Once again, Wisconsin under Gov. Scott Walker is providing a model for the nation for what Republicans euphemistically call “welfare reform,” which looks a lot more like punishing the poor for needing government assistance. Suddenly, it’s 1996 again, when Republican Gov. Tommy Thompson’s notorious W-2 (Wisconsin Works) program created the structure for Democratic President Bill Clinton’s federal plan ending “welfare as we know it.”
The difference, of course, was that Thompson and many Republicans back then were at least decent enough to fund daycare for single mothers working full-time for wages that kept them in poverty, often caring for other people’s children instead of staying home to care for their own. These days, under the exceptionally nasty Donald Trump Republican presidency, there are no longer any limits to just how many cruel, mean-spirited requirements can be placed on poor folks to receive assistance for health care, safe housing or food for their families.
Welfare reform has always been a misnomer. Republicans have no intention of improving welfare assistance for families who desperately need it. They simply want to reduce costs by helping fewer people. Republicans justify that with a blatantly cruel falsehood that claims living in poverty is a life of leisure. Anyone who’s ever been poor knows better. Struggling to survive without money is hard; so hard, in fact, many do not survive.
Walker’s Trampoline
Only someone like Walker who’s never lived on minimal government assistance could say: “We should treat public assistance more like a trampoline than a hammock.” Skimpy, rapidly evaporating benefits provide neither the fun of bouncing on a trampoline nor the relaxation of a hammock.
Clinton’s reforms reduced the number of families nationally receiving welfare benefits from 12.4 million in 1996 to 4.6 million in 2012. Where did those millions of poor families go? Nobody really knows, and, frankly, Republicans don’t care. But with the government’s safety net disappearing, how do Republicans justify taking even more away from those who have the least?
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Walker’s cover story is to pretend he’s doing poor people a great big favor by teaching them the value of work before they can receive any health care, housing assistance or food to eat. Nothing confers dignity upon the poor like seeing their children go hungry living in a homeless shelter without access to health care. That’s why Walker toured the state celebrating the signing of nine new Republican work requirements and restrictions on benefits.
Parents with children more than 6 years old would lose food assistance after three months unless they worked 30 hours a week or got more job training. Other work requirements and drug testing would be added to living in public housing and, with Trump’s approval, for anyone receiving heath care through Medicaid.
With all that emphasis on work, it might seem surprising Walker also tucked into the law a nasty little provision intentionally making it more difficult for anyone receiving benefits to get to a job: Anyone owning a car worth more than $20,000 is specifically prohibited from receiving food assistance or W-2 cash benefits.
Restricting Access to Jobs
Why would the state restrict poor people’s access to reliable transportation to good-paying jobs that are often beyond the reach of public transportation? Junkers breaking down and continually needing costly repairs are a barrier to employment in poor communities.
Actually, anyone growing up amid the racist stereotypes common in white communities knows exactly why that provision was written. That’s Wisconsin’s “Welfare Cadillac” Law. Racist legislators don’t want black people driving Cadillacs to pick up their welfare benefits.
The racist mythology of the “Welfare Cadillac” has an ugly Republican history going back to President Richard Nixon. Nixon was the president whose so-called “Southern Strategy” betrayed the party of Abraham Lincoln by going after the votes of racist, white, Southern Democrats alienated by President Lyndon Johnson’s support for civil rights and voting rights. It worked. What had been the reliably solid Democratic South has voted solidly Republican ever since.
In 1972, when Johnny Cash played Nixon’s White House, Nixon personally requested that he play “Welfare Cadillac”—a crude, racist song by a deservedly obscure country singer named Guy Drake. Cash showed why he was a cultural icon that day when he told the President of the United States he didn’t know that song but would play a few of his own. He then performed two of his most pointed political songs: “The Man in Black,” declaring his solidarity with the poor, the oppressed and the incarcerated; and “What Is Truth,” expressing appreciation for the idealistic, young protesters against the Vietnam War.
Nixon’s big lie about welfare going to Cadillac-driving African Americans is still being perpetuated decades later by Republicans like Walker to draw racist support for their war on the poor. Ironically, the majority receiving government survival benefits has always been the white majority, especially those trapped in dying, small towns who foolishly believed Donald Trump would magically create jobs for their abandoned, boarded-up communities.
