I think Maggie Coleman is on the right track but I don't agree with
all the details of her analysis. I don't have the numbers in front of
me but the last time I looked about 70% of SSI recipients were women.
It's not a men's program. From what she says I think Maggie may
be confusing SSI sometimes with Social Security. SSI is a public
assistance program based on satisfying a means test and also being
aged or disabled. One reason is that SSI is a program which
mops up after Social Security. The aged and disabled in SSI are
largely either those who don't qualify for Social Security or who
get minimal Social Security benefits. Social Security provides
more adequately for men than women, leaving more women in SSI.
SSI is clearly favored over AFDC. The amounts in SSI are higher.
It is a national program, with state supplements, which means that
there is a reasonable floor to benefits. AFDC has always had pitifully
low benefits in some states. SSI is indexed at the same rate that
Social Security is indexed, so real benefits can't fall; while real
AFDC benefits have been nearly halved in the last 25 years.
In the 1970s I published an article called "The Dual Welfare System"
in which I compared the "regular, mainstream" welfare system of Medicare,
social security, unemployment insurance, farm price supports, tax
breaks for owner-occupied housing, etc., with the "poor people's" welfare
system, consisting of Medicaid, AFDC, SSI, General Assistance, food
stamps, public housing, etc. One thing I didn't note at the time,
but realize now, is that men dominate the regular welfare system,
and women dominate the poor people's system.
Differences in benefit levels depend in part on the social
legitimacy of recipients. Those in the regular side are treated as
having "earned" their benefits. Mainstream welfare programs are
treated as an extension of self sufficiency. Poor people are
(still) divided into the worthy and unworthy poor, and the aged and
disabled are included among the worthy poor. They are still less
legitimate than those receiving regular, mainstream welfare such
as social security, because during their working years they did not
provide for today's dependency, but more legitimate than non-aged,
non-disabled people. Single mothers on AFDC are seen as less
legitimate than the aged/disabled. But there is an even less legitimate
group, namely non-aged, non-disabled adults who are single, or
childless, or in two-parent families. Like the immigrants, they
get no aid at all. In this category you find almost all poor men.
This category is dominated by men of color, and it is a fact that
there are virtually no social supports for this group.
So non-poor men are in general adequately provided for by the
regular welfare system. But poor men get little or no income
protection or support by the US system.
By the way, one difference between the two branches
of the welfare system is that the regular side tends, with exceptions,
to have nationally uniform benefit levels financed federally. (The
main exception to this is unemployment insurance.) Poor people's
programs tend, with exceptions, to have eligibility and benefit
levels which are determined at the state level. (The main exception
to this is food stamps, in many ways the best program we have.)
The most harmful consequence of state control of eligibility and
benefit levels is that states are led (as if by an invisible hand)
to manipulate the terms of these programs in order to inhibit
poor people from living within their borders. States and localities
have concluded that poor people are not desirable residents: they
add to public costs but not to revenues. Cities control whether
they have low income housing and how much. Most choose to have
very little, because of the idea that the more low income housing
you make available, the more poor people you will have. Similarly,
states have held AFDC levels down. Of course it is obvious that
no amount of state manipulation of poor people's programs for the
purpose of trying to move poor people out can have the effect of
reducing the AGGREGATE number of poor people. At best it can only
affect their location. At worst, the competitive reduction of
support will increase total poverty and deepen its effects. The
shift to block grants for welfare has to be read in light of this.
When the Medicaid program was created Barry Goldwater asked for
and got an amendment permitting Arizona not to join the Medicaid
system, and for 20 years or so Arizona had no Medicaid system.
I always thought that the main reason to boycott Arizona should have
been that they had no Medicaid program, more than that they
would not make Martin Luther King Day a holiday!
We should have national programs for poor people. But we are
moving in the opposite direction.
Dale Tussing
On Fri, 23 Aug 1996 [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
> One thing which seems to be missing from the SSI discussions is the history
> that SSI was originally part of larger programs which were supposed to take
> care of dependent persons in general. Even before the programs passed
> Congress in the 1930s, welfare was separated off from SSI and made subject to
> more stringent policies. While welfare benefits have waxed and waned over
> the years, racist and sexist attitudes have shallowly underlay the political
> debates on welfare, while the debates on SSI always take on more reverence,
> as referring to a sacred cow. (don't get me wrong, I think SSI is good, and
> absolutely necessary to the well being of elderly people -- and I ain't so
> young myself)
>
> What we call welfare today, was part of the support proposals which became
> SSI (Linda Gordon (Pitied but not entitled) and Nancy Folbre (Who pays for
> the kids?) both talk about this). I've always thought that SSI remained
> sacrosanct for two reasons. One, because there was always the buffer of
> welfare to keep the politicians occupied. If they wanted a red herring to
> blame for all the ills of society -- welfare has always seemed ready made.
> There has also always been the convenient press-fed public perception that
> all welfare recipients are non-whites, leading to a sort of self-righteous
> justification for attacking welfare ( the majority of welfare recipients are
> white). The second reason SSI was always sacrosanct was because it
> represented primarily a male stipend. Even those women who worked all their
> lives generally received smaller SSI stipends than men, sexism was built into
> the system. Further, racism was also built into the system because
> non-whites tended to hold those types of service jobs which did not pay into
> SSI (temporary work like manpower, agricultural jobs, maids, servants, ...)
>
> Now, welfare is clearly being greatly reduced. This has decreased the buffer
> which has always protected SSI. Once welfare disappears, it seems to me that
> politicians looking for another red herring might begin attacking one of the
> last bastions of the fdr era. Further, women and minorities in greater
> numbers are going to be entitled to collect full SSI at retirement. The
> lesser stipend for working women has been eradicated, and, there has been a
> strong increase of minorities in civil service jobs and in corporate america.
> Both of these groups will be collecting more SSI in the next two decades
> than ever before. To me, this will open up SSI to greater and greater attack
> by those same politicians using openly racist and sexist policies to attack
> welfare today.
>
> maggie coleman [EMAIL PROTECTED]
>
