Cradle to Grave: Welfare In the 1970s

Those on all sides of the welfare reform debate should have seen a New York City "Income Maintenance" office back in the 1970s.

NYC inherited a welfare mess that had been decades in the making. But which really picked up during the Sixties, when people came here in droves to take advantage of public assistance benefits. New York State's constitution mandates that benefits be paid to needy residents. While other states offered only what the Feds mandated (and in the case of able-bodied adults, there was no mandate to give anything) New York City essentially had to take whoever came here and met the requirements. Furthermore, the Aid to Dependent Children program, which was tacked onto the Social Security Act as a stopgap measure to look after people with small kids who didn't qualify for other benefits, required payments to just about anyone who claimed their kids' father deserted them.

At the same time, other states saw this as a golden opportunity to get rid of their poor people. By making their own welfare laws super-restrictive, they all but insured that some would come to places like New York. The system became over-burdened, and some of us can remember the scandal during the 1960s when the City was so starved for space to put welfare families that they put some in the Waldorf!

A strange coalition of liberals and conservatives helped things get bad. To the liberals, welfare was a right. And if people on welfare didn't find jobs or had kids they couldn't support, well, that was Society's fault. At the same time, the Nixon administration figured out that it was actually cheaper to just keep people on public assistance than to try and get them back on their feet. Processing welfare claims is cheap, and computerization helped the process along. Providing child care, assessing needs, investigating fraud and other measures required time, personnel and money.

Soon a whole Welfare lifestyle seemed to develop. The Housing Authority's "project" apartments, which at one time required a tenant to have references and a job, became more and more dominated by public assistance recipients. Working families provide stability. Without them, some of the projects turned into hell holes. At the same time, private and public universities rushed to take advantage of liberal grant programs intended to "train" the new poor, who were happy to go along, because being in training helped guarantee continued receipt of benefits. I worked at one such college. It was a joke. Many students would come to class only a few times a semester, and would often be seen outside, getting stoned. They kept getting incomplete grades, and Welfare kept paying them. I have met people whose entitled work careers have consisted of nothing but a series of special employment programs. There were also "Medicaid Mills" sprouting up all over town - dubious medical practices which catered to recipients of the free medical care to which welfare recipients were entitled.

Once a welfare mother's children reached maturity, there was no guarantee that she would be self-sufficient. She often had few marketable skills. But, if she could produce a doctor's note (and everyone knows that some doctors will put anything on paper) saying she could not work, benefits could continue. Meanwhile, single males and females could get unlimited assistance if they made a half-assed effort to act like they were looking for work, or were enrolled in yet another training program.

To be honest, there were many stereotypes of welfare recipients that were not accurate. The commonest was the "welfare Cadillac." Everyone claimed to see welfare recipients driving up to pick up their checks in Caddys. I never did. But, like most urban legends, it took off, based upon what people wanted to believe.

Welfare benefits were also anything but generous. The basic grant for one person in the late 70s was $262.10 a month. Still, it was more than what other states paid. Besides, cheating welfare was so easy. The City rarely verified anything.