US Welfare Policy: State, Class, and Gender Dimensions - Essay Example

?US Welfare Policy: and Gender Dimensions Overview Describing neo-liberalism as an “oft-invoked but ill-defined” concept, Mudge (2008, pp. 703-705) nevertheless defined neo-liberalism as an emphasis on the capability of the market, “liberalization, deregulation, privatization”, and on “promoting unfettered competition by getting the state out of the businesses of ownership and getting politician out of the business of dirigiste-style economic management.” Mudge (2008, p. 704) pointed out that neoliberalism or neo-liberal policies also aim to de-protect, privatize, or reduce public financing for “institutions that had formerly been protected from the forces of private market competition, such as education and health care.” The term “neo-liberalism”, however, is a term often used by the enemies of the term rather than by its friends (Gamble, 2009, p. 3). Although the term has started to be popular in 1989, the beginnings of neo-liberalist advocacies were much earlier (Gamble, 2009, pp. 2-3). For Wacquant (2001, p. 401), neo-liberalization is also the “penalization of poverty” that is in contrast with the welfare advocates concern for lifting people out of poverty. Neo-liberalism is a development of classical liberalism that “originated in seventeeth-century England” (Abramovitz, 1996, p. 14). According to Abramovitz (1996, p. 14), “liberalism held that the competitive pursuit of individual self-interest in a market free of government regulation would maximize personal and societal benefits.” Abramovitz (1996, p. 14) associated liberalism with Adam Smith whose views was expanded to mean that “the market, rather than the state, should be the regulator of society.” Meanwhile, liberal feminism “accepts liberal political theory but argues that its practice excludes women” (Abramovitz, 1996, p. 21). Liberal feminists see “blocked opportunities, the denial of rights, and sex discrimination” against women (Abramovitz, 1996, p. 21). Because of this, “liberal feminists accept considerable state intervention in family life” (Abramovitz, 1996, p. 22). In addition to economic and political rights for women, liberal feminists fight for “day care centers, reproductive freedom, maternity leaves, and more equitable divorce laws, and against pregnancy discrimination, rape, incest, wife battering, and other features of family life that negatively affect women” (Abramovitz, 1996, p. 22). Abramovitz (1996, p. 22) pointed out that in contrast with neoliberalism and liberalism, feminist liberalism has moved away from traditional liberal concepts. Great Depression of the 1930s and Welfare Programs In evaluating the US welfare policy, it is important to point out that the mainstream perspectives on US welfare policy are usually centered on class, state, and gender dimensions (Mink, 2001, p. 17). However, Mink (2001, p. 21) pointed out that there is “a need for racism-centered perspective on U.S. welfare policy.” In our rapid review of the US welfare policy, we try to factor to factor in the state, gender, class, and race dimensions of the US welfare policy. The severe depression of the 1930s made Federal action on welfare (US Social Security Administration, 2011, p. 2). According to the US Social Welfare Administration or SSA, beginning in 1932, the United States granted loans then grants for states to pay direct relief and work relief (p. 2). In 1934, President Franklin Roosevelt proposed to Congress to consider the recommendations of the Committee on Economic Security that he created that was instrumental for passage of and signing of the Social Security Act into a law on 14 August 1935 (US Social Security Administration, 2011, p. 2). The Social Security Act of August 1935 created an insurance program to meet the risks associated with ageing and unemployment (US Social Security Administration, 2011, p. 3). The 1935 law also provided federal grants to states in their old age assistance and assistance to the blind (US Social Security Administration, 2011, p. 3). In addition, the 1935 Social Security Act also established grants to “extend and strengthen maternal and child health and welfare services and these grants became the Aid to Families with Dependent Children program, which has been replaced in 1996 with a new block grant program for Temporary Assistance for Needy Families” (US Social Security Administration, 2011, p. 3). The Social Securities Act of 1935 also “provided Federal grants to States for public health services and services of vocational rehabilitation” such that “provisions for these grants were later removed from the Social Security Act and incorporated into other legislation” (US Social Security Administration, 2011, p. 3). According to the US Social Security Administration (2011, pp. 3-4), in 1939, “Congress made the Old-Age insurance system a family program when it added benefits for dependent retired workers and surviving dependents of deceased workers.” In addition, the benefits became payable in 1940 instead of 1942 “as originally planned” (US Social Security Administration, 2011, p. 4). Thus, in summary, the Great Depression or crisis of the 1930s created and strengthened the role of state in welfare. However, Marchevsky and Theoharis (2000, p. 238) pointed out that although welfare programs were expanded beginning 1930s, this was at the expense of “racialization” because, for instance, “deserving mothers” worthy of assistance were largely defined as “white mothers.” Post-Depression, Crisis of 70s and US Welfare Programs Since70s In the 1950s, the social security programs created under the Great Depression was even “significantly broadened in 1956 through the addition of