For Whom the Economy Tolls

In the summer of 1998 I bought a new used car. I wanted to know what kind of gas mileage it got, and so 1 checked. I frequently drive long stretches on the highway, and I frequently stay at home for weeks and avoid the interstates all together, so pretty soon I got good figures for both city and highway driving.

But then I decided to see how my highway mileage would change if I drove at different speeds. I checked at 75, 65, 60, and 55. My gas mileages were 28, 33, 37, and 41 miles per gallon. I learned that if I drive at 75 instead of 55 I use 43% more gas, and produce 43% more pollution.

This discovery bumped into my paradigm about myself. I used to think that I was a conservationist, and I believed that to be true even while I was driving on the highways at 75 miles per hour. After all, most of us consider ourselves to be conservationists. But most of us who drive consider "10 over the speed limit" to be appropriate.

That’s the dominant paradigm.

Those two words, "dominant paradigm," refer to the paradigm, or model of reality, which is held by the majority of people. However, it may also refer to the paradigm which the dominant forces in our culture want us all to believe.

In our culture, perhaps I should say "in our economy," the dominant forces can be identified by the term "monied interests." Monied interests control, by means of ownership, the major media. Back in 1973, when we had the OPEC oil crisis, monied interests were in favor’of reducing our dependence upon foreign oil. We got lots of reminders that 55 saves, speed limits were adjusted, and you were likely to see fists shaken at you if you drove 75.

Not today. Today the monied interests favor higher speed limits so that tractor trailers and consumers can get to wherever they’re going faster. No more reminders about gasoline consumption. Today you will see fists shaken at you if you drive 55.

In America, one of the rules of the economy is: You get what you pay for. Unfortunately, that rule has been extended to our most powerful public media, and it also has been extended to our electoral process. Both of them are under the effective control of private monied interests.

Today I want to bump into the dominant paradigm viewpoint regarding welfare. It’s the viewpoint that is favorable to private monied interests, and it was used to pass the Welfare [alleged] Reform Act of 1996.

I’ll express the dominant paradigm with six statements:

These statements, and others which were heavily promoted, received significant support from the general public. Let’s look at them one at a time.

If you compare the welfare systems of the industrialized countries of the world, you will find that the United States system is the flimsiest. All the other nations spend more generously for programs such as food stamps and AFDC (which were cut back in 1996). All the other nations also have lower poverty rates than the U.S. For example, the child poverty rate in the U. S. is over 20%. Finland has the lowest rate, less than 3%. The inescapable conclusion is that welfare ELIMINATES poverty, in accordance with how serious you are about that goal. With welfare, you get what you pay for.

People on welfare do depend upon welfare, just the same as people who own automobiles depend upon roads. I suppose if the media were owned by hiking enthusiast interests, we would hear a lot about dependency every time a highway bill came up. In America talk of dependency was used to gut welfare. The truth is, we are an interdependent web of social beings. We depend upon each other for almost everything.

The argument goes: If you can get welfare for free, then what’s the incentive to work? The reality is, the value of work has been subverted by the erosion of worker pay. This erosion has been most severe at the minimum wage level. In current dollars, minimum wage was once over $7.50, and today it’s down to $5.15. Before the 1996 welfare alleged reform, some single parents working minimum wage jobs had to quit work so their children could get medical care. That case reflects two problems. First, the welfare system failed to support the working poor. Second, the economic system failed to provide a living wage. Our democratic system of self-governance is not treating the working poor OR the people who need welfare with the inherent worth and dignity we revere.

Here we are "instructed," as Carley said, to believe that the only incentive for supporting welfare is the opportunity to live off the dole. This argument presumes that living off welfare is attractive. But the question is, to whom is it attractive? Not to people with god jobs, that’s for sure. You don’t see people who own things like houses and bank accounts voluntarily giving it all away to qualify for the welfare dole. Most people on welfare want to find a job which pays a living wage. They’re not lazy. They’re bereft of reasonable choices.

The argument was that the opportunity to get welfare money is a major factor in teen pregnancy rates. Teen pregnancy rates were way up, and cutting back on welfare benefits would reduce them. Actually, welfare benefits had been falling for years. AFDC, for example, had lost 40% of its value. If teen pregnancy rates were going up as benefits were falling, you would have to RAISE welfare benefits to reduce teen pregnancy.

The numbers are hard to understand, because the federal budget is so big. Here are some numbers written out so we can do some comparing:

These are all billions of dollars. They reflect the 1996 federal budget. They come from Take the Rich Off Welfare by Zepezauer and Naiman. One way to cut them down to size is to divide them by our population and divide by the number of days in a year. The results will be in dollars per day per person, and will be accurate within 5%. When you do that, the first number is $2.65 per day per person, the second is $3.27 per day per person, and so forth.

