It is no secret that the term “welfare” ignites polarizing, emotional opinion within
the United States. Since the New Deal emerged in 1935, conservatism and liberalism
have experienced heated debate over government’s role in social welfare. Conservative
views echo old American values of individualism and personal responsibility while
support is for limited-temporary-government assistance. Liberalism, in turn, advocates
for government, particularly federal government, to play a central role in supporting
disadvantaged groups while monitoring the wealthiest-most-powerful influences on the
economy. But, what is social welfare and what does it mean to the average American?
Furthermore, how does personal experience influences one’s attitude toward welfare in
the United States? While discussing social welfare with two individuals, one thing rang
clear: welfare is very much a subject assigned to lower income, poor, and disadvantaged
groups. As much as the middle and upper classes may feel involved in the discussions,
welfare remains an “us and them” topic.
“Lou”
“Welfare is great, I think it’s great”, says Lou, a white 26-year-old male from an affluent community by the sea, who is about to embark on his graduate studies in “Theatre Directing” at the Yale School of Drama. This attitude is based on what he’s read in the newspaper, his parents, and what he observed throughout his many years of private schooling. Describing his family as the “lower part” of an upper-middle class, Lou qualified for financial aid throughout all of his schooling. He reflects on how remarkable it was that even his home owning, well-educated, working family couldn't afford the “sticker price of private education”. His father, a merchant-seaman / carpenter / nurse, and his mother, a master’s degree holding occupational therapist, supported his goals throughout his growing up by sending him to private high school and encouraging theatre as an activity. He went to school with students “a lot wealthier than I”, but never felt that his financial aid likened him to a welfare recipient. As someone privy to high quality education, Lou is strongly in favor of need based financial aid and affirmative action. Explaining, “affirmative action is so necessary to at the very least acknowledge how unfair the system is” and that diversity of various kinds is better for everybody – certainly in arts education. Pausing to think about his phrasing, he adds a little devilishly, “Also, you know... to pop a little pin in the balloon of white middle / upper class people’s idea that they did everything on their own because they worked hard”. He clarifies, “I’m not saying I didn’t work hard, I’m not saying my parents didn’t work hard, but I think in the grand scheme of things, the choices I’ve been able to make and my opportunities were because of what was happening for me before I was born”.
“Lou”
“Welfare is great, I think it’s great”, says Lou, a white 26-year-old male from an affluent community by the sea, who is about to embark on his graduate studies in “Theatre Directing” at the Yale School of Drama. This attitude is based on what he’s read in the newspaper, his parents, and what he observed throughout his many years of private schooling. Describing his family as the “lower part” of an upper-middle class, Lou qualified for financial aid throughout all of his schooling. He reflects on how remarkable it was that even his home owning, well-educated, working family couldn't afford the “sticker price of private education”. His father, a merchant-seaman / carpenter / nurse, and his mother, a master’s degree holding occupational therapist, supported his goals throughout his growing up by sending him to private high school and encouraging theatre as an activity. He went to school with students “a lot wealthier than I”, but never felt that his financial aid likened him to a welfare recipient. As someone privy to high quality education, Lou is strongly in favor of need based financial aid and affirmative action. Explaining, “affirmative action is so necessary to at the very least acknowledge how unfair the system is” and that diversity of various kinds is better for everybody – certainly in arts education. Pausing to think about his phrasing, he adds a little devilishly, “Also, you know... to pop a little pin in the balloon of white middle / upper class people’s idea that they did everything on their own because they worked hard”. He clarifies, “I’m not saying I didn’t work hard, I’m not saying my parents didn’t work hard, but I think in the grand scheme of things, the choices I’ve been able to make and my opportunities were because of what was happening for me before I was born”.
Lou notes that both his father and mother were the first of their family to attend college and while recognizing an underlying truth to the conservative philosophy that morality, hard work, and self-reliance will lead to great successes, while a lack of is the fault of one’s failures, Lou links his privilege of opportunity to a chain reaction beginning in the 1950’s. It was then that his mother, born in the Bronx, moved to a suburb in New Jersey just as her older brother began entering into street fights and general “trouble”. This participation in the “white flight” movement resulted in his mother growing up in a better community with more opportunity, better paying jobs, and a safer overall environment. His mother’s life after the move became very different from her remaining Irish immigrant family in the Bronx. Lou’s fathers’ side followed a similar route, but experienced a brief hold-up when Lou’s grandfather, named Max (and described as having a big nose), was attempting to buy a house in Weston, MA – a suburb of Boston – and couldn’t get a Realtor to get him an offer on a house for weeks and weeks. When finally it was revealed there was a mistaken assumption he was Jewish, the process moved along and he secured a house for his family. For Lou, this family story is both kind of funny and awful because it asks the question, “For how many people was this blockage more serious” and how might it have derailed generations of people from advancements in opportunity such as my own?
Growing up, Lou’s exposure to welfare mainly came from what he caught wind of on the news or by overhearing adult-dinner-table discussions. He has memories of being a small child in public school and noticing that some kids got free lunch (because “you ALWAYS know”), but not recalling any direct feelings linked toward the idea of “free lunch”. He reflects, “I think kids have to be... kind-of... taught to look down on something like that and I wasn’t taught that”. Aside from his parent’s occasional gripe with “whoever turned the heat up”, Lou did not grow up feeling connected to financial burdens. Prior to his travels overseas, Lou felt “abstractly aware” of social welfare in the United States and distinctly unaware of America’s unfavorable views and resistance toward social welfare.
