As hundreds of thousands of city residents became wards, the repercussions mushroomed. Many black workers disappeared from the employment rolls, families disintegrated “amid an explosion of desertion, divorce and out-of-wedlock births,” and the middle class headed for the exits. Other social changes, including the sexual revolution, contributed to family and social breakdown, but, says Siegel, “welfare was a key ingredient in the toxic brew that devastated vast sections of the city.”15
The welfare explosion was accompanied by a transformation of attitudes as welfarists attacked root and branch the stigma associated with dependency. At the heart of this change of values was the belief that the poor were victims and they were therefore not responsible either for their condition or their behaviors. “The alibi industry had a justification for everything,” writes Siegel. “The biggest and most important alibi was that the poor were so disadvantaged by their environment … that all responsibility for their fate was shifted to government.… The assumption that some individuals might be even partly responsible for their actions was, they insisted, entirely outdated.”16
When Daniel Patrick Moynihan released his paper “The Negro Family: The Case for National Action” in 1965, it set off a firestorm of outrage among the new liberal elites. Moynihan warned that the wave of illegitimacy and family breakdowns was posing a daunting barrier to the realization of full equality for minorities. He wrote: “At the heart of the deterioration of Negro society is the deterioration of the Negro family. It is the fundamental source of weakness of the Negro community at the present time.… Unless this damage is repaired, all the effort to end discrimination and poverty and injustice will come to little.”17
Today Moynihan’s warning seems prophetic, but when it was released in 1965, it ran headlong into the rising tide of racial grievance and victimist ideology.
In an earlier book, A Nation of Victims, I recounted how the discussion of the “family question” fell under an extraordinary intellectual taboo that was to have appalling consequences for public policy. A white Boston sociologist named William Ryan led the way in claiming that any suggestion that the poor bore any responsibility for their plight was a form of “blaming the victim.” For liberals like Ryan, being a victim of racism meant never having to say you’re sorry or suffering the consequences of your misdeeds. Drop out of school? Refuse to work? Father illegitimate children? For Ryan, there was always someone else to blame, and he slammed any fellow liberal who did not embrace this position.18
The idea of the poor as victim was central to the new entitlement culture. In the new “politics of dependency,” wrote welfare expert Lawrence Mead, indigents “claim a right to support based on the injuries of the past, not on anything that they contribute now. Wounds are an asset today, much as a paycheck was in progressive-era politics. One claims to be a victim, not a worker.”19
Any attempt to change the behavior or conduct of the victim, Ryan insisted, was part of the overall pattern of victimization. Ryan shared some of his sharpest censures for wavering liberals who believed they could “revamp and revise the victim … they want to change his attitudes, alter his values, fill up his cultural deficits, energize his apathetic soul, cure his character defects, train him and polish and woo him from his savage ways.” In other words, trying to get the poor to finish school, be responsible for their families, and get a job was part of “a dreadful war against the poor and oppressed.”20
Waging such a war also consisted of focusing on minorities’ lack of job skills and education or emphasizing “better values” or “habits of thrift and foresight.” When Catherine Chilman in her book Growing Up Poor ventured a modest, almost apologetic defense of middle-class lifestyles as “more in harmony” with economic reality, Ryan denounced her ideas as “nefarious.” Poverty, insisted Ryan, had nothing to do with character, skills, or indeed any characteristic of the poor themselves. Poverty was “most simply and clearly understood as a lack of money.”
With that in mind, Ryan excoriated any program that even hinted at changing or “improving” the behavior of the downtrodden, including education programs that aimed to “make up for the deficiencies” in students’ backgrounds that caused them to fail in school. When sociologist James Coleman found that family background was the single most important factor in educational success, Ryan howled with indignation, “Is this or is this not, a clear case of blaming the victim?” It was not. Rather, Coleman’s study was a sober work of social research that has since become the basis for educational reform efforts throughout the country. But it clashed with Ryan’s ideological worldview and indeed the era’s dominant and fashionable ideologies of compassion.21
Welfare advocate Richard Elman declared that concern about the negative effects of dependency was a mere “bogeyman,” and he insisted that no one should be made to feel shame for feeding from the welfare trough.22 Since nonjudgmentalism was the flavor of the day, Elman found a receptive audience among urban intellectuals and activists alike. Mixed with a generous dose of racial guilt, his message was a recipe for a revolution of dependency. Stigmas against dependency, joblessness, and illegitimacy were ridiculed; the very idea of personal responsibility was derided as discriminatory.
