Robert Carleson Another Conservative That Nobody Knew - Road to the Middle Class

EVERYONE KNOWS that Horace Mann was the father of public education. But nobody knows that Bob Carleson, who died April 21, was the father of welfare reform.

It’s odd, isn’t it? Welfare reform is probably the most successful government reform of the last half century, and yet the man who did the most to bring it about is unknown.

Government education, on the other hand...

It was in 1970 that Governor Ronald Reagan decided that he wanted to do something about soaring welfare caseloads in California. He appointed Robert B. Carleson as director of the welfare department. “After a year of studying the crisis,” according to the Washington Times,

Mr. Carleson handed the governor a plan that would restrict eligibility, clamp down on corruption and increase work incentives.
...
The results were irrefutable. A year after enactment, total welfare spending dropped for the first time, despite an increase in spending on the neediest families. Where once the welfare rolls had been increasing by nearly 40,000 people per month, by the end of the decade there were 300,000 fewer people than in 1971.

It is worth noting that this program was enacted in the early 1970s when program evaluations of the federal War on Poverty were already showing that the huge expansion in material aid to the poor wasn’t winning the war.

It took twenty years to take Carleson’s program national. Now the welfare case load has been cut in half and more, and welfare reform is the most successful social experiment of our lifetimes.

And the most telling anecdote in the years immediately after the 1996 reform was the news that women were deliberately getting back to work before their eligibility was exhausted so that they could “bank” it. What’s this? Weren’t welfare recipients supposed to be helpless victims? Then how could they be planning and thinking about the future, and treating welfare not as a pension but as an insurance against a rainy day?

Nobody remembers Bob Carleson except the few. But he did not live in vain.

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Christopher Chantrill blogs at www.roadtothemiddleclass.com. His Road to the Middle Class is forthcoming.

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