This past weekend the Millions More Movement march took place. Well, was anyone there calling for an end to subsistence-welfare? This has done more damage to black families than any sinister plot that some evil racists might have come up with. In the black inner cities of America’s big cities, over 85% of children are born out-of-wedlock. Why? The best evidence points to the anti-poverty welfare state enabling women to support children without husbands, and this welfare state makes it easy for men to shirk their responsibilities. These perverse incentives have resulted in a cultural breakdown in poor black communities and a black underclass has emerged.

One goal of the march is to foster a renewed sense of responsibility among black man, and this is a worthy goal. However, without a radical overhaul of the welfare state, little is likely to change. As long as social policies encourage welfare dependency among poor blacks, severe cultural dysfunction will remain in poor black communities.

Much has been made of the reductions in violent crime over the last decade. That was partly accomplished by locking up more and more black males. So this is our leading edge of social policies? Surely we can do better.

The sad thing is that there are few black leaders standing up and saying what needs to be done. There are none in Congress that I know of. Instead, they demand more of the same - more welfare, not less.

There is plenty that can be done by the government to help poor blacks. Getting out of their way is the first step. Eliminating means-tested subsistence-welfare, in any form that creates incentives to stay poor and have children out-of-wedlock, must be at the center of any comprehensive welfare reforms.

Think of this as the natural follow on to the very successful 1996 Welfare Reform. Cutting welfare dramatically helped black people. Child poverty, among black children, fell from 41.5% in 1995 to 30% in 2001. Cutting welfare more will reduce child poverty even more.

If subsistence-welfare is allowed to go on, or is expanded as many are proposing, expect little to change for poor blacks in the next few decades. And expect America’s main social policy, for dealing with the resulting alienated blacks males, to be putting them in prison. Sad indeed.

In our age of tremendous affluence, people must be given total responsibility for their daily subsistence needs for food, shelter, and clothing. Government should phase out from providing any of these except for the disabled and the elderly. Subsistence-welfare for able-bodied, working-aged people simply can’t be done without creating an awful set of negative incentives. If people hit some hard times, they can turn to family, friends, neighbors, churches, or private charities.

Without subsistence-welfare, people will not starve, people will not be ill-clothed, and millions will not become homeless. People survive, people find ways to get by.

Having good intentions does not excuse letting subsistence-welfare run amuck. I see John Edwards calling for much more money for the means-tested welfare program called the Earned Income Tax Credit. The problem is that all subsistence-welfare programs sound good when looked at individually. Virtually all mainstream political leaders, on the left and right, have a huge blind spot when it comes to these programs. They just can’t see the big picture of how the programs collectively damage people’s live. It is a classic case of not seeing the forest because of all the trees.

Nearly all the mainstream proposals heard of today to help poor blacks will just make things worse. On the left, there is a call for subsidies for day care so low-income mothers can work. But how will his help restore black families? It will just further enable the breakdown black families (and all races for that matter). It will just further perpetuate single-parent families which is the leading cause of poverty.

Up until the late 1960s, blacks collectively were moving steadily upward economically. The poverty rate among black families fell from 87 percent in 1940 to 30 percent in 1970, during an era before the Great Society programs were in place and funded. After 1970 the upper socio-economic half of blacks continued to progress just fine, but the lower socio-economic half has become mired in problems. This is because subsistence-welfare has severely damaged lower income communities containing the lower half of socio-economic blacks.

America should phase out subsistence-welfare and instead focus on the many other things that can help blacks. For example, schools have room to improve dramatically and universal health care coverage is possible without benefit reductions based on a means-tests. A goal should be to break the cycle of thinking that demands that means-tests be used for providing aid. This is at the core of the problems for black Americans today.

This entry was posted on Sunday, October 16th, 2005 at 9:20 pm and is filed under Crime, Culture, Politics, Poverty, Race. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site. For Trackbacks to this post, use URL: http://nospeedbumps.com/wp-trackback.php?p=466