Originally published in American Habits.
The vision was always about opportunity. Our safety net still hasn’t caught up.
There is one phrase that has shaped American anti-poverty policy more than almost any other in the last half century. In January 1964, President Lyndon B. Johnson declared an “unconditional war on poverty” — outlining an aspirational vision for how the United States would address the material needs of struggling families, while equipping them with the tools to work, earn, and strive toward their own version of the American Dream.
But essential to President Johnson’s message was that this was a war for opportunity as much as a war against poverty. The core aspiration was work and independence. Temporary assistance addressing immediate material needs was a step on that path, not a destination.
That distinctly American aspiration, fusing compassion and self-reliance, has never been fully realized by the system built in response. And the constraint holding it back is not intent. It is design.
The shortcomings of the social safety net are a well-documented fixture of domestic policy debate. The system spans well over 80 programs administered through the states, overseen by multiple federal agencies reporting to different congressional committees. From the 1960s onward, many of the major programs comprising what we now call the social safety net, including the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, Medicaid, child care assistance, and housing assistance, were created at different times with distinct objectives and oversight mechanisms.
The result is a fragmented system that is burdensome to navigate, and often inadvertently punishes the very behaviors the war on poverty’s vision was meant to encourage. Nationally, 22% of low-wage workers on public assistance have intentionally limited their earnings — refusing raises, declining promotions, reducing hours — specifically to avoid triggering a benefit cliff.
Even in Utah, the best state in the nation for upward mobility, 19% of safety net participants worked fewer hours, and 13% turned down job offers, for the same reason. Twenty-nine percent simply decided not to look for or pursue a new job, raise, or promotion.
Analyses from the American Enterprise Institute, the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta, and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, to name a few, confirm what struggling families experience: benefit cliffs and system fragmentation can make it difficult to progress and economically rational to stay stuck. What was designed to be temporary help on the path to independence too often functions as an inadvertent barrier to it.
The American people already recognize these shortcomings, and there is some vital consensus on what to do about them across party lines.
