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The federalist model of U.S. politics allows power to remain as close to the state as possible. The U.S. Constitution states that all powers not explicitly identified by the federal constitution, federal courts, or federal statute reside with the state. In general, issues that affect only the local jurisdiction are best left to the city, with issues that affect a regional area left to the county, those that affect several counties left to the state, and issues that affect two or more states left to the federal government. Beyond that, any issue that has constitutional implications can be regulated by the federal government. Clearly, with 50 states and some 85,000 local governments, intergovernmental relations are extremely important. Within California alone, there are 58 counties, 478 municipalities, and 3,400 special districts.
Relations between levels of government have been both good and bad for California. The state has been the beneficiary of billions of federal dollars since World War II. This spending has delivered great defense and infrastructure projects to the state. California receives over $230 billion a year in federal largesse—in the form of programs for education, welfare, housing, or infrastruc-tural assistance for mass transit and highway construction. However, Californians pay over $240 billion each year in federal taxes.1 This chapter explores the different levels of California governments, as well as the way they interact with each other. To illustrate the intergovernmental relationships, the chapter concludes with a policy case study on welfare reform. Although all policies require effective intergovernmental relationships, welfare reform impacted governments at all levels in an extremely deep way. And because welfare reform is, in many ways, a redistribution of service responsibilities and fiscal authority, the chapter concludes with an assessment of how different levels of government experience differential benefits.
California has figured prominently in national politics in part because of the many Californians who have become national leaders. Governor Earl Warren went on to be chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court from 1953 to 1969. Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan used their California base to seek and win the presidency and then appointed Californians to prominent White House posts. Nixon brought fellow Californians Casper Weinberger and David Packard. The Californians serving in the Reagan administration included Ed Meese, William French Smith, Michael Deaver, James Watt, and George Schultz. Bill Clinton, who claimed to be a “special friend to California,” brought out many highly visible native sons and daughters, including Secretary of State Warren Christopher and White House Chief of Staff Leon Panetta, Defense Secretary William Perry, Commerce Secretary Mickey Kantor, and Economic Advisor Laura D’Andrea Tyson. Upon his election in 2008, Barack Obama tapped a number of Californians for key posts in his administration. Among them were Los Angeles Congresswoman Hilda Solis, selected as labor secretary, Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory Director Steven Chu as energy secretary, and Los Angeles Deputy Mayor Nancy Sutley as chair of Obama’s Council on Environmental Quality.
No presidential campaign can afford to ignore California. California controls 54 electoral votes—the largest of any state—almost as many as the 15 smallest states combined. The state played a key role in the contest between Democrat Bill Clinton and Republican Bob Dole for the presidency in 1996. With the South becoming solidly Republican, California had become a critical state to Clinton’s reelection prospects. Because California has one-fifth of all the electoral votes, Clinton could not have won reelection without carrying California. It is clear why Bill Clinton was a “special friend,” based on this electoral scenario. As part of his reelection strategy, Clinton maintained a constant positive presence in California, made easier by a series of natural and other disasters, which helped the president look more presidential and sympathetic to the average Californian. Floods, earthquakes, fires, and even the 1992 Los Angeles riots kept Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) dollars flowing into the state. In September 1995, Clinton promised and delivered $329 million to bail out the health system in Los Angeles County, keeping the county from going bankrupt. The state’s influence in presidential elections will only increase now that the state’s primary elections have been moved from June to February, making California one of the early deciders.
Representative Nancy Pelosi’s ascent to the speakership of the House of Representatives in 2007 is certainly the best example of California’s rising clout in Congress. Subsequently, some other members from the state have achieved positions of status and influence, including Senate Intelligence Committee Chair Dianne Feinstein and Representative Henry Waxman, who took over the powerful Energy and Commerce Committee after the ouster of its longtime chair, John Dingell of Michigan. Beyond these high-profile leadership posts, California has been something of a “sleeping giant” in Congress, with an unrealized potential to mobilize a voting bloc consisting of 12 percent of the House of Representatives. The consensus that had unified the California delegation in the 1940s and 1950s broke apart as early as the 1960s. Since that time, the delegation has been divided by ideological, geographic, and ethnic differences. These divisions are somewhat understandable, given the complex and competing interests in a state as large and diverse as California. In the absence of a cohesive congressional delegation, an army of lobbyists has instead been employed by California’s various interests. Thus, most major California cities have their own paid lobbyists in Washington, as do the state legislature, the state’s two public university systems (the University of California and California State University), and a myriad of private and public organizations.
