2.11: Competing Views of Social Welfare

Competing Views of Social Welfare

There are two major views of social welfare in the United States, and a third which we will also discuss. These are known as the residual, institutional, and developmental views. The residual view tends to align itself with conservative ideology (i.e., the Republican Party) while the institutional view is more liberal in nature (i.e., aligning with the Democratic Party). The final view, the developmental view, provides some hope for a compromise between the two major opposing views.

The Residual View of Social Welfare

Those who agree with the residual view see our nation’s safety net of social welfare programs (particularly public assistance programs) merely as temporary programs meant to provide help to people for as little time as necessary. According to the residual view, these programs should exist only in times of particular need, lest they become crutches on which people might rely, thereby making them dependent upon the government for support. People holding this view tend to believe that poverty is an escapable situation if one simply has the proper will and motivation.

Adherents to the residual view see many of the components of the social welfare system as gifts—they do not believe anyone is entitled to benefits like medical care or housing assistance. They also tend not to be terribly invested in making these services easy or pleasant for people to obtain. In the residual way of thinking, if benefits are easy to get, people will be less likely to work hard to get out of a situation where they no longer need to get assistance from the government. If services are unpleasant to obtain, that will discourage people from overusing the programs, and then money that would have been spent on supporting the poor can be redirected to other areas, or taxes can be lowered for everyone.

The Institutional View of Social Welfare

The institutional view is the typical view held by social workers and political progressives. According to the institutional view, people generally end up in dire economic circumstances due to forces beyond their control: getting laid off, significant medical problems, death of a breadwinner, the COVID-19 pandemic, economic recession, for example. It is the role of the government, therefore, to provide for these individuals, who may very well be hardworking, educated, moral individuals that simply have fallen on hard times.

This view sees social welfare programs as rights. Adherents to this view say that as members of a society, it is incumbent upon all of us to use our resources to help those who are currently in great need, especially since we may end up in a similar situation ourselves someday (or may have emerged from such a situation in the past). It believes these programs are legitimate and necessary for the overall healthy functioning of a society where people depend upon one another. Not surprisingly, holders of the institutional view believe these services should be as humanizing as possible to obtain. People who believe in the institutional view recognize that in many cases, people have come to seek public assistance only after exhausting every other possible avenue, and many of them have encountered significant negative reactions and judgment from others before resorting to applying for assistance. Therefore, it is imperative that those who are employed in such programs be as supportive and caring as possible in their approach to applicants for aid, rather than adding to their already considerable stress and negative judgment.

Finally, the institutional view believes these programs should be permanent. That is not to say that everyone who gets benefits should be on that program and receiving benefits forever, but that there will likely always be a need for that program due to different people needing assistance at different times. Therefore, supporters of this view also support well-established funding sources for these programs.

The Developmental View of Social Welfare

As noted earlier, our government has experienced a remarkable amount of partisan gridlock over the last several years. In 2021, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) even said, "The era of bipartisanship is over" (Carney, 2021). With so little cooperation between differing views, it is clear that we need some sort of middle ground to appease both sides if we ever want anything to be accomplished in providing for the social welfare of our citizens. With this in mind, the developmental view provides some hope.

The developmental view comes down to one basic idea: social welfare programs can exist provided they are economically justifiable. Of course, this is more complicated than it sounds. When it comes to businesses, it is often fairly straightforward to determine profitability. Subtract expenses from revenue and what remains is profit. (Your economics professor may disagree with the simplicity of that definition, but you get the idea.) However, when it comes to social welfare programs, the same determination can be fairly tricky. Many social welfare programs do not bring in revenue in the way that businesses typically do. Even those that do may not be looking to offset all of their expenses with the fees charged for their services—for instance, counseling received through a county health department may have a fee determined by a sliding scale (based on what the client can afford to pay), even though in reality the cost of providing that counseling session is the same for the agency regardless of the client’s income.

Therefore, the developmental view can seem a bit murkier, since social welfare programs may seem very expensive to maintain while not charging their consumers an amount equivalent to the cost of providing the service. (For example, an in-prison drug abuse rehabilitation program must pay its staff counselors and supervisors, as well as paying for materials that are used in the program, office equipment for staff, and more while providing those services at no out-of-pocket cost to the client at all.) However, social welfare programs provide a lot of benefits to the economy that are not easily put into hard numbers. For instance, the benefit of an in-prison drug abuse rehabilitation program is that it decreases the chance that inmates who complete it will be recidivists—that is, prisoners who complete such a program have a lower chance of returning to prison than inmates who either don’t complete or never start one. Estimates of the annual cost of imprisoning a single inmate often hover in the $30,000-$60,000 range—for instance, Illinois estimates their yearly cost per inmate at about $33,400, while California leads the nation with a cost of over $64,000 annually per prisoner (Vera, 2017).

If an in-prison drug abuse rehabilitation program could stop just 32 inmates a year from becoming recidivists, that would mean (using California’s numbers) a savings of over $2 million for each year those 32 inmates stayed out of prison. That wouldn’t even be the full savings; the economy would also theoretically benefit from those former inmates being out and working in society, contributing to the tax base rather than draining taxpayer dollars used to imprison them. Even if those former inmates were on public assistance programs that paid them $17,500 in benefits a year in order to help them get back on their feet, the savings to the economy would still be around $1.5 million each year.

Another important way to determine the economic benefit of a given social welfare program is to look at the costs society would incur without it. What costs would there be to society if we didn’t have public schools? What if we didn’t have child protective services and foster care programs, or Medicaid? What would happen? Would there be more crime, ballooning the expensive prison population? Greater expenses incurred by hospitals as poor people came in for treatment they could never pay for, but which legally had to be provided? More homeless children? How would society counteract these costs?

Some social welfare programs are very expensive to maintain, but the cost of not having them could be even greater. What would occur if we had no resources to assist people in getting housing, or to help abused children get out of dangerous homes?
"Worlds Apart" by James Willamor is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0

The developmental view, therefore, supports investments in “education, nutrition, and health care” as well as “infrastructure” like transportation, highways, and utilities (Midgley & Livermore, 1997, p. 577-8). It looks to find ways to help people become self-sufficient rather than depending upon the public assistance system (and therefore costing taxpayers more money). This view provides hope for agreement between liberals and conservatives because it both recognizes the importance of providing basic services and a standard of living for everyone (a big plus for Democrats) while also keeping the social welfare system fiscally accountable (a frequent focus of Republicans).

Attribution: Social Work & Social Welfare: Modern Practice in a Diverse World. (opens in new window)Mick Cullen & Matthew Cullen.