I am part of the welfare apparatus of a populous older state east of the Mississippi River. This state comprises an historic and diverse metropolis that is a showplace of economic inequality and systemic poverty, much heavy industry, and a large, almost exclusively white rural sector where poverty and sickness are hard facts of everyday life. Most people know little of how the system operates, even many recipients of “public assistance”, the name we politely use for the aggregate of programs that are alleged to help the poor keep body and soul together. My purpose here is to explain some of how that system works.

This state has many foreign-born residents, and not just in the metropolis. The African-American population is about the national average, and the Latino population is growing very rapidly; some small-to-medium cities have Latino population percentages as high any in the country outside the Southwest. The almost exclusively white areas of this state have been aging and depopulating for decades as a result of a deliberate capital-driven policy of de-industrialization, the same one that has laid waste to the rust belt since the 70’s. The mountain town where my step-father grew up once had several thousand residents working in the mining and railroad industries. The list of names on the town’s census rolls at the time of his birth shortly before WWII reflects a huge proportion of foreign-born and first generation Americans with national origins in Italy, Ireland, Russia, Poland, and the Balkans, an amazing and almost forgotten diversity that reflects the Appalachia of many decades past. Also nearly forgotten is how these people, who had little in common but poverty and courage, worked together to form part of the core of the early industrial labor movement.

There are three main types of public assistance available nationally, all funded mostly by the federal government and administered by the states according to federal and state law. The type most often pictured as “welfare”, direct cash assistance, is known as TANF, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, a title reflecting the moral and legislative priorities of the governing class. The name stands a reproach and a warning: no matter how dire your circumstances or how rigid the barriers you face, you cannot count on this “assistance” for more than a total of five years in your lifetime (less in some states), you must find work within 2 years, and your household must be morally validated by the presence of a child. If you are poor and do not have a child, you are not eligible. The majority of recipients are single women with children, and you must be profoundly deprived. Using New Jersey as an example (Bergen County Social Services) , your family’s gross countable income can be no more than $732 per month for four people, and the benefit is a maximum of $488 per month.

Please note the sum of these maximum figures is $1,220 per month for a family of four, even in a relatively liberal state like New Jersey. And everywhere, the value of cash assistance is declining. According to a 2016 report by the non-partisan Center on Budget and Policy Priorities:

Cash assistance benefits for the nation’s poorest families with children fell again in purchasing power this year and are now at least 20 percent below their 1996 levels in 35 states plus the District of Columbia, after adjusting for inflation. For 99 percent of recipients nationally, the purchasing power of their benefits is below the level in 1996, when the welfare reform law created the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) block grant.
Looming large as it does in the Social Darwinist imagination, TANF ironically is by far the smallest of the three major types of public assistance. Roughly 10 times as much money is spent on SNAP, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, aka Food Stamps. (Despite the new name, the term Food Stamps is used all over due to habit and its widespread presence in case records.) The standards here are less draconian but still very tight. If, for example, you get Supplemental Security Income (disability income for people without a work record long enough for Social Security Disability Income) at the national rate of $733 per month, you will qualify for a total of $194 per month in Food Stamps.

Please note, this is the maximum benefit amount. This means an individual with $733 in SSI per month will get only $48.50 per week to spend on food. At the top of the income limit, an individual with a gross monthly income of $1570 (2015 figure) would get as little as $16, the minimum monthly benefit, or $4 per week.

Dwarfing both TANF and SNAP is Medicaid, which is medical insurance for the poor under 65. There are literally dozens of categories of Medicaid determined by age, income, pregnancy, ability, etc. As of 2016, well over 20% of the residents of my state are poor enough to be enrolled in Medicaid or CHIP, insurance for children just above the maximum poverty guidelines for Medicaid. This is not because Medicaid is so generous, but because poverty is so widespread. To get an idea how much poverty there is in this relatively prosperous state, note that in general, an adult may have no more than an Adjusted Gross Income $1,317 per month to receive Medicaid, though the standards for pregnant women and children are somewhat higher. As soon as that child turns one, however, the income standards tighten again.

