Time to repeal Sviggum’s welfare failures
Published 9:32 am Tuesday, February 14, 2012
Column: Ted Hinnenkamp, My Point of View
It is time to repeal the Family Cap. Let me explain.
Beginning with the passing of the 1996 “welfare reform” law, few days have gone by where I have not thought about the former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich-led attack on low-income people, immigrants and those of us living with disabilities. The welfare reform law is truly a legal coding concluding low-income moms and their children have caused their own poverty, so let the punishment begin. All of this legally.
Former Speaker of the Minnesota House Steve Sviggum, a Republican, led the 2003 welfare reform charge in Minnesota. Speaker Sviggum created a Minnesota legal code that punishes moms and their children on Minnesota Family Investment Program (formerly the federal entitlement benefit Aid To Families With Dependent Children). In 2003, I asked Speaker Sviggum, during one of the Freeborn-Mower Cooperative Services conference room forums, why all of the punishment? I was sincerely hoping I would hear some of that famous St. Olaf College grad empathy and ethics. There was none.
In the 2003 session, when Speaker Sviggum led charge to “reform,” he would not allow any open debate at the Legislature. Minnesota tradition to talk and openly debate never happened. Major legislative changes to punish low-income women and their children without open public debate is Sviggum’s legacy.
Sviggum shredded the safety net. Work supports for moms were shredded. Over $86 million was cut from child care assistance to moms and their children. General Assistance Medical Care was gutted, eliminated for undocumented immigrants, and a retroactive three-month eligibility was eliminated. Minnesota Care was gutted including the inclusion of a cap of $10,000 coverage for any hospital need. People living way below the poverty income line now had to provide a co-pay for medical service. Up to 100 percent sanctions against the meager MFIP cash benefit to children for “non-cooperation” by Mom was implemented. The emergency assistance program to moms and children as one state policy was eliminated to be replaced by a block grant allowing the 87 counties to write their own EA policies, policies that were restricted by the limits of the block grant plus the new draconian rules. These 87 county EA eligibility rules varied wildly.
Sviggum’s worst punishment of moms and their children is the Family Cap. The Family Cap quite clearly shows how all of the welfare reforms created by Gingrich at the federal level and Sviggum at the state level were motivated by sexism, racism, nativism, classism and an odd-but-quite-serious hatred of all moms who receive public assistance.
The article: “Family Caps in Welfare Reform: Their Coercive Effects and Damaging Consequences,” by Rebekah J. Smith, (29 Harvard Journal of Law & Gender 151 (2006)), would make journalist Bill Moyers proud.
Smith defines the Family Cap as being “child exclusions.” Ms. Smith explains: “Family caps end the traditional system of welfare benefits that increase with family size and instead freeze the amount of a family’s welfare grant at a level correlated to the number of children in the family at the time that the family began receiving assistance.”
Ms. Smith sets out the facts backed by all social science data, which contradicts the assumptions upon which caps are based, including the ideas that welfare recipients have larger-than-average families, do not want to work and are motivated to have children by a desire to obtain welfare benefits. Smith writes all of these assumptions are based on sexist, racist and classist history.
Smith quotes a welfare director: “Anyone who thinks that a woman goes through nine months of pregnancy, the pain of childbirth and 18 years of rearing a child for $45 more a month … has got to be a man.” Smith quoting one of her footnoted researchers: poor women’s “bodies have become a field on which deep male insecurities about the erosion of their historic monopoly on economic and sexual power are acted out symbolically.”
So it is easy to see why in 2003 Sviggum would not allow public debate on any part of his ideas about welfare reform. The possibility of a formidable foe like Smith to testify on behalf of low-income women and their children was the reason he denied legislative and committee debate. The cowardice of Sviggum is the very real immorality which caused the passage of the Family Cap in Minnesota. The time to repeal the Family Cap is long overdo.
Ted Hinnenkamp is a member of the Freeborn County DFL Party.