Morality, Vision and the Phantom Welfare Queen

In the last few weeks, those of us who've been following the lectionary have been reading and hearing a lot of the prophet Isaiah's calls for social justice. Some of our church bodies have been using the Advent season to advocate on behalf of the poor and marginalized. (See my banner for the ONE Campaign, down the sidebar.) And many of us are including "the least among these" in our individual holiday giving, as our own small way of being Christ's hands in the world.

All of which makes this news nugget particularly ironic: Lawmakers in the state of Michigan -- my state, currently one of the most economically anemic in the nation -- are currently pushing a welfare reform bill that would push a lifetime maximum welfare cash-payment eligibility cap of 48 months. That's it. No matter what the economic climate, no matter what the household's changing life circumstances, whether those months are consecutive or sporadic over many years -- once you hit that 48-month limit, yer out. Forever. Too bad, so sad.

Advocates for the poor, and faith-based groups that work with the poor, object to a lifetime assistance limit. Unfortunately, they're up against legislators of both parties who have, over the years, found that pitting struggling, resentful working-class people against even poorer people is a good way to gain votes. The apocryphal Welfare Queen driving her Cadillac to the DHS office to pick up her food-stamp card rides again, apparently.

Here are some statistics about welfare recipients in Michigan, courtesy of Peter Luke, writing in The Bay City Times:

Fewer than 14,000 households in Michigan have been on welfare for more than four years.

Of the 50,000 individual recipients in that statistic, almost 37,000 are children.

One fifth of the state's long-term welfare caseload are employed wage earners who still need help to survive. More are are too physically or mentally ill to work. Most are caring for children. Many welfare recipients are illiterate, compounding their problems.

Oh...and welfare recipients can count on about $460 a month to pay for things like rent and utilities and clothing and "extras." (A heated mug in the Cadillac, maybe.) This year many social service agencies, the folks who help poor people with utility bills, are out or almost out of heating assistance money, even as the cost of heating is expected to jump exponentially.

Now, you might be wondering why lawmakers (and I'm sure this is happening in other states too) are flogging this particular deceased equine instead of using their brains and influence in a more proactive, visionary way, to help their states live into the future.

I've wondered this too.

Twenty-some years ago, when I was a high school senior, I was tapped to sit on a local committee retooling our high school's graduation requirements. The students on our committee had heard suggestions from our teachers that our economy was changing; that the workplace was changing; that the sort of low-skill/high-pay auto-assembly jobs many households in our area depended on were no longer going to be around. We argued strenuously for more rigorous academic requirements that would equip more people for a more challenging and diversified workplace.

For the most part the adults on the committee listened politely. Then they delivered the verbal equivalent of a pat of the head and proceeded to do nothing. "Most of the kids around here aren't like you," one committee member told us. "Most of them are going to graduate and then go down the street to work at the supermarket or at a beauty shop. They don't need all those hard classes."

At our commencement, our keynote speaker's profound vocational advice to our class as it headed off to its destiny was, and I'm not making this up, "Punch in on time."

Without a vision, the people perish.

The powers that be in our state apparently have the same visionary insight now as they did in 1979 -- which is to say, none. The auto industry was in trouble 25 years ago, and no one cared -- not the bigshots at the Big Three; not the state legislators; not the educational institutions of the state; not the policy-makers and citizens. No one, it seemed, was paying attention to changes in the world -- in geopolitics, in the economy, in sociodemographics -- that would profoundly affect Michigan's financial fortunes. I got mine.

Now our economy is tanking. The auto industry is moribund. New enterprises are not on the horizon to replace old, tired industries. And our Legislature's response has been to engage in deadlocking partisan slapfighting; to entertain itself and raise campaign money among the True Believers by fighting the culture wars; and to beat up on poor people.

Maybe Bob Dylan said it best:

Your old road is rapidly aging
please get off the new one if you can't lend a hand
oh, the times, they are a-changing.