Now, comparing the numbers to each other, $265B is the 1996 military line item budget. $327B is what you get if you add in other line-item spending which actually benefits the military. $494B is what you get if you also add in the portion of interest on the debt attributed to past military spending. $130B is the amount of welfare for the poor in the budget if you count their share of programs which benefit everybody as well as programs specifically for the poor. This amount might be reasonably compared to the middle figure for military spending. Programs for the poor included, in 1996, $26B for food stamps, $18B for AFDC, and $13.1 B for housing programs. I don’t have a figure for the total 1996 welfare for the rich, but some of the line items are $32B (for each of 30 years) for the S&L bailout, $18B for agribusiness subsidies, and $12B in tax breaks for transnational corporations. It’s hard to figure why food stamps and AFDC need to be cut while the military budget is routinely increased and billions are spent to fatten the wealthy. People on welfare depend upon it. As has been said, "They need it, and they should have it."

It is the de facto policy of the American system of economics and governance that a base level of unemployment be maintained. The policy is enacted by the Federal Reserve, through adjustment of interest rates. The present target is 4%, down from a recent 5% but above the rates some decades ago. People are on welfare because they are unemployed or underemployed. Others are on welfare because of a temporary economic setback. Most people who ever receive welfare have gotten themselves off within two years.

Who was on welfare when the 1996 Welfare [alleged] Reform Act was passed? For starters, lots of children.

According to California Congressman Vic Fazio, five million families received Aid to Families with Dependent Children. Average family size, including parents, is 2.9 people. In 1993, 1.2% of mothers receiving AFDC were under 18 years of age, and 7.6% were under 20.

Also, 70% of people receiving welfare at any one time come from families which never received welfare.

In "Patterns of Welfare Use," by Salomon et al, printed in the October 1996 issue of the

American Journal of Orthopsychiatry, the authors report a wide variety of demographics relating to people on welfare. Some examples: for long-term users who are homeless, 43.3% suffered childhood sexual violence and 93.4% suffered violence within their lifetimes by intimate perpetrators.

The closer you look, the less welfare recipients look like a group of high-living people who have chosen to belly up to the public trough. And the closer you look, the more corporate welfare does look like that. But monied interests have media control, and they use it effectively. If you read Noam Chomsky, for example, The Chomsky Trilogy, you will learn how the media is controlled, who benefits, and what they want. For the past two or three decades, what they’ve been getting is MORE. As Michael Lonergan put it, we’re suffering from OMOW -- Obscene Maldistribution Of Wealth.

For a good overview of how the economy is treating the less privileged, you could read Chaos or Community, by Holly Sklar. This book also has an excellent description of the bane of scapegoating. Scapegoating, the deliberate creation of a false image or paradigm in order to place blame upon the defenseless, is how they managed to gut welfare.

Today, the major media is reporting the success of welfare "reform." The rolls are down, and people have moved into jobs. You have to look to the alternative press, magazines like the Nation, In These Times, Dollars and Sense, The Progressive, or Z magazine, to get the other side of that report. Welfare spending is down, and poverty is up.

The Unitarian Universalist Service Committee conducted in-depth interviews with welfare recipients in five states. The results are summarized in "The Welfare and Human Rights Monitoring Project report: Is It Reform? The report identifies five double binds facing current recipients, including "The new welfare laws saddle recipients with conflicting requirements: complying with some requirements makes it difficult of impossible to comply with others," and "compliance revictimizes abuse victims." The report is available free from the UUSC (130 Prospect Street, Cambridge, MA 02139-1845, (617) 868-6600, www.uusc.org).

I told you already that my paradigm about my driving changed. Fortunately, I am able to change my behavior.

Now I’ve talked about paradigms concerning welfare, and perhaps one of you has had a paradigm shift. If you’d like to test your paradigm against some anecdotal evidence, read "‘They don’t Come In!’ Stories Told, Lessons Taught About Poor Families in Therapy," by Phoebe Kazdin Schnitzer, also in the October 1996 issue of the American Journal of Orthopsychiatry.

But, suppose you’re already with me. The gutting of welfare, in fact the entire Obscene Redistribution of Wealth, is an American tragedy which must be stopped.

Fortunately, we have the tools to do it. Actually, we’ve done it twice before, in the late 1800s and in the 1930s. This time, the movement has already begun. There are organizations already in place. One is the New Party, building grassroots democracy from the bottom up. Another is United for a Fair Economy, which developed the Growing Divide workshop and is organizing at the top with its Responsible Wealth program. A another is Unitarian Universalists for a Just Economic Community.

It will cost both time and money. But we will get what we pay for. At the very least we can be living our principles and purposes. At most, who knows? Bear in mind that we are very lucky. We are a small percentage of the earth’s population, but we have great powers. Unlike some other places, where a person is likely to get killed for promoting a just economy, we can speak and act relatively free from opposition by force.

Here are two final quotes for you.

From Aung San Suu Kyi, Nobel peace prize winner and leader of the struggle for democracy in Myrnmar (Formerly Burma):

I’m doing my bit to try to make the world a better place, so I naturally have hope for it. But obviously, those who are doing nothing to improve the world have no hope for it.

(The Voice of Hope, Conversations with Alan Clements, p 227)

And from His Holiness, Tenzin Gyatso, fourteenth Dalai Lama (1992):

It is not enough to be compassionate.
You must act!

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Copyright 2000, Bo Chagnon; Commercial Duplication Prohibited

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