When important state issues are at stake, however, California’s House members have rallied and voted together. Rare examples of cooperation can be observed in votes on some critical issues, including funding for the space station, water restoration, the Bay Delta Accord, Medicaid reimbursement, intellectual-property protection, funding for the cleanup of military bases, and transportation projects such as the Alameda Corridor Project. One observer noted that if California’s House delegation could only get its “bipartisan act together,” then with 53 House seats, the state “is uniquely positioned to control the game. Of course, other state delegations will be thinking the same thing. But none have the numbers that California does—almost half again as many as runner-ups New York and Texas.”2
Between 1981 and 1985 the federal government spent nearly $25 billion more in California than it took back in federal taxes. California won between 18 percent and 22 percent of all federal procurement spending in the 1980s. But with the slowing of the defense boom, federal procurement spending peaked in 1986 at $187 billion. California’s share of the federal procurement has slipped from its high of nearly 22 percent in 1986 to under 15 percent today. As a result, California has been a “donor state” to the federal treasury over the past several years. The state’s taxpayers paid $10 billion more in federal taxes than they got back in federal services and spending. California’s share of federal spending fell from a peak of 13 percent in 1984, to a stable 12 percent during the late 1980s and early 1990s, to a 20-year low of 11 percent in 2004.3 In addition, California was hit harder than any other state by the first four military base closure rounds in 1988, 1991, 1993, and 1995.4 During this period, 40 of California’s military installations were either shut down or realigned. And, in its Quadrennial Defense Review (QDR), the Defense Department announced continued base closures. The California congressional delegation is attempting to protect the state’s 34 remaining major installations.5 By 2004, California received 79 cents in federal spending for every dollar paid in taxes.
Only Pennsylvania and Illinois have more sanctioned local government entities than does California. Because the constitution makes no explicit reference to local governments, they are “creatures of the states,” created under state authority, and designed to enable the state to perform its functions throughout its territorial boundaries. It is through California’s counties, cities, special districts, and regional agencies that residents come into contact with government authority—be it in public safety, education, rent control, air pollution, or land use.
California’s 58 counties are extremely diverse; they range from tiny Alpine County, with some 1,000 residents, to sprawling Los Angeles County, with its 11 million residents—larger than 42 states of the union. San Bernardino County is the largest in terms of area—covering over 20,000 square miles. San Francisco comprises one of the smallest areas—only 49 square miles. Nearly every California county is administered by a five-member board of supervisors elected in a nonpartisan race every four years. The lone exception is San Francisco, a combined city and county, which is governed by 11 board members and a mayor. Supervisors have legislative, executive, and quasi-judicial duties. In most cases, supervisors govern with the assistance of an appointed chief administrative officer. Other county officials may be independently elected, including the sheriff, the district attorney, the assessor, and the county superintendent of schools.
County governments were created as geographic subdivisions of state government in order to deliver administrative services. The county’s role as an agent of the state has made it the major administrator of funds, which come from a combination of local taxes, the state, and the national government. Currently, more than half of county revenues come from the state, while 90 percent of their budget commitments are determined by state mandates.6 On average, California counties spend approximately 26 percent of their annual budget on public safety, 13 percent on public health, and 40 percent on public assistance and welfare. Counties provide all-purpose services to unincorporated areas in their jurisdiction, as well as contracted services that smaller cities cannot provide. For example, the County of Los Angeles contracts with several cities to provide such services as policing, fire protection, ambulance services, jail facilities, tax assessment, and elections. Because the suburban city of Lakewood was the first municipality to contract with the county for these services, this model has become known as the “Lakewood Plan.”
There are 478 cities in California. Cities may incorporate for a variety of reasons, including local pride, the retention of housing values, control of land-use and zoning decisions, or access to tax revenues. The two types of cities are general law, which derive their powers from statutes set by the state legislature, and charter, which have greater flexibility of home-rule because of locally crafted and implemented city charters. There are two basic forms of city government operating in California: the council-manager form and the mayor-council form. Most California cities use the council-manager form. Under the council-manager form of government, legislative authority rests with the city council, but the council appoints a city manager to administer city operations and administration. These governments may have an elected mayor, but the office is largely ceremonial. Because the city manager is a full-time professional executive who does not face the voters, the council-manager form is believed to be less political and less corruptible than the mayor-council form, though critics point to the fact that a city manager’s job security depends upon pleasing a majority of city council members. In cities with the mayor-council form of government, voters elect a mayor, who wields executive power, as well as the city council, which is the legislative body of the city. In “strong” mayor systems, the executive branch has the power to set the budget, appoint city heads, veto legislation, and control policy debate. In systems with “weak” mayors, the balance of power favors the legislative branch. Thus, the city council has not only policy oversight, but administrative oversight in running city agencies. The mayor may be independently elected or may be one of the city council members who periodically rotate into the mayor’s position. The major exception to these two basic forms of city government is the city-county of San Francisco, which is governed by an elected board of supervisors and an elected mayor.