What is my role in this system? Contrary to my title, being a welfare case worker does not involve social work at all. The laws themselves, for example the time limits on TANF and the minimal Food Stamp benefits, are intended by the political class to perform the function of any social work. My duty is to determine eligibility for benefits by interviewing applicants and recipients, reviewing the information provided, and explaining why and how benefits were determined. In practice, this often becomes telling people why their personal circumstances apart from basic, verifiable measures like income and family size are not relevant. Our clients are almost always coming from situations difficult to dire and wonder, understandably, why programs they mistakenly see as intended to provide humane relief do not take into account things like the difficulty of finding child care or a medical specialist who accepts Medicaid reimbursement.

Little, if any, accommodation is made for the problems that come from the stresses of poverty, for example the depression that can make it hard to meet all the administrative requirements, or suddenly finding yourself out of food for your children because $48.50 per person per week just wasn’t enough. If you find yourself in the latter situation and come in or call me, all I am allowed to offer you is contact information for food banks in your area. One of the most common situations I see is the suspension or termination of Food Stamps because periodic review and renewal paperwork goes out to an old address and doesn’t get forwarded. People in chronically hard situations can end up moving frequently trying to find quarters they can afford, sometimes post eviction; they have things on their mind other than paperwork. The client and family can miss a month of critical food assistance while the address change is sorted out and the paperwork is finally competed, submitted, and reviewed, if they are still eligible.

The people who I see and speak to on the phone almost never reflect the inhumane tropes of poverty. Aside from a very small percentage of professional frauds who are not poor, there is virtually no one “living on” the meager benefits of public assistance. The majority of the people whose applications I see and who I speak with on the phone are white and come from the rural and semi-rural communities of my state. Many recipients—and remember, the majority of public assistance money is spent on Medicaid—are too young or too sick to work or provide for their own needs. Unless you live in a municipality that is exempt because of very high unemployment, you cannot get a dime in Food Stamps for more than 3 months if you have no dependents. Almost every adult receiving Food Stamps is working, generally full time or as long as they can with children in the household and child care so costly. There are also many people who cannot work full time or work at all because they are needed to care for a sick family member.

In spite of the frustrations and brutal limits of our system, the work we do is important. While the state tells me I have a duty to the taxpayers to see that limited resources are used legally and effectively, one I take seriously, I also make it my duty to see how I can legally determine an applicant to be eligible. It’s also utterly critical to be as accommodating and helpful on the phone and in interviews as possible; it is one of the few sources of respect in an often cruel system.

I have acquaintances who assume that being a socialist, I’m working in some kind of heaven where I get to distribute public largess. This could not be further from the truth. Their misconception, a common one, is based on the notion that welfare state capitalism is the same as socialism, a form of ignorance that leads people to describe, for example, Scandinavian countries with relatively large welfare states as being socialist when their means of production are almost completely in private hands.

If anything, I am reminded time and again of the enormous injustice and economic insanity our system of “public assistance” represents. That we even need such a system indicts the alleged magic of capitalism and the Market. Under capitalism, economic priorities are always set and economic decisions always made to benefit the owners of capital and no one else, save to the extent that the electorate give them no choice. Even then, the fight to keep capital from taking back any gain is never ending.

One tactic capital uses to increase profit and suppress the power of the working class is the ceaseless pressure on wages to stagnate or decline. This pressure benefits the capitalist by increasing the capitalist’s immediate profit from the system of production and, as a long-term goal, by decreasing the fighting power of the working class by making it poorer and less secure. It also creates a pool of desperate unemployed labor that has no choice but to accept lower wages in order to survive. “Public assistance” as we understand it is simply the representation of the least the capitalist class believes it has to do to keep its profits flowing. Given the insidious nature of capitalism, it has never been anything else.

Welfare of any kind is not socialism, but a glaring reminder that we do not have it. Our society will continue to see the majority increasingly impoverished until we develop the consciousness that says we must not accept crumbs from the capitalist table if the working class is to survive.