How much do you already know about social policy?
What are your own reservations or concerns about learning social policy?
So let's talk about the history of social welfare. We really can't understand social welfare policy without going through a history of social welfare.
So when we look back prior to the 1600's, families, friends, and churches really were how people did social welfare. There were no institutions. There were no formal organizations. That's just how it was done.
Then, we have some shifts that begin to occur in society, including the main thing, which is industrialization in Europe. We had the development of the steam engine that began to pump water out of mines, and that began to fuel the ability for society to move into a larger urban center and to industrialize. So as cities began to grow, the feudal system began to crumble.
So what happened is we had Elizabethan Poor Laws around 1600 that begin to look at people, and we had, basically, people in need were categorized in two different ways into deserving and undeserving. Deserving were orphans, the lame, the blind, the widowed. And then, the undeserving were drunks-- what we now might call people with addiction-- people that were perceived as lazy or unwilling to work.
And then, basically, these two groups were categorized in how they were treated. So the first institutions to care for people were what we called indoor relief for almshouses, but these were for the deserving people. And outdoor relief was for those who were non-deserving. And this was basically forced labor so that people could just have the bare necessities. But that, in a nutshell, is what was going on in Europe.
So when we get to the United States, we have to just make the assumption that there is this huge European influence on social welfare because our history, we have our roots in Europe. So there's this classism built in early on, in which we have these deserving, again, and undeserving people. And again, by class, you have wealthy people and poor people. And again, you have this urban development.
And what ends up happening by the time we get to the post-Civil War to the Progressive Era, we have, basically, our society's beginning to respond to these new challenges, the complexities that are going on. We have charity organizations societies. We have settlement houses. We have churches. And then really interesting is that we have these big political machines, these big political bosses, that are giving welfare support in exchange for votes. It's hard to believe now to think about that, but actually these political machines and these political bosses were really a part of early welfare in the United States at least right after the Civil War.
So as cities develop these more complex problems such as migration, immigration-- honestly, dealing with garbage and trash was a big issue in these industrial areas-- unemployment, exploitation of vulnerable people, homeless youth, and the beginning of what we call the orphan trains. So this is what's going on in this Progressive Era. So for the first time, the federal government gets involved and develops the Federal Children's Bureau to begin to look at child welfare and well-being.
So then, let's just move a little bit forward to the Great Depression and FDR's New Deal. So we have a 20 year period, which really shaped social welfare in the United States. We had the stock market crash of 1929, and that was a big deal because so many people were unemployed, underemployed, out of work, and economically the country was in a really hard time, especially prior to the Second World War. So this is the first time that any major governmental involvement in social welfare took place. So just say it this way, such large scale poverty brought large scale solutions. Society was very complex. And so what happened out of the FDR's New Deal is we had emergency aid programs, we had work programs, and we have the beginning of social security.
Then you begin-- after that 20 year period, you get to the 1960's, and you have Lyndon Baines Johnson's war on poverty. By the 1960's, we actually had 40 million people in poverty. We began to pilot food stamps for the first time. The Civil Rights movement was gaining significant momentum. And then we had the Office of Economic Opportunity, which started in the '60's, but it didn't last all that long. It was abolished by President Ford in 1974.
But what happened, several things came out of that do still exist today. We have the Job Corps, Legal Aid, and Head Start. All that came out in the 1960's dealing with issues around people who are poor.
What we call this time is The Great Society of the '60's and '70's. So you have sort of this Progressive Era going back, where we're dealing with social welfare issues really for the first time. You have FDR, kind of large scale involvement of the federal government dealing with this really complex issue of economic uncertainty. And then, you get to the '60's and '70's, where we just realized there's so many people that are poor that even with the welfare programs that we've had at that point are still struggling.
So in the 1960's and '70's, we had this real focus on education. We had the Elementary and Secondary Education Act for poverty impacted districts. We had food stamps that officially were used, which we now call SNAP. You had Medicare, which focused on people with long term disabilities and then people having insurance in old age. We had Medicaid, which is insurance for people with disabilities. We had job training programs. And for the first time ever, spending on social welfare was higher than what was spent on defense, a trend that's still present today.
