Being 'on welfare'

It will be a relief to a lot of people, including me, to hear that there really is no point in going any further with guesses, speculations, polls about what a friend of mine calls 'the unbearable election'.

Benjamin Disraeli might have been talking about this presidential campaign when he said that the aim of a candidate is to command an interminable and inconsistent series of arguments to malign an opponent and glorify himself.

Well, two weeks from now we shall know the best and the worst according to taste. Then there'll be a blessed pause till 20 January when Mr Reagan, whoops, when the next president takes the oath and is sworn in and I expect that on 21 January, or as soon as the new Congress assembles, not a day later, we shall all, like bookmakers who've just torn up the tickets on the last race begin to calculate the odds on the next one.

They're already drawing up the list of Democratic runners for 1988 and pitting them against the likely Republican runners, but the names of Cuomo, Bradley, Hunt from one stable and of Baker, Dole and Bush from the other are, at present, outside this country, no more than names and we won't even mention them.

For now, I'll say only that a great many Americans and many of them in Congress are wearily asking themselves if there isn't a better way of choosing a president. By popular election, of course, but by some method that does not go on for the better part of two years, that doesn't produce physical and emotional exhaustion in the candidates, in spite of their red-eyed protestations of sap and vigour, that doesn't lead, on both sides, through the same emotional exhaustion to melodramatic speeches and lurid, sometimes preposterous, oversimplification of issues and that doesn't require the frantic outlay by interested parties of millions and millions of dollars.

Many people regret all this but wind up saying that, 'Well, that's democracy and you know what Churchill said about democracy? That it's a dreadful system of government, but all the others are worse.'

Well, as a rest from the interminable series of arguments – and the political commercials on television, which by now have all the honesty and subtlety of the soft drink ads that promise the imbiber a marvellous, carefree life on a golden strand in the company of golden girls in practically invisible bikinis – as a rest, and really to pull myself up and realise that an election is not a combination circus, soap opera and victory parade, I started to read an old Greek, dead these 2,000 years, longer, and came on this starting sentence: 'The true test of a civilisation is its care of the poor.'

It would be interesting, I thought, to apply Aristotle's maxim to our own time which, surely, more than any other time, is one in which every sort of government – totalitarian, democratic, right-wing, left-wing, fascist, Communist – maintains that that is, at the very least, one of its primary aims and each of them claims to do it better than the others.

Well, that sentence sent me back to a news magazine that is notable less for advocating how governments ought to rule than for reporting how well or badly they do it. Let's turn to a report in this magazine which goes directly to Aristotle's maxim about the care of the poor. Listen to this.

'Nobody knows exactly how many people need help. A right-wing conservative claims that 600,000 jobless people no longer get the full unemployment benefit and that their number is swelling by a hundred thousand a month. The government estimates that there are 100,000 unemployed without enough to eat or a place to live.' Now, here's the rub! 'Whatever the exact figure, welfare payments to the long-term unemployed to supplement their daily subsistence pay have been skyrocketing. In one coastal city they have tripled since 1982. The mayors of three big cities report a 75 per cent rise in payments to the poor. In the nation's capital, aid to the jobless and homeless rose by 141 per cent between 1981 and 1983.'

Does this sound familiar? Is it a true picture of capitalist America today? Pretty much, but this piece is not about America. It's about socialist France. I fudged the identity of the cities. I suppose it would be more or less true about Britain, Canada, Holland, West Germany, Sweden, if you changed the numbers but not the ratios. Whether we have a republican – with a small 'r' – a republican government or a monarchy, capitalist or socialist or liberal, we're all beneficiaries of the welfare state and the governments themselves are the victims of it in a sense that governments in power hate to admit they can't afford it. It's an obvious truth which governments, whatever their ideologies, have been forced to wrestle with in the 1980s.

