Welfare policies and their social impacts

Discriminations in Welfare Groups: The Rural Poor and Their Urban Peers

During the 1990s, fundamental changes in federal policy caused a major in welfare legislation and distribution throughout the United States. The appropriation of taxpayer money to those in need, particularly families, came under wide control from Washington, D.C, where programs meant to transfer the benefits allocated to America's poor from the Great Depression onward instead targeted the most vulnerable members of society, the poor youth. In 1996, the former welfare policies in place for years were reevaluated, modified, and redesigned as the Temporary Assistance to Needy Families Act (TANF). A decade later, despite its transfusion with new life, welfare's agrarian roots in post-Depression America remain, embodied most clearly in the disparity between urban and rural welfare policies and recipients, leading to an inevitable geographic discrimination in social work and welfare policy.

In her social critique and policy treatise on rural and urban poverty, Shirley Porterfield addressed the systematic differences of welfare receipt in urban and rural areas in the United States. In conjunction with previous studies, she examined the duration of welfare distribution to specific families and cases in rural areas; she paralleled their conclusion that in rural areas, welfare receipt happens for less time than in urban families. Not satisfied with mere data, she engages in a legislative debate on the causes of this difference. Very critically, the distinction between rural and urban welfare "spell length" is not only policy oriented, it is also historical. With the roots of American welfare in the salvation of the largely agrarian poor after the Great Depression, the taint of an agricultural past is very relevant today. Its roots in that history provide a firm solve for the rural poor, while the lack of protection in its historical social construct leave urban poor in the lurch.

"Welfare spells are significantly shorter in rural areas," and the determinants of these causes are rationally both economic and social.

Examining these causes in the long-term view is difficult, though, because welfare policy was not lead nationally until the 1990s when a vast amount of comparable data was taken; even still, New Jersey and Utah go above-and-beyond national welfare constraints by providing financial assistance to single adult poor, not merely those with dependent children. In New Jersey, this legislative differential is of particular interest in on-going work because of the presence of both powerful urban and rural centers. New Jersey also presents an interesting situation because of its high immigrant population, which is generally isolated in either urban or rural areas and outside of the safety net of the suburbs. Confronting these issues head-on opens a number of questions about the impact of immigration policy on welfare reform and farm worker programs in the rural areas as well as urban social task forces like Head Start, usually centered in cities.

Martin and Taylor assert that labor-intensive agriculture, unique to the rural welfare problem, causes an increase in poverty in a given community. Because this work draws in largely unskilled foreign workers, their access to the social systems available in a community are lowered, leading to a direct increase in the area's poverty rate.

With that increased rate of destitution comes an equally needy rate of governmental assistance. While their study examined the farm worker, unemployment, farm employment and immigration model in San Joaquin Valley, California, its application is equally relevant throughout the country. All across America, the divide between the rural poor and the urban poor is becoming more extreme and more important in the very nature of politics and government.

What Landis calls "rural trends and needs" are geographically specific; they do not affect the counterpart poor in the cities and urban dwellings across America. In rural areas, there are vastly difference institutions, agencies, and county, state, and federal services that engage in welfare relief. Depressed rural areas stand in direct contrast to the idyllic rural area of the successful farmer living the American Dream.

While Benson spends time engaging farmers in a conversation about which product belts (e.g. corn v. wheat) are more apt to suffer from economic depravation or instability, the welfare system unequivocally is more catered to their needs. Despite the ability for farmers to cope with the welfare system and make it work to their benefit in a way urban families are not, the economic conditions of their environment demand it. Rainfall, uncertain weather conditions, and market fluctuations provide an unending battle for the poor rural families to face when confronting the welfare system and paying for their lives in general.

Discouraged, unemployed, involuntary part-time workers and those underemployed are "more apt to be non-metro than metro-workers."

Additionally, they are more likely to remain unemployed and underemployed over the course of time than the national average. When Findeis and Jensen began looking at this, they found "that transitions to adequate employment have become less likely over the past twenty-five years."

Their conclusion confirms the result of other studies that over the last two decades, less-skilled workers have faced lowered economic solvency and greater doubt as to their fiscal stability. "Fewer jobs are available and real wages have fallen for less-skilled workers."

In that environment, welfare could not be any more important. It plays in the life of the underemployed, employed, and migrating workers with families, stabilizing for the random effects of the farm life.

At the same time, Benson reports that most farmers have the opportunity to make the most of their subsistence lifestyle and garner more assistance from the government, which is unable to provide to the extent of the greater national need. "But farmer's actual income," he writes, "may be larger than the cash income or value of produce reporter: for example, few farmers pay any house rent, and they seldom report the full amount of the value of the fruit, vegetables, poultry, meat, and dairy products consumed by their families."

While farmers are able to cushion their reported income -- and not to demand more of the welfare system than is needed -- they are able to provide for themselves in a manner that those who do not have vegetables to eat and roofs already over their head in cities are not.

On the flip side of the argument, it is important to investigate the policy approach to these regional differences through the welfare system to fully understand the federal response to employment, financial, and lifestyle opportunities by area. Recent federal policy has shaken the states quo of the welfare system free, supposedly infusing the old system with new access to a variety of opportunities and a number of characteristics that are specific to rural needs. Taking regional differences into account, inclusionary practices are the only means of successfully accounting for fair welfare rules. "Obviously, the conditions and characteristics of the local labor market will be critical factors affecting the success of welfare-to-work efforts, and better understanding of the differences between rural and urban labor markets is needed."

In rural welfare situations, the conditions are much different. While the American history of welfare policy is entrenched in the salvation of the American agrarian, or ideas of the American farmer and grandiose dreams of agricultural success, the modern-urban industrial environment has produced a class so desperately in need of financial assistance from on legal high it is dubbed the "welfare class."

Government aid programs serve the basic task of providing for the bare minimum financial requirements of these families, for whose children parental income accessible in the low-skill urban environment is not enough.

Limitations on outside income sources limit these families' access to welfare while rural families are, if leftovers are accessible, able to pad their welfare reports with the internal income their hard labor and meager rewards produce.

The differences between the rural recipients and the urban recipients are critical in understanding the regional discriminations at the heart of the welfare system. While one group is able to subsidize its own poverty with the unreported, meager, and illegal addition of home-grown products that might exported for a greater income intake but loss of ultimate income because of welfare laws, another group is unable to prevent its full income exposure because urban employment opportunities do not usually include the ability to grow food and provide shelter for one's family under the auspice if work. Additionally, as America is more strapped to support its social services, those in critical need are becoming more and more important to numerically isolate and for whom to provide. "A comparison of the fifty states over a fifteen-year period indicates that the income position of AFDC [Aid to Families of Dependent Children, the legislation which preceded TANF] recipients, as a welfare class, continued to recede from the income position of middle class."

The results of this study support conclusions that name a worsening welfare class and putting the concept of "minimum standard of living" under extended review.

As other countries have navigated their transition from agriculture to industry, they too have witnessed the problem of former welfare expectations in now disparate urban and rural environments. Nearly all of the existing models for financial redistribution available in American politics isolate potential applications on lines of income, while others divide along racial, ethnic, and religious lines to help insure the same standard of living for all of those in need -- adults and families included.

The current situation in America highlights the need to isolate welfare recipients further, by more than just income and instead to also take into account the idea of regional differences that foster not only varied opportunities of employment, but also a wide array of external sources of lifetime substance. Because America is still trying to balance the difference of tax revenues, budget allotments, and other sources of welfare subsidy, it is most important that both social scientists and legislators illuminate the regional discriminations that exist between the urban and rural poor.