As William Fulton points out in The Reluctant Metropolis, cities compete with one another to attract new sources of revenue.7 In the post-Proposition 13 world, sales and business taxes are the primary sources of revenue for city governments to deliver the services city residents are increasingly demanding. Proposition 13 capped state property taxes, allowing an annual increase of only 1 percent, and reduced the cities’ share of property tax revenue. The impact on California’s cities was immediate. In 1978, for example, just before Proposition 13 became law, the three major cities in Ventura County’s Oxnard Plain collected $8 million in property tax and $10 million in sales tax. In 1979, after Proposition 13 became effective, the cities collected only $3.7 million in property tax and $12 million in sales tax.8 It was clear where future revenues would be sought. To this end, local governments try, whenever possible, to attract affluent residents and to provide economic incentives for commercial or industrial growth—be it big-box retail, shopping malls, car dealerships, or light (non-polluting) industries.9
There are more than 3,400 special districts in California providing specialized services that no other local government provides within a defined area. Special districts include agencies that monitor, regulate, and tax for such services as water, street construction, pest control, flood control, public schools, community colleges, transportation, mosquito abatement, waste disposal, land reclamation, and air quality control. In the post-Proposition 13 era, they also serve as a mechanism to provide public services by sidestepping existing constitutional limits on taxation. Even though two-thirds of special districts are governed by elected boards of directors, most of these bodies are little understood by the average citizen. Critics have argued that special districts are problematic because of their lack of overall coordination and planning, as well as the number of staff and personnel each employ at a direct cost to the taxpayer. Because of a popular belief that special districts are unaccountable and inefficient, state law has limited their growth since the 1960s.
Most regional governments in California exist to aid local governments in planning, coordination, and data generation. Municipalities join regional governments voluntarily, hence these agencies have little or no real power other than the “bully pulpit” to press for corrective policy changes that cross jurisdictional boundaries. Examples are the Southern California Association of Governments (SCAG) and the San Diego Association of Governments (SANDAG). There are also several regional agencies that deliver a specific service. For example, the Bay Area Rapid Transit District (BART) or the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transit Authority (MTA) are agencies designed to deliver mass transit to regions that include more than a single county. The California Coastal Commission governs land use in coastal areas. The Bay Area Air Pollution Control District and the South Coast Air Quality Management District (SCAQMD) are entrusted with considerable political power to regulate air pollution over vast regions (see Chapter 13). Regional governments and agencies serve the broader goals of multijurisdictional (regional) governance, through cooperative data collection, resource sharing, and state-mandated regulation implementation.
In 1995, a blue-ribbon panel concluded that political power in California—with its myriad of government agencies—is fragmented, unaccountable, confusing, and, in many areas, redundant. As part of its package of suggested reforms, the California Constitution Revision Commission sent to the state legislature a proposal suggesting a radical restructuring of local government. If placed on the ballot and approved by the voters, the plan would have authorized local “charter governments,” allowing residents to combine existing agencies—including cities, counties, as well as school districts, water boards, sewer districts, and other types of agencies. It also would have redefined the relationship between the state and local governments by forcing the state to reconsider its unfunded mandates. The legislature has yet to act on this proposal, to the dismay of the financially strapped counties.
The United States is now engaged in a national experiment in the decentralization of social programs. These measures will significantly alter the major federal-state-county relationships pertaining to a myriad of social programs in all 50 states. In its simplest form, the experiment would unravel the fundamental principles that were shaped in the New Deal legislation of the 1930s and repeal major segments of the Great Society legislation of the 1960s.
Historically speaking, this “New Federalism” is the latest wave in a long succession of measures to shift more power and authority from the federal government to the states. In the 1970s, President Nixon proposed revenue sharing and simplification of government operations by transferring planning and management functions to state and local governments. The thrust of his New Federalism policy was to consolidate grant programs in an effort to reduce the complexity of national programs into a manageable handful of block grants—and ultimately to save taxpayers money.10 In the early 1980s, President Reagan won a major concession to realign the federal government’s categorical grant program. His administration consolidated some 57 categorical grants into nine block grants.11 The Nixon and Reagan block grant initiatives were designed to prune the federal bureaucracy, restrict paperwork, and enhance decision making and control at the local level.