Elman argued that Americans needed to “make dependency legitimate” so dependents could “consume with integrity.” Members of the middle class, he insisted, “must dispel our own myth that we are not dependent and do not wish to become dependent. We must try to create even more agencies of dependency, and we must make it possible for all to make use of them equally.”23
Policymakers set out to make it so. Under the leadership of New York’s welfare chief Ginsberg, writes Siegel, “work—particularly entry level work—was, like fatherhood, placed in the trash can of history.” Liberal leaders increasingly sneered at the idea that the poor should be steered toward gainful employment as an alternative to welfare. Activists insisted that it would be wrong to push the poor into what they called “dead end jobs.”24
Arguing for the expansion of welfare, Paul Goodman insisted that “there are fewer jobs that can be done keeping one’s honor and dignity.” Elman jibed that the narrow-minded middle class wanted the poor “to go the hard route, to be … taxi drivers, restaurant employees … and factory hands.”25 These were jobs with no future, he insisted, and among the welfarist elite the idea that the poor should work came to be seen as reactionary, “the northern equivalent of the forced labor and debt bondage of the South.” Instead, Elman declared, they should be entitled to dignity and income through welfare.
The cry was taken up by the emerging welfare rights movement. Declared welfare activist Beulah Sanders, “You can’t force me to work! You’d better give me something better than I’m getting on welfare.” Another welfare mother informed legislators that “we only want the kind of jobs that will pay $10,000 or $20,000.… We aren’t going to do anybody’s laundry or babysitting except for ourselves.”26
Perhaps most famous among the would-be architects of the revolution were two Columbia poverty intellectuals, Richard Cloward and Frances Fox Piven, who quite explicitly and unapologetically “wanted to sever the connection between economic effort and outcome; they wanted, instead, to guarantee a high level of living as a matter of right.”27 The two argued that not nearly enough people were on welfare and they urged a full-out campaign to recruit more of the poor onto the welfare rolls. Their goal was quite explicitly to overload and bankrupt the antipoverty system, thus (they hoped) forcing a fundamental realignment of the nation’s economy by guaranteeing the poor an annual income—regardless of their willingness to work.
This was not always an easy sell. Piven later lamented the reluctance of some civil rights leaders to embrace the culture of entitlement. “We met with [Urban League President] Whitney Young,” Piven recalled, “and he gave us a long speech about how it was more important to get one black woman into a job as an airline stewardess than it was to get fifty poor families onto welfare.”28 Cloward and Piven and
the emerging liberal orthodoxy, of course, thought just the opposite—welfare was far preferable to mere work—and they were willing to harness the “rolling riot” for their cause. They argued that the real power of the poor was “their ability to menace and riot.” They called it the “politics of the poor,” which included “rent strikes, crime, civic disruptions.”29
By 1972, writes Gareth Davies, the entitlement mentality had come to dominate elite liberalism, crowding out notions of reciprocal obligation and personal responsibility as well as the idea that the poor would best be served by opening the doors of opportunity. By then, he writes, “it had become more common for liberals to define dignity as freedom from both hardship and from the stigma hitherto attached to dependency.… Dependency, in the old sense, was almost equated with independence in the new.”30
Welfare reform in the 1990s came largely as a reaction to the excesses of the earlier period, and the rhetoric of entitlement is seldom voiced quite so explicitly now among the political classes. But the attitudes that shaped the embrace of the entitlement culture remain beneath the surface of much of our modern welfare state. Despite political setbacks that lay ahead, the sixties marked a dramatic shift in American culture.
Moocher Nation was born.
Chapter 4
* * *
THE JOYS OF DEPENDENCY
* * *
The converter boxes may not have been a tipping point, but they were surely a milestone in the willingness of Americans to rely on a beneficent government to provide them with all things good and beautiful, or just marginally convenient.
In 2009, the federal government spent nearly $2 billion on coupons to help consumers buy digital converter boxes for their television sets. Several years earlier, the federal government had mandated that television signals switch over from analog to digital and broadcasters spent millions of dollars warning viewers to make the necessary changes. Viewers who had cable or satellite TV were unaffected, as were those who had late-model television sets; but there were uncounted throngs who still relied on the older over-the-air sets. For them to be able to watch Dancing with the Stars, they would need to buy a box that would convert the signal to digital.
The problem was simple enough, but members of Congress were so fearful that they would be blamed for the disruption and swamped by enraged constituents who were confronted with digital snow that they came up with a taxpayer-funded giveaway so that people would be able to continue to watch their favorite soap opera on their old analog television sets. Each TV owner who applied was to be given a $40 taxpayer-funded coupon to buy the converter box. The coupons did not pay the full cost of the converter boxes, but they were sweeteners, and millions of viewers grabbed for them.
Interestingly, the spending and the handout were not even especially controversial: The government was handing out free money, so who was there to object? Demand was so great that the government announced in January 2009 that its $1.34 billion coupon fund was exhausted (more than 24 million households had requested approximately 46 million coupons).1 Not only did Congress extend the date for the transition from analog to digital, but it also provided another $490 million for the freebies as part of the massive stimulus package passed that year. By August 2009, consumers had cashed in nearly 34 million taxpayer-funded coupons (suggesting that millions of the free coupons went unused).
