Reforming Welfare and Gutting the Poor: A Bipartisan Platform

Charles McCain/Flickr/Creative Commons

The Romney camp’s new attack line on the Obama administration–that he “gutted” the work requirements imposed on families receiving public assistance–has been widely debunked as a distortion of a mundane policy memo. But the real scandal here isn’t what Obama did or didn’t do to “workfare”; it’s that both parties have gutted the welfare system as a whole to conduct a cruel social experiment on impoverished families.

As many watchdogs have pointed out, the memo in question from the Department of Health and Human Services basically offers states more flexibility to meet mandatory targets for moving people off of Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) and into gainful employment. This program, administered jointly through federal and state agencies, is the central plank of Clinton-era welfare reform, and its principal political aim has always been to reduce the statistical presence of the poor, not alleviating their poverty.

According to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP), as welfare reform approaches its Sweet Sixteen, TANF’s track record contrasts bitterly with that of its predecessor, AFDC, which Reaganite conservatives had savaged as undeserved entitlement:

Read the rest of this entry →

Romney-Rosen Firestorm Is Reminder: We Need to Redefine Gender Justice

7:39 am in Uncategorized by Michelle Chen

(photo: Don Sutherland/flickr)

Cross-posted from In These Times

It’s almost poetic that this year’s Equal Pay Day—the one day of the year when Americans are supposed to reflect on the value (and undervaluing) of women’s work—coincided with the media firestorm surrounding the American stay-at-home-mom. The “controversy” over Ann Romney’s decision to stay home rather than work a “regular” job should highlight some of the continuing struggles of women to be valued and respected for their work, in and out of the home.

But the partisan proxy war waged over the mommy question only underscores the country’s lacking vocabulary when it comes to discussing the totality of social and economic barriers facing women. Pay discrimination, domestic violence, attacks on reproductive rights, overlapping oppressions facing women of color—it’s misleading to try to lump all these issues together into a blanket term like “woman problem,” but there is one persistent theme: society’s fear of women controlling their own lives.

The distorted framing of the debate is captured in Mitt Romney’s contradictory comments about forcing mothers receiving public assistance into the labor force—in order to instill in them the “dignity of work.” This myopic binary between women of poverty and women of privilege reflects the evolution of the federal welfare state throughout the 20th century.

Poor women, who evidently lack dignity, must redeem themselves through work, while the apparently inborn dignity of their affluent counterparts allows them to embody feminine virtue by staying within the domestic sphere. And if they volunteer to climb the career ladder, they’re vaunted as supermoms.

Part of this mentality stems from a reactionary, often racialized construction of the “deserving” versus the “undeserving” poor. The argument is also steeped in the corrosive cultural assumption that poor women’s social value derives from their labor or reproductive capacity, not their humanity, intellect or relationships.

The counterpoint to Ann Romney’s domestic sainthood is the right’s fictional “welfare queen,” the unwed mother who supposedly leeches off the state with abandon and embodies corrupt, uncontrollable fertility.

And that’s where the “dignity of work” comes in, to discipline the unruly woman and keep her in her place, safely below the poverty line. Neoliberals like Newt Gingrich have sought to broaden the attack on poor women by advocating for the use of the child welfare as a punitive tool, sweeping kids into state custody to “rescue” them from disadvantaged mothers and their communities. So much for family values. Read the rest of this entry →

Tags: Ann Romney, economy, election, Hilary Rosen, labor, Mitt Romney, mother, poverty, welfare
6 Comments »

You are browsing the archive for Mitt Romney.