The Age of Moynihan
The next phase of welfare reform from above began in the early 1980s. It culminated in a major legislative reform in 1988. The central figure in creating that reform was Daniel Patrick Moynihan, veteran of debates over the Johnson administration’s “Moynihan Report” on African American families and, by the 1980s, a U.S. senator from New York. A rough balance between continuing activist energies to improve welfare and anti-welfare reformism resulted in a kind of stalemate for most of the 1970s. After Nixon’s FAP proposal failed, voices quieted at the two poles of welfare reform, the one that stood for expansion and rationalization, and the one where racist misogyny defined the need for welfare reform and underlay calls to require more wage work and to keep benefits low.
A new welfare politics gathered slowly in the aftermath of poor people’s powerful assertion through NWRO and other groups. In addition to and intermixed with the collapse of a nationally coordinated welfare rights movement, the ebbing of African American and feminist activism by the end of the 1970s helped enable the change.54 One way to observe the shift is by studying intellectual treatments of poverty and welfare.55 As so often was the case in the history of social policy, Moynihan’s work was an early indicator of what was to come: he attempted to recuperate his experience advocating the Nixon administration’s FAP, with all its contradictions, in The Politics of a Guaranteed Income (1973).56 Deploying the same racialized and gendered stereotypes with which President Nixon had encased his ambivalent FAP proposal, the book blamed activist welfare recipients for defeating FAP—which, according to Moynihan, had been perhaps the last, best hope for major social policy reform for a generation.57 Moynihan’s book became increasingly influential as the contributions of other interlocutors stirred the debate over welfare reform anew.
Two tributaries of research had the potential to challenge the anti-welfare agenda, but their findings were hijacked by conservatives who claimed that the availability of welfare undermined heterosexual marriage and the waged work ethic. The first body of work emerged following the deadlock over FAP, when the federal government funded “income maintenance” demonstration projects in selected cities. The projects provided FAP-like basic income solely on the basis of economic need. Preliminary data that became available in the late 1970s revealed that this kind of basic or minimum income—essentially, welfare provided irrespective of a recipient’s personal or family characteristics—reduced poverty without causing the kind of cataclysm that had long been predicted by opponents of welfare rights. Basic income security had a slight depressive effect on recipients’ willingness to do paid work—concerning in Washington although arguably exerting a salutary pressure on employers, who would have to offer more decent working conditions to ensure a robust labor force. Among the variables researchers chose to study, the only sizable effect, which manifested in a Seattle-Denver study, was on sexual and marital behavior:58 women with a steady, nonstigmatized income source were more likely to leave intimate partnerships than were women without it. Researchers in the Canadian province of Manitoba, which conducted a comparable experiment, found similar results. Later analysis of the data indicated that this kind of no-strings-attached welfare also limited women’s exposure to domestic violence.59
Hostility to the possible links among women’s independence, self-sovereignty, and economic security had inspired previous welfare retrenchment and helped doom policy proposals such as NWRO’s guaranteed income proposal and President Nixon’s FAP. Fresh data from the income experiments were used against both traditional welfare and the Carter administration’s guaranteed income–like initiative, the Program for Better Jobs and Income.60 Members of the male-dominant policy establishment argued among themselves, shutting out feminists and poor people. Not surprisingly, virtually no one in official Washington argued that some women had good reasons to withdraw from their relationships. Perhaps the impact of income on heterosexual unions should have been received as an alarming measure of the state of those unions rather than as evidence against economic redistribution. Officials of the Carter administration, federally funded social scientists, and anti-welfare policy intellectuals united in their squeamishness about women’s choices and centered debate on the size of the negative effect.61
Policy makers had ready at hand a second federally funded source of information about poverty and people’s use of welfare benefits. With backing from the National Science Foundation, the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) began in 1968 to study a large, diverse sample of U.S. households.62 By the early 1980s, researchers had evidence to share about family incomes over a decade. In Years of Poverty, Years of Plenty (1984), Greg J. Duncan and colleagues argued using the PSID that poverty was a normal, not anomalous, experience among U.S. families. They attributed this ubiquitous poverty to easily identified features of the economy (e.g., structural unemployment) and government (e.g., a bare-bones welfare state that left families mostly on their own to accommodate the cost of raising young children). Along with ubiquitous poverty was a ubiquitous need for—and use of—welfare benefits. In the course of a decade, Duncan and his colleagues pointed out, over one-quarter of households received government grants from the means-tested programs AFDC, food stamps, Medicaid, and Supplemental Security Income (or its predecessor programs).63 These numbers suggested that welfare recipients should not be shamed, and that their economic dependence should not be treated as an outrage or scandal, but as a normal phenomenon in a society that had made economic and political choices with certain predictable consequences.
In the policy circles that produced anti-welfare initiatives, these data were either recruited into a wider war against welfare or largely ignored. The motives of ideological conservatives who censored normalizing ideas about welfare were fairly clear; they wanted to reduce the public sector and shore up the so-called traditional family.64 However, thanks to gendered, sexual, and racist biases that were rarely addressed head-on, researchers identified with the Democratic Party and liberal politics also joined a consensus of pseudowisdom about public assistance. In this regard, Senator Moynihan was again an early adopter, a nominal Democrat (veteran of both the Nixon and Johnson administrations) who reprised his emphasis on gender from the Moynihan Report. He drew on the Seattle-Denver Income Maintenance Experiment findings to goad the Carter administration about the effects of guaranteed income on marriage, suggesting that the findings could be applied to the far stingier, more conditional AFDC program. In other words, from his perspective, as a form of income maintenance, welfare was a moral hazard, inevitably breaking up marriages and undermining desirable behavior.65
Conservatives such as George Gilder, Charles Murray, and Lawrence Mead followed suit. They largely ignored the conclusions of Duncan and colleagues from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics and utilized only portions of the Seattle-Denver evidence, in the touchstone texts of the Reagan presidency, Wealth and Poverty (1981), Losing Ground (1984), and Beyond Entitlement (1986). They argued that AFDC and, by extension, all government antipoverty efforts, reduced sexual abstinence and fidelity, pointing men toward “deadbeat” fatherhood and women toward lone parenting.66 The overall result, they claimed, was social chaos, with government policy at its source. Hovering high above the ground of empirically proven facts, they argued that welfare should end because it produced more poverty. This last point was easily falsified by the PSID evidence and other sources. However, the mix of moral anxieties about the patriarchal family and racialized scares about the future of the work ethic appears to have overwhelmed any weakness in their economic claims.67
The absence