If You Can Spare a Dime, Spare the Sermon : Welfare: Our willingness to believe the worst about people is a new impediment to charity.

Government assaults on the living standards of low-income people have been so common in the past nine years that they hardly rate a bulletin. Now, the threat of recession raises anxiety that trouble will reach people who may have thought themselves immune. So far unnoted and now even more important is the peculiarly mean and petty quality that has crept into our way of thinking about financially needy people.

Among early evidences was a change in the federal welfare program, Aid to Families with Dependent Children. It seemed sensible to include childless but pregnant women in AFDC; perhaps they could avoid having low-birth-weight babies. In 1981, however, AFDC was amended to forbid payments to such women in the first six months of pregnancy. Someone had reflected that women might deliberately get pregnant in order to collect welfare for three or four months and then abort. Estimates were that $1 million--in a $10-billion program--would be saved by delaying AFDC coverage until the seventh month. In the whole country, how many women were thus discouraged from conceiving and planning a late abortion in order to cheat the government? What can have occupied the reveries of the legislator who worked out this problem and introduced it into the discussions of a committee dealing with weighty tax issues?

More flagrant, because it displays the thought processes of a group of prestigious civic leaders and scholars, was the following observation about incentives for self-improvement as a factor in the lives of poor people; it occurred during a discussion about how to extend prenatal care:

“The wonders of modern technology,” a Ford Foundation report says, “may lead to a social policy dilemma: We are increasingly able to save the lives of even the tiniest newborns. We want people in all situations, including but not limited to the poor, to be able to avail themselves of life-saving technologies, but we do not want these technologies to encourage social behavior that triggers their use.”

It may require rereading to be certain that one has understood the logic: Pregnant women may eat poorly and fail to see a physician, not to mention use drugs and do other things that will injure their unborn children, because they think that modern technology will be able to undo the damage. In short, technology provides an incentive for neglecting one’s unborn child! Do the authors seem intoxicated with their own words? Are they out of touch with ordinary women? Or is the problem more ominous: Are poor women in particular seen as an alien species requiring scientific management--say, husbandry?

Now comes the Emergency Food and Shelter National Board, involving people from United Way, the American Red Cross and other major philanthropies. They are promoting a program (pioneered in Los Angeles) that gives panhandlers food coupons instead of cash. We are to buy coupons redeemable for food and, when the spirit moves us, hand them out to beggars on the street. This says implicitly that we suspect that cash might be used for alcohol or drugs (as we do suspect, of course), and we have gone to some pains--sent a check somewhere, or queued up at a counter--to make sure the $1 or $2 we give is not misused.

What is involved in such tender care about trivial sums of money? For the donor, does it not perfectly blend the pleasures of charity and righteousness? And is the recipient warmed by the gift?

The United States has a long tradition of what historians call “scientific charity.” For 100 years, the term has described and justified painstakingly measured help embedded in less-measured moral uplift. It is our privilege to be penurious, but what does it do for us or for the needy to think and act so mean while we are at it?