So let's move forward then to the Reagan and Bush era from 1980 to 1992. So we had fiscal conservatism and social conservatism, or some people even call this time some Neo-conservatism, where we cut federal spending on welfare, not significantly, but it wasn't growing for sure. So as the economy grew in other areas of spending, it was basically flat. So that's what was happening. And some of the issues around unemployment, inflation, and lower investment were actually viewed as a result of big government of the previous 50 years from the 1930's all the way up through about 1980 so that the problems we now have in the 1980's were really because of all this government overreach, all this government involvement. At least, that was the narrative of the Neo-conservatives.
And so the conservatives were focused on supply side economic reform by cutting federal spending, tax cuts, and deregulating industry. And so what the federal government also did is gave more power to states to handle social welfare issues, and this is the first time that critics contended that this was actually going to be a step backwards because what would happen is if you empower states to handle social welfare as they see fit, then you're going to start to develop major inequality between the states. And in my opinion, that did indeed occur. And also, there is a big focus, then, on privatizing, outsourcing social welfare to the private sector. In other words, the federal government would fund it, but the services would actually be provided by the private sector.
Let's move forward, then, to the Clinton era, where we do end up having some other major welfare reforms under a Democratic president. What we had in 1996 was the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act, which effectively ended aid for families with dependent children and started TANF, the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families. And the big thing that I just want you all to understand about this is that work became mandatory to receive any kind of welfare. So you can't say that people just get a check and don't work. Work was mandatory, and it has been since 1996.
The other thing just to be aware of during this time is that Clinton and Hillary Clinton both were focused on universal health care legislation, which actually failed. It did not end up happening.
Then, we get closer after 2000 to where we are today. And we have George W. Bush. Of course, we had 9/11. We had significant focus on war, and war time, and spending on war. We had burgeoning federal deficits and budgets. One thing that Bush did is he focused on faith-based initiatives. And for the first time, the government was involved in actually funding institutions that were faith-based and could receive grants. And then, toward the end of his second term, we had what we call the Great Recession of 2007.
Then, we get into the past decade or so with the Affordable Care Act in March of 2010 and then continued war. So you see some of the complexities going on with our history of social welfare, and that's just a high level view, a 5,000 foot view, of how we got from in the United States from the Progressive Era to where we are now.
So let's just demystify a couple of things about TANF. Let's just go back to that Temporary Assistance for Needy Families. And it's really just important that you understand this because TANF is a big part of what we think of as far as welfare programs and welfare benefits. The typical family on TANF is one parent and one or two children. That's the typical family. Only 8% of families have more than three children. I say that because the myth is that welfare families are a single mom with 10 kids, something like that. It's ridiculous.
Only 5% of the families actually have more than one adult. 50% of all TANF benefits go only to children, so none of the parents actually get the benefits. They're for children. 44% of children in families that have TANF are under the age of six. Most of the adult recipients, 77%, are in their 20's and 30's. These are not older adults. These are young, parenting age adults. And only 32% of families who meet the eligibility requirements receive any cash benefits. So that's just important to understand. So only 32% of families who meet the requirements actually get what we would call cash benefits.
What was TANF all about? Well, TANF, the goal of TANF, was to end welfare dependency. The benefits were to be time-limited. It was set up to be a block grant, just the federal government would give states a chunk of money. And then, now, states have major discretion in how they administer TANF. They get to decide the eligibility requirements, the income supplements that go with it, incentives or sanctions. In other words, do you have to have drug screens in order to get this or not? And the other thing is that states can actually save block grant funds for economic downturns. So if they don't spend all of their TANF block grant money, they can actually hold onto it. And then, also, states can decide whether they design work or education programs that go along with a requirement to receive those benefits.
Using what you have just learned, reflect on the following:
Social welfare policy in the United States has its history in Western Europe.Â
In what ways do you see vestiges from its early history still playing out today?Â
In what ways do you see significant progress in how we solve complex social problems today?
Exploration of Values
How do you conceptualize or think about the common good?
What does "the welfare of all" look like?