The Rewards of Poverty

A congressional subcommittee laboring through forests of welfare statistics paused last week to report some disconcerting facts: a family of four in New York City, alert to their opportunities under welfare, Medicaid and a handful of other social-benefit programs, can harvest a yearly income of $8,959, an untaxed sum that is the equivalent of $11,500 in taxable wages. Such hypothetical rewards, in other words, operate as a real incentive not to work for a living. Indeed, the system makes it positively unprofitable to take a job, since that would result in massive disqualifications.

Thus a theoretical point was scored for the ancient opponents of "welfare chiselers." Of course, it would take a Ph.D. in bureaucracy and creative sloth for a harried family to collect such riches. All the same, it does turn the work ethic upside down. The real issue is not so much those who avoid work as those who seek it and cannot find it--those husbandless mothers in particular who, for lack of day-care centers, cannot go to a job even when one is available.

But the problem is deeper still. Another study, this one involving welfare recipients in Detroit, has concluded that the working poor are just as impoverished as those on the dole, and have little prospect of improving their lot through work. Poor working women, said the report, are in the worst condition of all, their wages and opportunities even more limited than men's.

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