"A decent provision for the poor is the true test of civilization." --Samuel Johnson

ife for millions of destitute people in America is certain to become worse in the months and years to come. With new social legislation called "welfare reform" in the new-speak of the day, the United States has entered a truly nightmarish period in which the overwhelming might of the government is being used to deliberately inflict harm on the least powerful people in the country: its children.

The U.S. government's recent welfare reform law may be the most brutal attack on the American people in the history of this country. As the writer Lin Neumann said, "The rhetorical question is this: Have we grown so mean as a people that we now turn on the weakest members of our society for someone to blame? The answer is yes." Not a day goes by without outrageous attacks on the poor. Official American social policy on the national level has seemingly become: Poverty isn't the enemy, the poor are... As a nation, the United States of America seems to have taken to heart the bitter ironic humor of George Bernard Shaw, who once wrote, "I hate the poor and look forward eagerly to their extermination."

The U.S. Congress and President Clinton have dealt a severe blow to all social welfare programs that existed in this country. The Congress may have passed the so-called "Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act" -- the Orwellian title chosen by the congressional Republicans -- but Clinton was happy to sign it into the law since it fulfilled his promise to "end welfare as we know it." With the stroke of a pen on August 22, 1996, President Bill Clinton swept away the last remains of public social decency in the United States of America. This marks the beginning of a new era in American social policy: one of social barbarism.

The U.S. social safety net, which had always had many more holes in it than that of any other developed country even before this Act, has been shredded. Sixty-one years of financial assistance programs for the most vulnerable in American society are now over. The new law proclaimed that "no individual or family shall be entitled to any benefits or services" under state welfare programs with federal financing. In other words, Americans are no longer guaranteed as a right even a minimal measure of public assistance to help poor people -- and especially poor children -- keep body and soul together. No individual or family has the right to receive financial help from the government in America anymore. These draconian cuts take place under conditions of deepening social misery, and make the desperate conditions of life for the poorest Americans even worse.

What is welfare? Webster's Unabridged Dictionary defines the word as meaning: "The state of faring or doing well; thriving or successful progress in life; a state characterized especially by good fortune, happiness, well-being or prosperity..." In the United States these definitions today can only hold the bitterest sort of irony. As feminist writer Ruth Sidel said:

It is ironic that 'welfare' has come to connote exactly the opposite of its traditional meaning. If welfare was once defined by Webster's Dictionary as 'the state of faring or doing well,' today it means living in poverty; if it once meant 'good fortune, happiness and well-being,' today it means living at the margins of society, struggling to pay the rent and feed the children, enduring far more serious problems of fundamental health and well-being than those who are more affluent. And if 'welfare' once meant 'prosperity,' today it means living with stigma and denigration.

The word "welfare" as used in American English today most commonly serves as an umbrella term for a variety of government programs that provide income support and create a social safety net for impoverished individuals and families. It usually refers to such programs as Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC), Emergency Assistance (EA), General Assistance (GA), Supplemental Security Income (SSI), and Food Stamps -- the major public assistance programs for the poor in the United States.

Welfare assistance in the United States has always been at an extremely low and inadequate level. Welfare has not offered a free ride, but rather has administered a test of how to subsist on too little. As might be expected, such grudging and tight-fisted support has proved an insufficient and ineffective way to fight poverty. Spending on AFDC consumed only about 0.35 percent of the gross domestic product. It accounted for only one percent ($12.2 billion) of the $1.3 trillion federal budget and the state share equaled 3.4 percent of the average state budget. In 1993, for example, AFDC cost the nation as a whole $22.3 billion. Eighty-seven percent of the AFDC budget was spent on benefits; thirteen percent (about $3 billion) on administrative costs. These skimpy programs never covered people's real needs -- and certainly haven't caused high taxes or budget deficits.

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The most significant measure is the ending of the Assistance for Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) program. It was the largest among assistance programs, which provided limited monthly cash grants for poor families or single mothers with minor children.

Of the thirteen million AFDC recipients, only four million were adults, the vast majority of whom were single mothers of young children trying to raise them on their own. The federal government will no longer have the obligation, legally enforceable for the past sixty years, to provide a minimum of financial and food aid to impoverished families who have nowhere else to turn. AFDC was the program of last resort for millions of American families with children in poverty. It was a frayed lifeline however, barely providing for necessities, and only serving fewer than half the families in poverty.

For example, in 1993, the average monthly family enrollment in AFDC was five million. These five million families translate into 13,626,000 recipients, of which over two-thirds -- 9,225,000 -- were children. Another fact must be stressed. This represents only about sixty-three percent of the children in poverty. About half of the children on AFDC were younger than six; a quarter were younger than three. This means that at least another six million children in the United States in 1993 were living in absolute poverty but weren't receiving any financial assistance. AFDC recipients comprised only 5.6 percent of the total U.S. population. Welfare dependency wasn't primarily a problem of the urban black so-called "underclass." Ninety percent of America's poor live in suburban and rural areas, and sixty percent of all AFDC assistance recipients were white.

The U.S. government's statistics show that half of all aid recipients were off the rolls within two years. Only two percent remained for more than a decade. Using longitudinal data, LaDona Pavetti, a researcher at the John F. Kennedy School of Government, found that as many as seventy percent of women who receive AFDC leave the rolls within two years. But then, many of them were forced back onto welfare -- sometimes over and over again -- because they were laid off or the jobs available to them simply don't pay enough to raise a family. This means that when women do not to live with the father of their children, their wages often simply can't cover their bills, especially if there is illness in the family, or if there isn't a grandparent around to watch the kids while their mom is at work. Poor American women are often forced to leave their kids alone and get involved in prostitution to survive.

Many of these women are simply not able to work due to illness, disability or lack of even basic education and job skills. A study sponsored by the Kaiser Foundation found that as much as thirty percent of the caseload was composed of women who were caring for disabled children or were disabled themselves. Most have attended American public schools which can only be described as dreadful since, although they have spent nine to twelve years in school, they are still barely literate. Many cannot do basic arithmetic, understand written instructions, or perform simple tasks such as counting money. The same U.S. government that now requires them to work has so woefully prepared them that their labor has little, if any, value. And it must be emphasized once again that the United States is among the few industrial nations that does not provide parents with an automatic grant for every child.

What will happen now to all these women who need AFDC support? The new welfare law replaces AFDC with a federal block grant system to the states called Temporary Assistance for Needy Families. No longer will cash assistance to poor families with children be guaranteed by the federal government. Instead it will be provided -- or not -- by states using money from those block grants. The law abdicates federal responsibility for needy children by abolishing any entitlement to financial assistance or other social services. Under new state programs, poor children will no longer be automatically entitled to cash benefits. The U.S. Congress believes that no child -- no matter how poor or how sick -- should be entitled to basic protection from poverty and ill health.

New federal guidelines will limit welfare payments by the states to five years maximum and require all adult recipients to work after two years of receiving assistance. No one will be able to get benefits for more than five years over a lifetime. Under this new federal law, mothers on public assistance can receive welfare checks for only five years, regardless of whether they are disabled or not. And all mothers must go to work once a newborn baby is three months old. By the end of year 1997, one-quarter of each state's welfare recipients were required to get a job. Most recipients will simply be kicked off the assistance within two years. An estimated thirty to forty percent of the 12.8 million people that were receiving AFDC assistance have simply been cut off right away. ...

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