New Federalism has long been a contested terrain, however, because increasing state authority over programs allows states to fund some programs at a lower level and to terminate other support programs altogether. Republicans have favored reducing the federal role, while Democrats have argued for greater security and oversight in program delivery. President Clinton was able to bring about bipartisan support for one area of reform with the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA) in 1996. This 500-page document was the cornerstone of Clinton’s initiative to “end welfare as we know it.” The proposal was not without controversy, however. One side of the debate contends that given sufficient discretion, the states can devise more innovative, cost-effective services, that are better able to reduce welfare dependency. On the other side of the debate are critics such as Peter Edelman, who resigned his post as the assistant secretary for planning and evaluation at the Department of Health and Human Services to protest the new welfare law. According to Edelman:
[Welfare reform] does not promote work effectively and it will hurt millions of poor children by the time it’s fully implemented. What’s more it bars hundreds of thousands of legal immigrants from receiving disability and old-age assistance and food stamps, and reduced food-stamp assistance for millions of children in working families… . [Under block grants] there will be no federal definition of who is eligible and therefore no guarantee of assistance to anyone: each state can decide whom to exclude any way it wants, as long as it doesn’t violate the constitution (not much of a limitation when one reads the Supreme Court decisions on this subject). And second, that each state will get a fixed sum of federal money each year even if a recession or a local calamity causes a state to run out of federal funds before the end of the year.12
The effects of welfare reform will be felt everywhere in the state. Welfare recipients are not concentrated in any one county or region. To assess the impacts in California, it is appropriate to review the major elements of the new law.
Title I: Block Grants for Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF)
• Eliminates Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) and consolidates federal funding for AFDC and related programs (such as job training) into a TANF block grant.
• The state was required to implement the block grant by July 1, 1997. The date is important because it triggered the beginning of the five-year time limit for assistance.
• Prohibits use of block grant funds for teen parents under age 18 unless they are (1) attending school and (2) living in an adult-supervised setting.
• Establishes five-year lifetime limit on family use of block grant funds. States may exempt up to 20 percent for hardship.
• Requires at least one adult in a family that has been receiving aid for more than two years to participate in “work activities,” including employment, on-the-job and vocational training, and up to six weeks of job searching.
• By 2004, TANF required 90 percent of two-parent families to participate in work activities. Single parents must work 30 hours each week, or 20 hours for families with a child under age six.
• Imposes penalties on states for noncompliance.
• States must place at least 50 percent of cash welfare recipients in jobs or work programs.
• Federal funds cannot be used to provide cash benefits to adults who fail to find work within two years.
• Cash aid is reduced by 25 percent for recipients who do not cooperate with child-support enforcement agencies or in establishing paternity.
• States have the option to deny additional cash aid to welfare recipients who have additional children.
• States that have received federal waivers to conduct reform programs may continue to operate under those waivers.
Title II: Supplemental Security Income (SSI)
• Eliminates benefits to children who are “relatively less disabled.” Currently, children may be eligible if an impairment exists that precludes them from “age-appropriate” activities.
• Eliminates SSI payments to prison inmates incarcerated for more than 30 days.
• Children no longer qualify for SSI benefits unless they have a medically proven disability that causes “marked and severe functional limitations.”
• Most elderly immigrants are denied SSI benefits unless they obtain citizenship or work in the United States for 10 years.
Titles III, VI, VII, and VIII: Child Care, Support and Nutrition, Food Stamps
• Individual food stamp allotments were reduced across the board by 3 percent.
• The standard deduction applied to food stamp applications to determine eligibility will no longer rise with inflation.
• The deduction for housing costs was frozen at $300 per month, beginning in 2001.
• Able-bodied adults with no dependents lose food stamps after three months (six months if laid off) unless they work at least 20 hours per week.