I looked back a few weeks ago to a whole raft of files of pieces I'd written, an appalling load of stuff during the Fifties and Sixties and Seventies and was amazed, at least made to feel uncomfortable, to realise that there was nothing there at all about the slow, menacing rise in the costs to the government of the various forms of welfare. Oh, lots of complaints and warnings from governors of states and mayors of cities, but complaints mainly put before state legislatures or town councils that they weren't voting high enough taxes to cope with health care or unemployment pay or whatever.

In our presidential election of 1976, or '72 or back beyond 1960 into the Fifties, I can find no sign that the cost to the government of welfare was ever an issue in the campaigns. There was much to do about inflation and tax rates and whether this state or that should follow New York in imposing a state income tax, that's to say a second, personal income tax over and above the federal income tax that everybody pays. But no warnings, until the arrival of Ronald Reagan, that the soaring national debt was due, as much as anything, to welfare costs that were doubling and tripling and going out of sight.

In this country, the party that is most embarrassed by this discovery is the Democratic party because its emergence as the majority party of the country dates from the invention of a national welfare system, just over 50 years ago, from the time when the party was revived from a long slumber by Franklin Roosevelt with heavy doses of his New Deal, which was based on the conviction that government, the national government, has a prior obligation to feed, to nurse, to pay, to house, the poor.

Now this was not the application of any theory of government. Franklin Roosevelt was the least theoretical of politicians. The New Deal was a desperate remedy for the desperate condition of a nation in which almost one-third of the entire workforce was unemployed. Roosevelt came in in the worst year of the Depression, 1932, and he handed out to a dazed, but a long-time, a grateful, Congress, a long lifeline of rescuing bills, of government aid to the unemployed, guaranteed minimum wages, relief for the disabled, housing loans, a welfare system, a dole and a social security act.

Now social security is not to be confused with welfare. It's a huge government pension fund set up by Congress almost 50 years ago in 1935, financed equally by employers and employees, the money to be held in trust by the government until the employee is 65. By which time, whether employed or not, he or she gets a monthly cheque that is as big or little as the number of years the employee was gainfully employed.

After you reach 72, your spouse, whether ever employed or not, under the act also gets a monthly cheque – a proportion of the husband's or wife's cheque. It doesn't matter whether you're a humble schoolmaster living off a minute pension or a Rockefeller with a billion or so, if you worked down the years, you get a monthly government cheque. You earned it in your working years. No matter if you had an independent income, you get it.

Now, three weeks ago, the government census bureau announced that one-third of Americans receive some sort of welfare. This was slickly equated by the headline writers to read, 'One American in Three Below Poverty Level'. You think you're badly off, but the definition of a poor person is one who earns less that $10,000 a year, which is about, this weekend, £8,200.

'Earns' is the word to stress because the earned income does not include in the income of the young welfare payments of several kinds for the family – food stamps, child care – or for the old, most medical expenses paid by the government under Medicare. Or, the monthly cheques from social security or, for students, college loans. You can do very handsomely while being listed as 'being on welfare'. It comes out in the end that the percentage of Americans with no other resources than government help, the real poor, is something between five and eight per cent.

Anyway, the cost to the government of social security alone is $190 billion which it will occur to simple-minded people is just about the amount of the federal deficit. On top of that are the uncounted costs of what we call 'entitlements' – automatic aid of many kinds to all citizens who can qualify – the poor, the not-so-poor, the middle-class, the students, the old, however rich or poor.

It's Nirvana all right – we've got it now and maybe we might pay later. Mr Mondale rudely suggests we begin to pay now in higher taxes. Such a monstrous idea will probably guarantee his retirement to the fishing holes of his native Minnesota where he will have to get along on his large, vice presidential pension, his considerable senatorial pension, his monthly social security cheque and his wife's monthly social security cheque.

This transcript was typed from a recording of the original BBC broadcast (© BBC) and not copied from an original script. Because of the risk of mishearing, the BBC cannot vouch for its complete accuracy.

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