In other words, tens of millions of American tapped in to the federal treasury to pay for something that most of them could have easily afforded to pay for on their own. Millions more were lining up for Cash for Clunkers credits, weatherization credits, and subsidies for new home purchases. But it was only later that anyone seemed to wonder: How had we gotten to the point where Americans thought it was the responsibility of the government to pay for their TVs?
“If the Government Wants to Give Me Money…”
Less squeamish than their American counterparts, the British media routinely publishes exposés of that country’s entrenched entitlement culture. What makes the accounts striking is not merely the extent and cost of the welfare state, but also the unapologetic attitudes the system of dependency has engendered among the moocher class. The Daily Mail, for example, profiled the upstanding Davey family, whose £815-a-week handout (roughly $1,270 U.S.*) pays for a four-bedroom house, top-of-the-line modern conveniences, and two vehicles, including a Mercedes van.2 Courtesy of the government, the family also enjoys a forty-two-inch flat-screen television, a Wii games console, Nintendos, a computer, and four cell phones.
So generous are the benefits that Peter, the paterfamilias of the family of nine, quit work because he figured he could make more on the dole. And was he grateful for the generosity of the working taxpayers who made his lifestyle so bountiful and easy? Hardly.
Even with an annual income equivalent to $66,587 (U.S.), the couple, reported the Mail, still were not happy. With child number eight on the way, they demanded that taxpayers provide them a larger house. Unapologetically.
“It doesn’t bother me that taxpayers are paying for me to have a large family,” explained Mrs. Davey. “We couldn’t afford to care for our children without benefits, but as long as they have everything they need, I don’t think I’m selfish.” She added: “I don’t feel bad about being subsidized by people who are working. I’m just working with the system that’s there. If the government wants to give me money, I’m happy to take it. We get what we’re entitled to. I don’t put in anything because I don’t pay taxes, but if I could work I would.”
Despite filing for bankruptcy just eighteen months earlier after running up £20,000 of debt on mail-order catalogs, the couple routinely spends £2,000 ($3,170) on Christmas gifts alone. And why not? It is not, after all, their own money.
Although this is a tale from across the Atlantic, it provides a useful glimpse of what a successful product of the entitlement culture looks like. And indeed, it is hard to imagine a purer expression of the dependency lifestyle than the Daveys, who live the good life courtesy of Other People’s Money without any sense of embarrassment or shame, their self-respect so firmly intact that they are looking for ways to expand their dependency, especially since the government appears so willing to continue to give them money.
There is an inevitability about all of this, since dependency tends to beget dependency rather than either self-reliance or gratitude. Even if the rather bald-faced cadging of the Davey family might be embarrassing to the original advocates of the welfare programs, the family illustrates how the war against the stigma of dependency can bear impressive fruit.
Yearning for the Dole
The same is true on this side of the pond, and the yearning for the dole is not confined to the poor. An article on The Huffington Post advises would-be writers to embrace their inner moocher: “Find ways to be unemployed, doing nothing, finding enough time on your hands, after you’ve met your basic needs, to wander into unknown realms of thought and imagination. You can’t do it when you’re busy working like everyone else … Avoid this gentle poison by figuring out ways you can mock the system by taking from it what it needs to give you to maintain your writing, and give it nothing back in return.”3* (Emphasis added.)
In other words, if not Mom or Dad or the trust fund, find someone else to cadge off of while you think about writing something.
Gratitude need not be part of the plan.
When a Boston television station, WBZ, interviewed President Obama’s aunt, Zeituni Onyango, the reporter seemed taken aback at her unapologetic sense of entitlement. Despite being an illegal immigrant at the time, Aunt Zeituni had been receiving disability checks of up to $700 a month while living in taxpayer-subsidized public housing. She explained: “I didn’t ask for it. They gave it to me. Ask your system. I didn’t create it or vote for it. Go and ask your system.”4 And, indeed, if the government is handing out money, why not? When WBZ asked Aunt Zeituni whether, considering all that she has been given, she owes this country anything, she “said flatly that she owes this country nothi
ng in return.”
“But it’s given you so much?” the reporter asked. She responded: “So? It’s a free country under God.”
The Problem of Poverty
The problem of poverty is that poor people in America have so much stuff.
According to Census Bureau data, 91 percent of poor households have color TVs; 89 percent have microwave ovens; 98 percent have a video recorder or DVD player; nearly two out of three have cable or satellite television; nearly a quarter have big-screen TVs; 72 percent own a car or truck; almost a third own two or more cars; 47 percent have dishwashers; more than a third have personal computers. According to census data, 43 percent of “poor” households actually own their own homes, and the average home is a three-bedroom house with one and a half baths, a garage, and a porch or patio.5
As analyst Robert Rector notes: “The average poor American has more living space than the average individual living in Paris, London, Vienna, Athens, and other cities throughout Europe.”
To put this in even more perspective: 80 percent of poor households have air conditioning, a convenience enjoyed by just 36 percent of Americans as recently as 1970.
A Nation of Moochers Page 4