The Children's Defense Fund and Welfare Reform

Return to Welfare; History, Results and Reform

The Children's Defense Fund and Welfare Reform

How about the Children's Defense Fund?

CDF provides a strong, effective voice for all the children of America who cannot vote, lobby, or speak for themselves. We pay particular attention to the needs of poor and minority children and those with disabilities. CDF educates the nation about the needs of children and encourages preventive investment before they get sick or into trouble, drop out of school, or suffer family breakdown. (134) (emphasis mine)

Considering that mission statement, wouldn't the so-called 'experts' on all issues dealing with child poverty have been pushing for Welfare Reform for decades? They must be so happy that 2.9 million fewer children are in poverty and that over 1 million of these are African American children. Not quite:

Marian Wright Edelman, President of the Children’s Defense Fund, added to the furor, stating that welfare reform “will leave a moral blot on [Clinton’s] presidency and on our nation that will never be forgotten” (Rector and Fagan, 2001). (130)

She wrote a highly publicized 'Open letter to the President", in which she blasted him signing the bill (136):

I am calling for your unwavering moral leadership for children and opposition to Senate and House welfare and Medicaid block grants, which will make more children poor and sick.

As president, you have the opportunity and personal responsibility to protect children from unjust policies. It would be a great moral and practical wrong for you to sign any welfare "reform" bill that will push millions of already poor children and families deeper into poverty, as both the Senate and House welfare bills will do.

It would be wrong to exacerbate rather than alleviate the current shameful and epidemic child poverty that no decent, rich nation should tolerate for even one child.

Neither the Senate nor House welfare bill is an example of the good competing with the perfect. Both are fatally flawed, callous, anti-child assaults. Both bills eviscerate the moral compact between the nation and its children and its poor.

If child investments are unfairly and indiscriminately cut by many billions of dollars, there is perhaps some prospect of recouping the money over time when new child suffering becomes apparent, as it did after the Reagan cuts and as it will this time as pending cuts are many times worse.

We want to "end welfare as we know it." But we do not want to replace it with welfare as we do not want to know it. We do not want to codify a policy of national child abandonment.

What a tragic irony it would be for this regressive attack on children and the poor to occur on your watch. For me, this is a defining moral litmus test for your presidency. (136)

These are harsh words, but then she echoes Senator Moynihan (and countless others) and plays the race card (136):

Both you and I know that there are lessons from American history, including the end of Reconstruction, when the immoral abandonment of structures of law and equity led to decades of setbacks for powerless Americans and battles we still are fighting today.

We cannot heal our racial divisions or prepare our nation for the future unless we give poor Black, Brown, and White children a healthy and fair start in life. (136)

I wonder what Marian Edelman and others at the 'Children’s Defense Fund' would think of our chart?

Chart 51 (137):

In fact, her husband - Peter Edelman - was so upset that he resigned his position as Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation at the Department of Health and Human Services (138) and published a piece in the 'Atlantic Monthly' titled, The Worst Thing Bill Clinton has Ever Done. He stated:

There will be more malnutrition and more crime, increased infant mortality, and increased drug and alcohol abuse. There will be increased family violence and abuse against children and women." (139)

Another Clinton Appointee, Wendell Primus, resigned from his position as Assistant Secretary in the Health and Human Services Department in protest.

In July 2001, Primus co-authored a study which was... well... I'll let you decide. Here are some key points (141):

Although there are undoubtedly many factors related to this remarkable increase in employment by single mothers, welfare reform, recent increases in the EITC, and a booming economy are the most important factors.

The 1996 welfare reforms that emphasized work and the dramatic increase in work by single mothers that resulted, a hot economy, and increased government benefits that support working families all contributed to the sharp decline in poverty. However, many analysts argue that child poverty would have fallen even more if working families were allowed to retain more of their cash welfare and food stamp benefits when they entered the labor force.

Although there is broad agreement that these facts about poverty reduction are correct, many analysts think the reduction in child poverty should have been much greater given the remarkable increases in employment and earnings by low-income mothers. They emphasize data on the poverty gap (the amount of money required to bring every poor family to the poverty line) to argue that the true picture of poverty is not as bright as the one painted above.

It is the combination of increased earnings from work and the system of public subsidies for low-wage workers, both occurring in a rapidly expanding economy, which constitutes the most parsimonious explanation of the substantial progress against poverty in recent years. Working families do not always receive all the benefits for which they are qualified under these programs, but the programs still play a major role in reducing child poverty. (141)

This really illustrates the crux of what I am getting at. Look at what this 'expert' still says despite all of this evidence. He even displays some of the same charts I use in his paper! First, he won't admit that Welfare Reform is the main reason for the drop in poverty and seems to give equal credit to, "employment by single mothers", EITC and "the system of public subsidies for low-wage workers". We've already covered the fact that welfare rolls had only slight correlations with expansions and recessions and a lot to do with spending and the eligibility of government programs. Secondly, he thinks things would have been better if families had been allowed to retain more of their cash and benefits etc... and that these programs play a major role in reducing child poverty! These programs and benefits were the problem!!!!! If you increased them to whatever he wants to increase them to, then poverty would go back up to as high as he is willing to spend! Thirdly, he says that these so-called 'analysts' - aka him - believe poverty would have fallen faster if families now qualify for benefits had more access to these benefits... Precisely the opposite! Poverty would have fallen faster if more benefits would have been taken away and if Clinton and all the 'moderates' hadn't forced whatever compromise they did! (if there even was a compromise)

My main point is that this illustrates a profound difference between liberalism and conservatism that can be broadly applied (although not exclusively). Here we have what appears to be an obviously caring human being, who genuinely feels for the poor and children; so much that he followed his conscience and quit a job for which he was nominated by the President of the United States; yet if his recommendations and proposals had been followed, the people he so ardently supports would have been most hurt. Even afterwards, with the facts in his hands, he unwittingly continues to plot their downfall. That is why this ideology and people in power that subscribed to it can be so dangerous. In reality, he was to his constituents, what he believed the most hardnosed Republican represented. This is the difference between idealism and pragmatism, empathy and understanding, failure and success. A results driven attitude based on progress is always preferable to blind compassion grounded in cynicism.

