Newswise — Strongly held but conflicting values have shaped the U.S. social safety net and the policy debates since its expansion in the 1960s. A new Urban Institute Press book disentangles these beliefs and shows how they have led to the patchwork of mostly uncoordinated programs the safety net is today.
“The nation is still far from consensus on the many questions raised by the idea of a safety net, most of which are values questions rather than issues that can be resolved by policy analysis,” says Martha Burt, a coauthor of Repairing the U.S. Social Safety Net and an affiliated scholar at the Urban Institute.
Safety net programs should provide economic security, protect vulnerable families, and promote equality, but the United States falls behind other developed countries in accomplishing these goals, Burt and coauthor Demetra Nightingale maintain. Nightingale, principal research scientist for employment, welfare, poverty, and social policy at Johns Hopkins University, and Burt recommend strengthening these programs and making a national commitment to end poverty.
The authors trace these conflicting values to the first Calvinist settlers, who equated poverty with laziness, and to the culture of capitalism, which measures people by their ability to produce wealth. Individualism and freedom, self-reliance and independence, hard work, fairness, and the primacy of family and community sometimes conflict with compassion, fairness, and a willingness to help those in need. Providing adequate supports to our whole population, the authors argue, is not only a good thing to do, it is essential to the nation’s future economic viability and security.
Today, supporting vulnerable people amid this value conflict requires providing economic security without discouraging work; helping poor people, especially children, without encouraging irresponsible decisions by parents; and targeting public resources to the neediest without stigmatizing them – a tall order indeed.
Burt and Nightingale show how public officials, trapped between wanting to aid the needy and fearing that they will inhibit individual responsibility and sometimes blind to the long-term national interest, have consistently defined poverty in ways that minimized the number of people considered poor. As a result, safety net programs are not serving most of the people in need.
The complexity of the social safety net comes not only from conflicting values, but from the difficulty in balancing states’ rights with the national government’s Constitution-granted responsibility to protect the general public welfare. In the end, the safety net has become a confusing agglomeration of programs and approaches created in different eras and reflecting different values, priorities, and economic conditions.
The United States ranks near the bottom among 23 developed countries when it comes to the proportion of children and elderly in poverty, infant mortality, and high school dropout rates. This, the authors say, is evidence that the U.S. safety net does not do a good job of providing economic security, protecting vulnerable populations, and promoting equality of opportunity.
Burt and Nightingale conclude that a national and political commitment to eradicate poverty is needed to protect our position in the world, reduce inequalities, strengthen the social fabric, and prepare everyone in this country to participate in the 21st century. They suggest three ways:
- strengthen and improve services for vulnerable populations, who have multiple needs that prevent them from being self-sufficient;
- help the working people through health care, tuition assistance, child care support, and adequate medical leave; and
- reduce inequality of opportunity between the rich and the rest, ensuring that the poorest children get the education needed to contribute to our economy and get ahead.
Repairing the U.S. Social Safety Net, by Martha Burt and Demetra Smith Nightingale, is available from the Urban Institute Press (ISBN 978-0-87766-761-2, paperback, 290 pages, $29.50). Order online at http://www.uipress.org, call 410-516-6956, or dial 1-800-537-5487 toll-free. Read more, including the introductory chapter, at http://www.urban.org/books/repairingUSsafetynet/.
The Urban Institute is a nonprofit, nonpartisan policy research and educational organization that examines the social, economic, and governance challenges facing the nation. It provides information, analyses, and perspectives to public and private decisionmakers to help them address these problems and strives to deepen citizens' understanding of the issues and tradeoffs that policymakers face.
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