Social Welfare Under Reagan

Report Outline
Welfare Spending Cuts
Growth of Poverty Aid
Questions of Fairness
Special Focus

Welfare Spending Cuts

Controversy Over Benefit Reductions

At Issue in this presidential election year is the three-year-old question of whether President Reagan's social welfare programs are fair to the nation's poor. Reagan's critics claim that his economic recovery program has been built on the backs of the poor, that federal programs to help low-income individuals and families have been cut to finance an unnecessarily large defense program and to compensate for massive income tax cuts of benefit primarily to the wealthy. Reagan and his supporters counter that the welfare program reductions were needed to curb the excessive federal spending that was fueling doubledigit inflation and creating a dependency on the federal government.

The growth of social welfare programs has been a central issue of American domestic policy since the mid-1960s. Conservatives condemned the steady expansion of these programs, claiming they had placed an unacceptable burden on the American taxpayer while doing little to alleviate the long-term problems of the poor. Dissatisfaction with welfare programs helped propel Reagan into the presidency in 1980, and he moved quickly to slow the rate of growth in domestic spending.

From the beginning, Reagan has said that his budget-cutting efforts have been aimed only at those low-income individuals who had been able to obtain substantial incomes by combining their earnings from work with federal cash assistance and “inkind” benefits. The poorest individuals—the “truly needy” would be spared from the budget ax. “Those who through no fault of their own must rely on the rest of us, the poverty-stricken, the disabled, the elderly, all those with true need, can rest assured that the social safety net of programs they depend on are exempt from any cuts,” said Reagan in February 1981.