Patterns of Welfare Use

Abstract

Anyone acquainted with the thinking about welfare policy in the United States and in other countries recognizes that a persistent issue is whether a large proportion of welfare resources is consumed by a group of chronic recipients. This "chronic" group is often referred to as a welfare "class," meaning those individuals who are more or less permanently entrenched in a welfare dependency status and have no active relationship to the means of production. The use of the terms "chronic" and "class" in this content carries ideological overtones. One common view of the welfare "crises," and spiraling welfare costs, is that the principal cause is the growth of a welfare class, which passes on a legacy of dependency to its children. This essay estimates the extent of long-term and heavy dependency on welfare based on data from a nationally representative sample of American families interviewed annually for almost a decade and reports findings on the extent of intergenerational dependency.

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