difference in theory and practice, TANF states it promotes independence, in theory, they believe they are promoting economic self-sufficiency through the promotion of work first and marriage. I assume that the government defines self-sufficiency as not collecting TANF. Yet, in practice, through the allocation of resources, policies, and federalism (differing state rules and eligibility and sanction criteria), TANF promotes or fosters economic dependence on a spouse or the government.
Mink defines citizenship as “a web of relationships between the individual and the state, relationships that incur both rights and obligations.”1 Mink discusses obligations as “ethical and legal” and they are “codified through statute and political culture.” Rights, are either “explicitly enumerated in the Constitution or have been definitively located in its penumbras by the Supreme Court.”2 As a democratic republic, all citizens have political rights which in theory make us equals. Mink discusses the 1950’s and 60’s as a time for universalizing the civil rights of all citizens through the Court. “Social inequalities” pose as barriers which limit citizens’ ability to exercise our political rights equally. Social rights attempt to create equality, to ensure, for example, “the basic economic security of citizens.” This equality would lead to the equal ability between citizens to exercise their political rights. The paradox lies here, social rights are easier to deny when they lose majority support, yet social rights enable the equal exercise of the political rights of citizenship. The goal is for recipients to not only to have their constitutional rights as citizens recognized under TANF, but to also obtain the social right to welfare, to make it an entitlement again. TANF creates unequal citizenship between welfare recipients as well as between recipients and non-recipients. The restrictions imposed on all welfare recipients (although they vary for married and single women in many ways) degrade the recipient’s rights and deny constitutional protections other citizens enjoy, such as reproductive freedom, a right to privacy, and vocational freedom. Through work first and marriage promotion, recipients are denied opportunities and choices, protected Constitutional rights, that non-recipients exercise.
Additionally, since TANF allows for wide state discretion for TANF eligibility and sanction criteria, it’s implemented differently and the different policies in different states creates unequal citizenship between recipients in different states. An example of this is the family cap, a rule stating that if a recipient has a child while on TANF the new child would be ineligible to receive TANF funds. Yet this rule only applies in some states.
1 – Mink page 9
2 – Mink Page 9-10
