Traditional Welfare Programs Research Articles

Who deserves what and why during the COVID-19 pandemic: Applying the CARIN principles of deservingness to the American welfare state.

How does the public decide who is deserving of welfare benefits? To shed light on this question, we investigate whether the CARIN principles of deservingness—specifically the ideas of control, attitude, reciprocity, identity, and need—impact the public's perception of American welfare target groups. We draw contrast between traditional welfare programs and pandemic‐related programs to gain a more comparative understanding of the principles' effects as well as to determine what role the pandemic may play in shaping welfare perceptions. We report that positive, deserving social constructions exist for recipients of both traditional and pandemic‐related welfare programs, and we find evidence that the distinction between traditional and pandemic‐related programs is important for deservingness perceptions in the US. Overall, these results suggest the importance of the CARIN criteria in an American context.

Unearthing the Hidden Welfare State: Race, Political Attitudes, and Unforeseen Consequences

AbstractThis paper incorporates the role of race into our understanding of the hidden welfare state by exploring the implications of racialization of hidden welfare state programs for mass attitudes. We explain how traditional welfare programs have been racialized historically and the implications of that racialization on attitudes towards welfare programs. We then discuss how the same fate could befall hidden programs for the poor if “unearthed” as hidden welfare state scholars have suggested. Finally, we carry out an experiment racializing a hidden welfare state program in the same way that traditional welfare state programs have been racialized historically. Our analysis finds that only when the hidden welfare state program is described using traditional racial stereotypes, support for the program drops significantly among racially resentful. Our findings suggest that the inclusion of race into the hidden welfare state narrative alters our understanding of attitudes towards some of these programs.

The Effects of Work-Conditioned Transfers on Marriage and Child Well-Being: A Review

Transfer payments to poor families are increasingly conditioned on work, either via wage subsidies available only to workers or via work requirements in more traditional welfare programs. Although the effects of such programs on employment are fairly well understood, relatively little is known about their effects on marriage or child well-being. The authors review a small number of studies that provide such information here. Their discussion of marriage is couched in terms of a theoretical model that draws from the efficient-household literature. The model is consistent with the wide range of effects that they observe and suggests an explanation for some of the observed differences. The theoretical framework in which they couch their review of results on children is likewise consistent with the observed variation between programs and among children of different ages.

The Institutional Origins of “Workfarist” Social Policy

Between 1971 and 1975, congressional leaders quietly transformed the character and politics of public assistance in the United States. Three legislative initiatives were passed in quick succession and with little debate—the Talmadge Work Incentive amendments (WIN II), Supplemental Security Income (SSI), and the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC). Although they drew little attention at the time, their combined impact was significant in two respects. First, by redefining the terms and target populations of income assistance, they established the elements of a workfarist approach to federal antipoverty policy, one that turned the ends and means of federal assistance away from traditional needs-based New Deal welfarism and toward the principle of rewarding, encouraging, and enforcing work. In addition, the initiatives helped to create the political capacity for subsequent retrenchment of traditional welfare programs, notably Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC).

Participation and Compliance with the Earned Income Tax Credit

We explore participation and compliance with the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) using a unique administrative data source. Among eligible households with a legal filing requirement, we find that EITC participation is high and that it responded positively to the rise in real benefit amounts during the 1990s. Although participation has also improved among households with no legal filing obligation, it remains rather low and may actually be inferior to participation within more traditional welfare programs. Compliance with the EITC has been a persistent problem. We find that erroneous claims are much more common among households who satisfy some (but not all) program requirements. We find no evidence of a deterrent role by tax practitioners with respect to improper claims.

Shadow Welfare

Corporate tax expenditures are a growing problem, although most contemporary analysts of traditional welfare programs ignore this policy area. The publicity surrounding Enron highlights this expanding segment of our welfare system. Corporate tax expenditures constitute a shadow welfare state that hides behind the complexities of our tax laws. This paper describes this often-neglected segment of the American welfare state.

The Earned Income Tax Credit and the Limitations of Tax-Based Welfare Reform

The earned income tax credit (EITC), which uses the federal income tax system to provide an earnings subsidy to low-income workers, has enjoyed support across the political spectrum as a pro-work, pro-family alternative to traditional welfare programs. Advocates of the EITC also claim that the EITC's tax-based administration is cheaper and less stigmatizing than traditional welfare administration. In this Article, I argue that the case for the EITC has been oversimplified in two significant ways. First, the Article argues that both advocates and opponents of the EITC place undue emphasis on whether it discourages work and marriage. The conventional policy debate over the EITC's behavioral incentives is too narrowly framed: the debate relies on incomplete economic analysis and reflects important but unacknowledged normative tensions.Second, the Article shows that the EITC, as a tax-based income-transfer program, faces institutional constraints not present in traditional welfare programs. Although economists and policy analysts have long advocated integration of the tax and transfer systems, they have overlooked the problems of inaccuracy, unresponsiveness, and noncompliance that are inherent in tax-based administration. Reforms might improve the EITC's performance, but such improvements would require either comprising the benefits of tax-based administration or undertaking a major restructuring of the federal income tax system. Absent such changes, the EITC and similar tax-based transfer are likely to prove widely acceptable only if we revise our expectations about accuracy, responsiveness, and compliance.

Phantom Welfare: Public Relief for Corporate America

This article describes and quantifies the major types of federal subsidies to American businesses. These subsidies, although they do not strictly conform to conventional definitions of welfare, are important policies that directly affect more traditional welfare programs. Representing a federal expenditure in excess of $150 billion a year, the policies responsible for this “phantom welfare state” represent a major redistribution of wealth that partially accounts for the growing gap between the rich and the poor. Additionally, these programs also compete with more traditional welfare programs for scarce federal dollars. The implications of these “phantom welfare” programs for the traditional welfare state are discussed.