Whether or not such self-reliance is achieved, the five-year lifetime limit means that the federal government would no longer be obligated to share the cost of public support of children and other members of families with adults who, though able-bodied, have long-term dependency needs. Many of these families would be transferred to general assistance, the residual welfare program for those who do not fit into AFDC or other welfare categories. Because general assistance receives no federal funds, the cost burden would shift to state and local governments. A shift from AFDC to block grants may thus create serious risks for the welfare population; the largest risk is the complete end of entitlements. Although general assistance provides a secondary safety net, its benefit levels are often considerably lower. Children, in particular, may be severely disadvantaged. Nor is there any requirement that states and localities fully fund general assistance. If they cannot or do not, it is not clear what resources will be available to needy families. Since counties are service providers of last resort—for health care, housing, and general assistance—it is likely that services once provided for by the federal government will now fall to states and counties. This is particularly challenging for large urban counties like San Diego, Los Angeles, Alameda, San Francisco, and Sacramento.13
In 2003, the adult recipients of TANF cash grants who had exceeded their 60-month limits began to lose their benefits. In compliance with PRWORA, the state had created the California Work Opportunity and Responsibility to Kids (CALWORKS) program, which continued to fund benefits for children after their parents were cut off. Fortunately, the robust economy of the late 1990s made it possible for California to move families off the welfare rolls with greater success than the nation as a whole. By 1999 the number of families on public assistance had dropped 31 percent from the peak in 1995, and 90 percent of this decline was attributed to job creation, the expansion of the Earned Income Tax Credit, and an increase in the minimum wage.14 California has more than 10 percent of the nation’s population but more than 20 percent of the nation’s welfare caseload. Whether the experiment with welfare reform will succeed remains to be seen. One thing we know for certain: The federal government stands to gain the most because much of the proposed projected savings from welfare reform will come from California alone.
| California Split | Gar Alperovitz |
Something interesting is happening in California. Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger seems to have grasped the essential truth that no nation—not even the United States—can be managed successfully from the center once it reaches a certain scale. Moreover, the bold proposals that Mr. Schwarzenegger is now making for everything from universal health care to global warming point to the kind of decentralization of power which, once started, could easily shake up America’s fundamental political structure.
Governor Schwarzenegger is quite clear that California is not simply another state. “We are the modern equivalent of the ancient city-states of Athens and Sparta,” he recently declared. “We have the economic strength, we have the population and the technological force of a nation-state.” In his inaugural address, Mr. Schwarzenegger proclaimed, “We are a good and global commonwealth.”
Political rhetoric? Maybe. But California’s governor has also put his finger on a little discussed flaw in America’s constitutional formula. The United States is almost certainly too big to be a meaningful democracy. What does “participatory democracy” mean in a continent? Sooner or later, a profound, probably regional, decentralization of the federal system may be all but inevitable.
A recent study by the economists Alberto Alesina of Harvard and Enrico Spolaore of Tufts demonstrates that the bigger the nation, the harder it becomes for the government to meet the needs of its dispersed population. Regions that don’t feel well served by the government’s distribution of goods and services then have an incentive to take independent action, the economists note.
Scale also determines who has privileged access to the country’s news media and who can shape its political discourse. In very large nations, television and other forms of political communication are extremely costly. President Bush alone spent $345 million in his 2004 election campaign. This gives added leverage to elites, who have better corporate connections and greater resources than non-elites. The priorities of those elites often differ from state and regional priorities.
James Madison, the architect of the United States Constitution, understood these problems all too well. Madison is usually viewed as favoring constructing the nation on a large scale. What he urged, in fact, was that a nation of reasonable size had advantages over a very small one. But writing to Jefferson at a time when the population of the United States was a mere four million, Madison expressed concern that if the nation grew too big, elites at the center would divide and conquer a widely dispersed population, producing “tyranny.”
Few Americans realize just how huge this nation is. Germany could fit within the borders of Montana. France is smaller than Texas. Leaving aside three nations with large, unpopulated land masses (Russia, Canada and Australia), the United States is geographically larger than all the other advanced industrial countries taken together. Critically, the American population, now roughly 300 million, is projected to reach more than 400 million by the middle of this century. A high Census Bureau estimate suggests it could reach 1.2 billion by 2100.
If the scale of a country renders it unmanageable, there are two possible responses. One is a breakup of the nation; the other is a radical decentralization of power. More than half of the world’s 200 nations formed as breakaways after 1946. These days, many nations—including Brazil, Britain, Canada, China, France, Italy and Spain, just to name a few—are devolving power to regions in various ways.
Decades before President Bush decided to teach Iraq a lesson, George F. Kennan worried that what he called our “monster country” would, through the “hubris of inordinate size,” inevitably become a menace, intervening all too often in other nations’ affairs: “There is a real question as to whether ‘bigness’ in a body politic is not an evil in itself, quite aside from the policies pursued in its name.”
Kennan proposed that devolution, “while retaining certain of the rudiments of a federal government,” might yield a “dozen constituent republics, absorbing not only the powers of the existing states but a considerable part of those of the present federal establishment.”
