Changes in Welfare Policy in the 1980s
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Description
The Reagan administration is sometimes thought to have reversed the growth of the welfare state by eliminating or shrinking welfare programs at all levels of government and by removing new redistributional initiatives from the national agenda. This assault on the welfare state was motivated at least in part by philosophical considerations. Leaving aside questions of cost and efficacy, the new administration aimed to confine welfare payments to the “deserving poor” (the aged, children, the permanently disabled, and others who could not be expected to enter the work force) in order to reduce the distorting effects of welfare both in labor markets and on the moral character of recipients. In practice, the administration sought to reduce payments to those with relatively high incomes by tightening eligibility standards and by reducing benefit levels on various programs (Palmer and Sawhill 1982). Looking back over developments in the 1980s, we can see that things were more complicated than this. First, in real terms, welfare expenditures continued to grow throughout the 1980s. Part of this growth was due to the increase in Social Security outlays but part was due to growth in programs with more explicitly redistributional aims. Second, where cutbacks occurred, they were largely concentrated in a transient political moment in the first year of the Administration’s tenure in office. Indeed, many of the sharpest cuts were really continuations of retrenchments begun under the previous administration. Thus, Reagan’s actual impact on welfare policy seems to have been concentrated in time during his first administration and, more narrowly yet, in his first year in office.
Source Publication
Politics and Economics in the Eighties
Source Editors/Authors
Alberto Alesina, Geoffrey Carliner
Publication Date
1991
Recommended Citation
Ferejohn, John A., "Changes in Welfare Policy in the 1980s" (1991). Faculty Chapters. 518.
https://gretchen.law.nyu.edu/fac-chapt/518
