The Endless Odyssey of Patrick Henry Polk
The Wanderings of a Texas family on the road to nowhere.
(Page 8 of 9)
While administering DPW is the chief purpose of Vowell’s $42,000-a-year job, an equally important function is selling his department’s biennial budget to the Legislature. Vowell enjoys pointing out that this year the department actually turned back to the state a $40.5 million surplus in its food stamp and AFDC programs. The reasons for the surplus were higher employment and a decline in AFDC families. Figures like this make good reading back in the legislators’ home districts, but in fact this is an example of the way the lawmakers arbitrarily tangle the department in red tape. By budgeting each DPW program separately (which pleases the various lobbies), the Legislature also makes it unlawful for the DPW to transfer state funds where they are needed. Health service premiums paid to Blue Cross, for example, were projected and budgeted at $159.7 million, but the actual cost was $177.9 million. The department couldn’t use the food stamp surplus to make up the difference but had to find surplus federal funds. Since individual members of the Legislature possess an abysmal understanding of the welfare system, Vowell must know at all times who to see and what to say.
Vowell’s most popular decision was the creation in 1974 of the department’s investigation division which claims to “uncover a half-million dollars a month” in welfare fraud. That is uncover, not recover. Last year $871,000 was recovered, or about $72,600 a month. The cost of recovering this money is $1.7 million a year, almost double the reward, but of course there is a principle involved. Not all the criticism Vowell hears in his daily routine concerns welfare chiselers. At almost every subcommittee meeting some black legislator is certain to ask Vowell how may blacks DPW employs at the executive level. “None,” Vowell says. Then he smiles and adds, “With the salaries we pay and the services we provide, qualified blacks won’t take the job.”
Pointing proudly to his charts and graphs, Vowell offers evidence that the state’s welfare rolls are steadily declining: when Vowell became commissioner in July 1971, there were 384,682 persons on the Texas AFDC rolls. After peaking at 449,000 in the fall of 1972 (during the national recession), the rolls have dropped to under 325,000. This doesn’t mean, though, that there are fewer impoverished Texans; strict enforcement of eligibility standards is cited as the main reason for this decline. Only 2.4 per cent of the Texans on welfare shouldn’t be there: no other state has such coldly impressive statistics. The national average is 7.5 per cent. Increases in the state’s per capita income levels mean that federal matching funds are decreasing proportionately. Seven years ago, for example, the federal share of medical assistance programs was almost 80 per cent. That figure has dropped to 63.5 per cent, and beginning next fiscal year it will drop again to 60.6. And yet, for all the billions spent, man-hours utilized, charts and graphs and reports, Texas still has the highest number of illiterates and the highest number of poor people in the country. There is absolutely no evidence that the state’s stop-gap approach to welfare is doing anything to solve the real problem: what welfare experts call the poverty cycle.
“Before clients come into our system,” Vowell told me, “something [bad] has already happened to them. In most cases you can track it back to the time they dropped out of school. If we would go back to the roots of the problem and start doctoring it there, we could break or at least reduce the poverty cycle.” Vowell cited a recent study that claimed that of the students who entered the first grade last year in Texas, 40 per cent will never receive high school diplomas. Vowell suggested that I go to the DPW library and read the report of “The White House Conference on Child Health and Protection,” convened by President Herbert Hoover in 1930. “I think you’ll see that we’re dealing with the same problems today as we were then,” the commissioner said. “The truth is, we haven’t come very far.”
The DPW librarian seemed surprised when I asked to see the 1930 White House report, which is about the size of a junior high school history book. “The commissioner is the only one who ever asks for that one,” she said. The bulk of the report consists of flowery speeches and high-principled declarations from Hoover and lesser lights. The report claims that of 45 million children, ten million were “other than normal” because they were improperly nourished. One million suffered from defective speech, and another one million had weak or damaged hearts. Lesser numbers had behavior problems, were mentally retarded, tubercular, deaf, crippled, blind, or delinquent. Hoover begins his speech extolling the virtues of motherhood (the Great Engineer added that he wasn’t so sure about fatherhood), then there was a sentence underlined in red pencil, possibly by Commissioner Vowell himself:
“If we could have but one generation of properly born, trained, educated, and healthy children, a thousand other problems of government would vanish.”
And finally this warning, also underlined in red.
“. . . if we do not perform our duty to the children, we leave them dependent, or we provide . . . the major recruiting ground for the army of ne’er-do-wells and criminals.”
Ray Lyman Wilbur, Hoover’s Secretary of Interior and chairman of the conference, tacked on a final philosophical note, claiming that education, health, and welfare were jobs for “the local unit” of government. “We want a minimum of national legislation in this field,” he said. “No one should get the idea that Uncle Sam is going to rock the baby to sleep.”
You probably remember what happened next: The Great Depression. Then the New Deal. The New Frontier. The Great Society. Always, welfare was supposed to be a leg up. It never worked, possibly because politicians could never agree on whose leg needed the helping hand. Farmers, miners, small businessmen, even Lockheed got a nice share, but many of the states, Texas in particular, never got around to doing much about the crippled, the blind, the deaf, the disabled, the young, the old, or the plain old down-and-outer. There was hardly a trace of uniformity among the states, which of course precipitated migration, putting unbearable burdens on high-welfare states such as New York and California, and at the same time did little to alleviate poverty in tightfisted states like Texas. Uncle Sam’s first all-out attempt at what welfare people call “whole income subsidy” was the food stamp program which became mandatory for every state in 1973. On January 1, 1974, the federal government took over all cash-assistance programs except AFDC, which remained the province of each state. In other words, while the federal government set amounts for adult welfare, it remained for each state to determine cash payments for dependent children.
Like the commissioner says, we haven’t come very far.
“The most difficult problem that we face is the attitude of the people,” says Ed Horne, an attorney in charge of one of the DPW’s regional Child Support Collection Units. “We have one of the most efficient welfare departments anywhere, but when people read wild stories about welfare fraud in New York they automatically assume that goes for Texas, too. We need to advertise, like the telephone company or Mobile. We’re not going to change a lifetime of thinking overnight, but if people could at least understand welfare, society might be able to prevent the cycle sometime in the future.”
“The average legislator knows little or nothing about the welfare system,” says Representative Mickey Leland of Houston, the only black on the powerful Legislative Budget Board (LBB) which routinely trims the DPW budget and sends it out to be rubber-stamped. “Fraud is used as an excuse to cut back or vote against welfare programs. The LBB doesn’t have the resources to investigate the complexity of welfare, and what’s more they don’t want to investigate.” I asked Leland how long it took the LBB to hear testimony and consider the DPW’s 2000-page budget proposal. “There wasn’t any testimony,” he said. “I’d guess we spent about an hour on the total budget, maybe ten minutes of that hour discussing the constitutional limitations of AFDC.” After sixty minutes of deliberation, the LBB voted to whack $231 million from the DPW request.
Representative Sara Weddington of Austin told me, “When you reach the bottom line, welfare comes into collision with other programs—highways, prison systems, new parks. If you ask us to vote a $5 increased to an AFDC recipient or $5 for a new park, we’ll vote for the park. It’s something lasting. The letters we receive say don’t raise taxes, not don’t raise welfare, but there is no effective lobby for poor people. The teachers are organized, the highway lobby is very organized, but when the poor try to organize they usually end up hurting their own cause. The poor are not people that a legislator feels comfortable with, nor are they influential in terms of votes.” A member of the state Senate, who asked to remain anonymous, told me: “It’s not that members of the Legislature are all that insensitive, it’s just that it’s politically expedient to vote against welfare. Poor people don’t vote.”
My Library