Then came European influence on his young developing mind. Part of Lou’s many years of private education involved spending substantial amount of time in Europe, predominantly France and England. There, he observed the overt criticism toward American’s “selfish and conservative” views on social welfare because “so many people from England and France love to discuss their distaste for America to Americans”. The overseas experiences, more than anything he had observed in America, “opened his eyes to how different things are in other countries”; how broader systems of welfare are so much more available in other countries – “certainly England and France” – and they seem to work and are respected by the people.
Now as an adult, Lou believes “we need more government welfare”, not private. This belief comes mainly from his life work in the Arts. His thinking is: there should be more government social welfare for the same reasons there should be more government sponsorship for the Arts, because private charity “doesn’t work”. With some exaggerated exhaustion he explains, “It becomes all about “people’s feelings and whether they feel good donating to ‘this’ cause, but better if their name was on something”. Lou’s concern of private money putting power into the hands of few is often echoed by numerous liberal voices in regards to social welfare and political control. For Lou, the Arts having to rely on private donors means those donors then have more sway in dictating product, their voice becomes more valuable than the experts creating the art and “everything gets wrapped up in rich people thinking they’re important because they have money to give”.
“Jack”
For the most part, Jack grew up in the same affluent community as Lou, however his experience as a young adult wasn’t filled with privilege and security. Jack, now a mid-forties white male, has worked for the past eleven years “in a cubicle like the Dilbert comic strip” as an IT specialist for Fidelity Bank. It’s a “good job, the people are nice”, and he frequently travels for work to areas in North Carolina and India. He took over his grandmother’s mortgage when she died and lives there, the same house he spent the majority of his youth growing up in, and he rents part of the house in order to supplement his income. He isn’t married and doesn’t have any children, but he’s an avid dog lover and adopts from high kill shelters when he can.
Jack describes his current views on social welfare as “mixed”. He believes the idea of a “welfare mom” – someone without any interest in improving her life or the lives of her children, who actively tries to stay on welfare by “pumping out kids in order to collect a government check” – is a myth. He’s never seen personal evidence of that happening and frankly, it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense; his experience being on welfare did not provide a comfortable life even with his grandmother working additionally to support the family. He feels welfare should be there for those who need it, but is deeply disturbed by the stories he garners from news shows about drug dealers who also collect government aid or commit welfare fraud. He describes such a story along the lines of “a dealer’s arrest reveals dozens of EBT (Electronic Benefit Transfer) cards in their possession”. Drug dealers especially incense Jack, “I don’t think having an addiction problem to drugs and alcohol should disqualify someone from receiving aid, but when I hear stories on the news about those dealing, my blood boils”.
For years, Jack’s parents battled drug and alcohol abuse, which meant he and his sister were frequently forced to move, bouncing between their two parents while they transitioned in search of housing and jobs. Sometimes twice a year, Jack began at a new school, in a new town. He remembers his mother using food stamps at the grocery store and the strange apartments within vacant houses they sometimes lived in. He recollects the cruel comments older kids called through the windows of those apartments and his awareness – even as a child - that he had something to be ashamed of regarding his mother receiving welfare. It wasn’t until 1979 when he was ten years old, his mother was committed to a mental health facility, his father imprisoned, that he and his sister permanently moved in with his widowed grandmother.
His grandmother supported Jack and his sister by working as a hairdresser out of their home and with help from Aid for Families and Dependent Children (AFDC). By then, the stability that came from living in the same house and attending the same school in a good neighborhood greatly lessened the stigma attached to being on welfare. After AFDC was succeeded by TANF - Temporary Aid to Needy Families – in 1996, Jack experienced a sense of loss for so many of the “deserving families” like his, who so dearly needed those funds in order to live a dignified life.
Conclusion
In the United States, “welfare” is a word that elicits general feelings of both compassion and resentment, all-the-while imposing distance with it; either you are on it or you aren’t. Certainly for Lou and Jack, but possibly the majority, “welfare” is synonymous with both “poverty” and “need” when in authenticity, the nature of the word itself, “to fare well”, is quite lovely and universal. Any group, no matter their socioeconomic status, can exact claim for their “happiness, well-being, and prosperity” through government aid. In actuality, it is the middle and upper classes, not the poor, who are most benefited by welfare, yet the language used to describe welfare changes. Lower income government aid such as TANF, food stamps, Medicaid, public housing have been categorized as “welfare” by the majority of the population, but aid such as tax exemptions, tuition reimbursement, pensions, and in-service training have not.
Both Lou and Jack’s perceptions of welfare have been shaped by their life experiences, which have led them to feeling outside of, not part of, the system. Perhaps the first step to remove the stigma attached to the idea of “welfare” is to acknowledge that we all exist within a system providing us entitlements (as unequal as those entitlements may be). Maybe then, the conversation can shift from debating what is truly fair and just in terms of welfare distribution to “those” in a poor lower class to what is fair for “us”. Possibly then will resentments be redirected where they are actually needed, which most certainly aren’t at the “bottom”.
