When I started this blog back in 2012, we were just coming to the end of 20 years of Republican, or quasi-Republican, New York City mayors (Giuliani and Bloomberg), who also had support from a newly-Republican Congress elected in 1994. One of the great triumphs of that era was welfare reform. The new Republican Congress made reform of welfare a priority, and after their first efforts were vetoed by President Clinton, in August 1996 he signed a compromise bill called the Personal Responsibility and Work Reconciliation Act. Among the reforms contained in that Act were time limits and work requirements for welfare recipients.
With the combination of the federal welfare reform and the Giuliani mayoralty, the ranks of welfare recipients in New York City started to fall rapidly; and the decline continued during Bloomberg’s three terms from 2002-2013. In this post from April 2019, I collected statistics on various metrics of New York City’s progress during the 20 years under Giuliani and Bloomberg, from 1994 to 2013. The decline in crime was certainly impressive (murders went from 1946 in 1993 to 332 in 2013), but the decline in the welfare rolls was a close second: from “nearly 1.2 million” in 1993 (out of a population of 7.3 million) to 357,000 in 2013 (out of a greatly increased population of 8.5 million). As a proportion of the population, those receiving welfare had gone from nearly 1 out of 6 to barely 1 out of 25. It was a remarkable transformation.
It’s now nearly 11 years since Bloomberg left office, and the goal of minimizing welfare dependency is long gone and forgotten. As the number of welfare recipients creeps ever upward, somehow this issue rarely makes the news. However, the New York Post has an important article on the subject today. The headline is “Nearly 800,000 New Yorkers collected welfare checks last fiscal year — most in decades.”
The Post provides this helpful graphic of mileposts along the road to welfare reform and its subsequent undoing:
The Post queries the City bureaucrats on the reasons for the increase, and particularly the recent surge. The bureaucrats deny that the recent influx of illegal immigrants has much to do with it:
[T]he city claims only “a very small percentage” [of the new welfare recipients] are illegal border crossers who’ve arrived since spring 2022. In March, the agency estimated 1.3% of that month’s 535,184 recipients were non-citizens, or nearly 7,000.
So what then accounts for the sudden surge? The City’s spokesperson quoted by the Post tries to put the blame on the pandemic:
The city’s Department of Social Services attributes the huge hike to an “unprecedented” challenge of trying to help New Yorkers get back on their feet after many — especially people of color — were hit hard in the pocket during the pandemic.
That’s rather lame, especially considering that most of the recent surge has taken place after the pandemic was already basically over in 2022.
A far more likely explanation is that as soon as nobody is looking the functionaries revert to their natural state of encouraging dependency. After all, the more people who are dependent on the programs, the more will be the budget and staff of the agencies administering the programs. Increasing budget and staff is the inexorable goal of all bureaucracies.
Likely the functionaries who are facilitating the increases in welfare rolls think of themselves as doing good. They are “helping struggling families,” or something like that. They don’t see how it is demeaning to make dependents out of people capable of self-sufficiency.
While Mayor Adams currently faces corruption charges (about which I have expressed my doubts), a more important criticism of the Mayor is that he is detached from the details of the City’s governance. He enjoys going to clubs and getting treated like a bigshot, while letting the bureaucracy substantially run itself. A bureaucracy left to run itself just keeps finding new ways to grow its mission and increase its budget and staff. And thus we have the return of mushrooming welfare dependency.
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