On August 12th 2001, a month later, Primus admitted this to the New York Times:

“In many ways welfare reform is working better than I thought it would. The sky isn’t falling anymore. Whatever we have been doing over the last five years, we ought to keep going.” (140)

From the study he just authored I wouldn't have picked that up...

Returning to the Children's Defense Fund, what are they up to these days? We might think from their mission statement, that they would have graciously apologized to President Clinton (and I'm sure they said worse about the Republicans [I found a few such statements attributed to Marian Edelmen, but could not verify their authenticity]). Seeing the results of Welfare Reform they must have done a 180 degree shift and are now lobbying members of Congress to enact even greater reform; right? Wrong.

In addition to studies arguing for more gun control, the Children's Defense Fund came out with a study in May 28, 2003 titled: Number of Black Children in Extreme Poverty Hits Record High. But they don't use the poverty definition that the Census Bureau uses to measure poverty rates! They use a method that includes housing and food stamps as income and accounts for taxes and found that the number of black children in extreme poverty (50% < poverty rate) rose from 729,000 in 1996 to 996,000 in 2001. Using their definitions of income (nearcash aftercash), 883,000 are lifted out of general poverty as opposed to the 267,000 that 'fell' into extreme poverty. They don't explain why their formula had 923,000 black children in extreme poverty in 1992 (when welfare rolls were at an all time high). Using the normal Census definitions, 1,269,000 black children were lifted out of poverty and 476,000 out of extreme poverty.

I find this confusing because it is unclear why counting all these benefits as income should result in more black poverty. I would think that, by definition, adding any kind of income to existing income could only raise the poverty level. What does nearcash and aftercash mean? According to the Children's Defense fund:

Nearcash income includes all cash income plus the estimated value of food stamps, school lunch, and housing benefits. Taxes include federal and state income taxes, FICA, and the federal earned income tax credit. (146)

First, low income families in extreme poverty pay no federal income tax. In fact, they receive a negative tax (they get money) due to the federal earned income tax credit - which any working low income person receives. FICA, better known as the payroll tax, is money that everyone pays and, to varying degrees, receive back in social security benefits and Medicare benefits (147). Since these measures were partly set up to redistribute income and ensure 'fairness' and 'equality', persons in extreme poverty will surely receive more benefit from this then they put in. So we are left with the state income tax. Obviously, this varies state to state and many states have EITC tax credits (which are like the federal earned income tax credit) and other programs to reduce taxes on the poor. It is difficult to see how this tax burden drives all these black children into poverty, especially considering that they are including all these non cash benefits - even if one (somewhat misleadingly) subtracts payroll (FICA) tax from income.

Perhaps they are raising the whole poverty bar, which seems foolish, or engaging in some other methodology, which they are not stating. Even more puzzling, the (conservative) Heritage foundation, which did a similar critique on the Children's Defense fund study, found that heads of households of black families in extreme poverty worked on average 405 hours a year, 7.8 hours a week, and that 60% had not worked in the past year (148). From this we might wonder if many of these families are supported by cohabitating boyfriends, or other family members, are on other government assistance, work in under the table jobs, underreport their income, or perhaps are teenagers living with their parents or students in school. The Children's Defense fund assures us:

CDF found evidence that the trends in extreme poverty were not the result of potential pitfalls in the survey data such as failure to count income from live-in boyfriends or other household members, possible underreporting of welfare income, or the presence of wealthy respondents with very low annual incomes who live off of sizable assets. Even after accounting for these and other pitfalls, the number of extremely poor Black children remained significantly higher in 2001 than in 1996. (See accompanying Technical Report: Trends in the Data on Extreme Black Child Poverty.) (146)

We are left to wonder what they mean by 'significantly' and how they can be so certain. The Technical Report could not be located.

The point is that even by their own slanted figures (if they are even correct...), Welfare Reform has been a resounding success, lifting 883,000 black children out of poverty. Miriam Edelman and the Children's Defense Fund have not admitted their mistake in opposing Welfare Reform, they publish misleading research downplaying it's success, they have not apologized for the venomous slander they directed at it's proponents, and they and continue to fight the very reforms that were so helpful to poor children. In 2003, in an incredibly biased article in the Louisiana Weekly, Marian lashed out at President Bush (149):

"He has just proposed a budget that declares war on children," said Marian Wright Edelman, president of the Children's Defense Fund (CDF) in Washington, D.C. "He's proposing to slash child care at a time when his welfare bill is being rushed through to make poor mothers work longer hours as they leave welfare. Who's supposed to take care of the children?" (149) (Her claims are largely baseless. Bush is placing traditional federal funding for programs under the control of the states in block grants - the ones which proved to be so successful in kick-starting Welfare Reform in 1992. He has proposed a freeze on federal child care expenditures - not a cut. He is continuing to build on the work requirements of the 1996 Welfare Reform law by requiring 40 hour work weeks.) (150) (149)

"This is one of the most revolutionary, radical assaults on children and the poor. It's a very dangerous time. We'll look up and the tax cuts will be run through, all this other stuff will be run through. But we've got to fight." (149)

The Children's Defense Fund is a shrill, disgraceful, partisan organization. By it's very existence it hurts the poorest children in America.