Disability Insurance” (US Social Welfare Administration, 2011, p. 4). According to the US Social Security Administration, in the 1956 reform “benefits were provided for severely disabled workers aged 50 or older and for adult disabled children of deceased or retired workers” (US Social Security Administration, 2011, p. 4). In 1958, amendments to the Social Security Act extended benefits to “dependents of disabled workers” (US Social Security Administration, 2011, p. 4). In 1960, the age-50 rule for disabled worker was removed (US Social Security Administration, 2011, p. 4). In 1967, social security benefits expanded to provide disability for widows and widowers aged 50 or older (US Social Security Administration, 2011, p. 4). The US Social Security Administration (2011, pp. 4-7) claimed that the US government has continued to provide additional benefits from 1970 to 1996). In contrast, M. Abramovitz (1996) claimed that the United States has made a U-turn on strengthening welfare programs as a result of economic difficulties beginning in the 1970s. It should also be pointed out, however, that the U-turn that had been observed since 1970s is partly a product of the neo-liberalism which Gamble (2009) thought to have become more popular in the 1980s. One manifestation of the U-turn is the 1996 Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act or Public Law 104-193 (Marchevsky and Theoharis, 2000, p. 235). The law dismantled the more than 60-year old “federal cash assistance program, Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC)” (Marchevsky and Theoharis, 2000, p. 235). The law “replaced AFDC with Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF)---block grants to states governed under new set of time-limits and restrictions” (Marchevsky and Theoharis, 2000, p. 235). According to Marchevsky and Theoharis (2011, p. 248), US welfare approach continued to be racist because in the mid-1990 national debates, for example, “the national debate over ‘personal responsibility’ focused exclusively on the black and immigrant welfare poor---this in spite of the federal government’s own statistics showing that poor whites made up the majority of the nation’s welfare recipients.” The 1990s reforms were also anti-women because, for instance, “almost two-thirds of the 1996 welfare law was a litany of rules and sanctions against family and sexual life” that ultimately disadvantaged women than men as women not men become pregnant (Marchevsky and Theoharis, 2000, p. 251-252). Under pre-Obama presidency or under the Bush administration of 2005, large budget cuts on welfare were implemented (Kogan and Greenstein, 2005, p. 1). In contrast, under President Barack Obama, there has been an increased in the welfare budget that has been unprecedented for at least several years. President Barack Obama’s fiscal year budget request for 2011 included an increase by 42% in the total spending for welfare (Bradley and Rector, 2010, p. 1). Against the Obama budget, however, there are neoliberal agitations for welfare reforms anchored on five principles (Bradley and Rector, 2010, p. 2): slowing the growth of welfare state, promoting work responsibility and work, providing a portion of welfare assistance as loans rather than as grants, ending welfare marriage penalty and encouraging marriage in low-income communities, and limiting low-skill migration. . Conclusion and Implications for Social Work Given the foregoing, it is clear that neo-liberalism continues to be the principal obstacle in the strengthening of welfare reforms or their improvement in the United States. Our very detailed exposition on the welfare reforms done under the Great Depression of the 1930s provide evidence that welfare reforms need not be viewed as obstacles to extricating ourselves out of our economic crisis. In contrast, neo-liberal agitation can lead to a situation in which the welfare of women and children is threatened and, thus, the exacerbation of the current crisis for all of us. Given a Black President, it is not likely that the welfare programs will continue to be racist under the Obama presidency. Unfortunately, however, the Obama presidency is not permanent and neo-liberal agitations are strong. There is a serious risk, therefore, that several years down the road, US welfare programs can re-become anti-female, racial, and anti-poor. That time will be the third U-turn in US basic welfare policy. References Abramovitz, M. (1996). Regulating the lives of women: Social welfare policy from colonial times to the present. Boston: South End Press. Bradly, K. and Rector, R. (2010). Confronting the unsustainable growth of welfare entitlements: Principles of reform and the next steps. Backgrounder: The Heritage Foundation, Issue 2427 (24 June). Gamble, A. (2009). The western ideology. Government and Opposition, 44 (1), 1-19. Kogan, R. and Greenstein, R. (2005). President portrays social security shortfall as enormous, but his tax cuts and drug benefit will costs at least five times as much. Washington: Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. Marchevsky, A. and Theoharis, J. (2000). Welfare reform, globalization, and the radicalization of entitlement. American Studies, 41 (2/3), 235-265. Mink, G. (2001). Conceptualizing “Welfare Racism”. In: K. Neubeck, and N. Cazenave, Welfare racism. New York: Routledge, 17-38. Mudge, S. (2008). The state of the art: what is neo-liberalism? Socio-Economic Review, 6, 703-731. Wacquant, L. (2001). The penalization of poverty and the rise of neo-liberalism. European Journal on Criminal Policy and Research, 9, 401-412. US Social Security Administration. (2011). Historical development. Available in: http://www.ssa.gov/history/pdf/histdev.pdf. Read More