Zealous Toward Social Harmony

An Overview of Welfare in the U.S.

December 14, 2010 at 9:49 pm Leave a comment

The welfare system in the United States varies from state to state, as each economy and fiscal policy can differ.  However, the federal government has influenced how the states receive their funds and through a change in legislation.  States now have gained more control over the ways in which they can distribute cash assistance for needy families, according to an article by Schram and Soss.   The change from the federal program known as Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) to Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) in 1996 signified that states are affected by federalism, but they each can decide their own fiscal policy through separation of powers.  Thus, states try to determine how to provide the lowest possible benefits for their needy constituents, while avoiding the label of a “welfare magnet” state explained as a race to the bottom.

Federalism impacts state policy in a number of ways, such as the way it changed its welfare legislation from AFDC to TANF.  The federal government assumed that too many recipients of welfare were becoming dependent on the system and taking advantage of it.  But, Schram states that the national government was partly unaware of each state’s economic needs and thus limited states funds based on assumptions that “welfare queens” or widowed, unemployed women fed off the system (19).  However, in reality two-thirds of the recipients of the assistance programs were children.  This example of federalism shows that TANF created a new approach to welfare that U.S. state policy would need to adjust and adhere to it.  TANF gave states the right to develop their own fiscal policy, but it also limited their capabilities to an extent.  For example, the federal government restricted states from using the funds to educate individuals for more than a year, to aid legal immigrants, or to assist unemployed recipients who have been without a job for more than two years (Schram 5).  The legislation change intended to finance in a way that would only benefit those whom only the federal government deemed needy.

The states have the ability to maintain authority and thus determine their own welfare system even while the national government enacts federal programs and policy.  The former is possible because of the Constitution.  According to the tenth amendment, states have implied power, which refers to the powers not delegated to the federal government.  So states can carry out aspects of welfare policy based on the socioeconomic characteristics of their populations.  In addition, there is a separation of powers between the state and federal government that checks and balances the amount of power each level of government can hold.  Federalism can make the distribution of resources a complicated effort because of the national government’s perspective that sometimes just includes a general model of what the states need.  States are forced to compete for funds and come up with the most innovative programs to attract praise from the federal level.  Therefore a degree of accountability is enacted onto state governments to maintain their authority and policy command.

After TANF was put into effect, the current welfare system can be described as a race to the bottom.  The federal government provides the states with funding and basic guidelines.  But, there is not a “laboratories of democracy,” where state governments use each others’ governing policy to implement on their state; because the states have become more individualized.  The states are largely left responsible to determine the recipients’ work requirements and length of assistance (Schram 2).  This in turn causes a race to the bottom, which derives from the increase of distribution freedoms that the states receive from TANF (Schram 3).  The metaphor refers to the migration of poor and needy families to the states that offer the best welfare benefits, while their home states lower their assistance.  Due to class bias, which refers to the over proportionate wealthy class in America, states can vary in the amount of inequality among social classes (Mooney 71).  So the race to the bottom can be used to explain the how much poverty states are willing to tolerate.  If a particular state does not want its population highly dependent on welfare than it will decrease its funding.  Thus recipients will be forced to find another state that offers a higher amount of benefits.

The race to the bottom best represents the type of behavior that states implement for their welfare policies.  The state government is given more power under TANF to be able to produce a policy that allows it to avoid becoming a welfare magnet.  The separation of powers within the Constitution gives the states the right to devise a welfare policy that best suits their economy and constituents’ needs.  However, it is because of the class bias that the wealthier population dictates whether the funding will be of high demand or not by the population.  The higher a state’s class bias, then the more likely it will look to implement strict benefit requirements and guidelines for recipients to discourage the amount of poverty.

Works Cited:

Mooney, Christopher Z., Todd Donovan, and Daniel A. Smith. State and Local Politics: Institutions and Reform. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, 2010. Print. Schram, Sanford F., and

Joe Soss. “Social Welfare: The Concepts of Laboratories of Democracy and the Race to the Bottom.” Journal Unknown. Print.

“The Constitution of the United States of America.” GPO Access Home Page. 1 Nov. 1996. Web. <http://www.gpoaccess.gov/Constitution/html/amdt10.html>.

Entry filed under: Civil Rights, Poverty. Tags: AFDC, Aid to Families with Dependent Children, fiscal policy, local politics, state politics, TANF, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, welfare, welfare magnet.