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2.9: 1980s--Reagan's Stance on Social Welfare

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    211882
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    Reagan's Stance on Social Welfare

    Throughout the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, as the political parties in power vacillated, so did social welfare spending. Presidents Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, and Jimmy Carter all voiced conservative approaches to social welfare spending, choosing not to back any major new initiatives, but social welfare spending continued to increase regardless (Cullen & Cullen).

    Under Ronald Reagan (President from 1981-1989), however, social service spending was cut in favor of increasing defense spending, though we were not at war with anyone at that time (Cullen & Cullen). For example, in 1986, House Democrats wanted to expand government welfare, then called “Aid to Families With Dependent Children.” But Reagan and Senate Republicans opposed this. So the government shut down, in large part because of drastically differing party stances on welfare (Why Ronald Reagan, 2019).

    Reagan’s position was in line with his radically anti-welfare stance. He had campaigned for president by arguing that he would cut social programs that aided “Welfare Queens”—a racist caricature implying single black mothers were receiving benefits they didn’t deserve (Return of the Welfare Queen, 2012).

    The Welfare Queen has become such a legendary character in political circles that her existence is treated like Bigfoot. Most scholars say she never existed, while a few insist the truth is out there.“It’s one of those persistent symbols that come up every election cycle,” says Kaaryn Gustafson, author of “Cheating Welfare: Public Assistance and the Criminalization of Poverty.” Gustafson went in search of the Welfare Queen and discovered something surprising. There wasn’t one Welfare Queen, she says. There were three.

    Here’s how Reagan first told the story when he ran for the Republican presidential nomination in 1976. At virtually every campaign stop, he attacked welfare chiselers by bringing out the same character, according to press accounts.

    “There’s a woman in Chicago,” Reagan said, according to an article in the now-defunct Washington Star. “She has 80 names, 30 addresses, 12 Social Security cards. … She’s got Medicaid, getting food stamps and she is collecting welfare under each of her names. Her tax-free cash income alone is over $150,000.”

    It was a powerful story, but reporters investigating it concluded it wasn’t quite true. Some said it may have been based on a then-47-year-old woman in Chicago, but that Reagan wildly exaggerated her abuses.

    In time, though, it didn’t matter what reporters said. People started repeating the story as true.

    In his State of the Union speech that year, Reagan even spoke about government services as though they were a drug. He said that he wanted to help poor people “escape the spider's web of dependency,” and argued that welfare programs degrade the moral worth of work, encourage family breakups and drive entire communities into a bleak and heartless dependency.”

    The perception of social welfare by the general public in the 1980s, and still today, seems to be based largely off this negative stereotype of those who receive assistance.


    2.9: 1980s--Reagan's Stance on Social Welfare is shared under a not declared license and was authored, remixed, and/or curated by LibreTexts.

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