Regional devolution would most likely be initiated by a very large state with a distinct sense of itself and aspirations greater than Washington can handle. The obvious candidate is California, a state that has the eighth-largest economy in the world.
If such a state decided to get serious about determining its own fate, other states would have little choice but to act, too. One response might be for an area like New England, which already has many regional interstate arrangements, to follow California’s initiative—as it already has on some environmental measures. And if one or two large regions began to take action, other state groupings in the Northwest, Southwest and elsewhere would be likely to follow.
A new wave of regional devolution could also build on the more than 200 compacts that now allow groups of states to cooperate on environmental, economic, transportation and other problems. Most likely, regional empowerment would be popular: when the Appalachian Regional Commission was established in 1965, senators from across the country rushed to demand commissions to help the economies and constituencies of their regions, too.
Governor Schwarzenegger may not have thought through the implications of continuing to assert forcefully his “nation-state” ambitions. But he appears to have an expansive sense of the possibilities: this is the governor, after all, who brought Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain to the Port of Long Beach last year to sign an accord between California and Britain on global warming. And he may be closer to the mark than he knows with his dream that “California, the nation-state, the harmonious state, the prosperous state, the cutting-edge state, becomes a model, not just for the 21st-century American society, but for the larger world.”
Source: “California Split” by Gar Alperovitz, New York Times, February 10, 2007.
Ever since California was officially admitted to statehood in 1850 as the first noncontiguous American territory to become part of the Union, it has had to build its psychic and pragmatic bridges to protect its interests in Washington. The ongoing debate over where California stands in the federal system, and whether it can use its numeric clout to tip the balance of power in its favor, is really part of its historic legacy. This chapter has examined the complex structural and personal relationship the Golden State has developed over the years with the key centers of national power. In the federal system, states and their representatives must compete for their share of federal dollars without losing sight of the national agenda or the overall development of the United States.
1. Tax Foundation, Special Report No. 139 (March 2006) Federal Tax Burdens and Expenditures by State (www.taxfoundation.org/files/sr139.pdf)
2. Tim Ransdell, “California’s Prospects in Washington,” San Diego Union-Tribune (November 2, 1996): 12.
3. California Institute for Federal Policy Research, “California Balance of Payments Background Data,” 1991–2004 (www.calinst.org/pubs/CalShare2004-tables.pdf).
4. Herbert Sample, “Downsizing California’s Military-Industrial Complex,” California Journal (September 1995): 39–42.
5. Faye Fiore, “State Delegation Braces for Base Closure Battle,” Los Angeles Times (May 23, 1997): A1.
6. See Laureen Lazarovici, “Counties in Crisis,” California Journal (November 1995): 32–34.
7. William Fulton, The Reluctant Metropolis: The Politics of Urban Growth in Los Angeles (Point Arena, CA: Solano Books, 1997).
8. Ibid., pp. 260–261.
9. Paul Kantor, The Dependent City Revisited (San Francisco: Westview Press, 1995).
10. See Richard E. Thompson, Revenue Sharing: A New Era in Federalism (Washington, DC: Revenue Sharing Advisory Service, 1973).
11. George Peterson, et al., The Reagan Block Grants: What Have We Learned? (Washington, DC: The Urban Institute Press, 1986).
12. Peter Edelman, “The Worst Thing Bill Clinton Has Done,” The Atlantic Monthly (March 1997): 43–44.
13. The preferred outcome of achieving self-reliance through employment—the goal of the new programs—raises further tough questions: Will additional education and training sufficiently increase skills and instill better work habits? Will child care and transportation be available? Will child care, Medicaid, and food stamps extend beyond welfare? Wisconsin, for instance, has determined that in its own welfare reform experiment, child care and Medicaid must be extended to all working poor, in part to maintain the incentive of welfare family heads to transition to work. Many other states have not yet developed an integrated perspective, leaving welfare recipients to wonder about interim support. Further, child care funding will be reduced under block grants, but AFDC work requirements will increase the demand for child care. This leads some to wonder whether the quality of child care will diminish—and with it, the positive effects of child care on child development. Funding for family protective services will also be reduced under block grants, raising the possibility that cases of child abuse and neglect will more often be handled by removing the children from families and placing them in foster care, which remains an entitlement.
14. Steven Haider, Jacob Klerman, and Elizabeth Roth, The Relationship Between Welfare Caseload and the Economy, Labor and Population Program Working Paper Series (Santa Monica, CA: RAND, 2002).