The Policy in the Room

POSC 459 — Social Welfare Politics and Policy
Week 2 · Wednesday, September 2

Howard ch. 2, "Tracks of My Tiers" · Desmond ch. 2

Today

1. Research pre-survey (~10 min)
2. PapyrusAI sign-up, everyone, in the room (~10 min)
3. My AI policy, briefly — then the $13M one behind it (~20 min)
4. Howard's tiers and Desmond's flatline (~30 min)

First: the pre-survey

• It is part of a research study, and it is voluntary.
• No credit either way. Declining costs you nothing with me.
• Absent today, or want to do it later? Complete it on your own by Friday 9/11.

Sign-up, together, now

1. Canvas course nav → PapyrusAI. First access creates your account.
2. Choose Google or a password — decide now, not in October.
3. Course code: FALL2026-POSC459
4. Confirm you're enrolled before you close the tab.

Five AI policies, and one of them is mine

• Five courses, five sets of rules, and you are expected to hold all of them straight. 16 of 25 of you said so on the Check-In.
• That is administrative burden, and I am contributing to it. Week 3 gives you the vocabulary.
• Mine is §12 of the syllabus, plus the long version on Canvas. Read it before the first Yellow assignment. Not now.
• Standing invitation: find me the line where a reasonable student would get it wrong, and I will fix it.

My stake, on the record

• I use these tools.
• I'm in a grant-funded faculty learning community promoting AI-integrated teaching.
• This course runs on PapyrusAI.

Asking you to evaluate something I benefit from without saying so would be the exact failure the disclosure rule exists to prevent.

Scale it up

The CSU–OpenAI contract.

• 2025: systemwide ChatGPT Edu, ~$17M for eighteen months — announced by the Chancellor's Office and by OpenAI.
• Renewed May 2026: ~$13M a year, for three years, 675,000 users (EdSource).
• Sold as equitable access. Contested in public: LAist on the $2.3B budget gap, CalMatters on who refuses to use it, the AAUP on whom it serves.

You have an account because of this decision.

What the record says

• Everyone got the same tool. Every student, faculty, and staff member on 23 campuses; 675,000 users under the renewal.
• Most of you already had it. 84% of CSU students said they used ChatGPT before the deal; 95% used some AI tool. 82% worry AI will hurt their job prospects. (CSU survey, 2025)
• Training didn't come with it. 67% of students say their professors don't teach them how to use AI; 52% of faculty say it has hurt their teaching. (CalMatters)
• It was paid for during a $2.3B budget gap. "We are cutting programs. We are laying off faculty … and we're giving it to the richest technology companies in the world." (a CSU sociology professor, LAist)
• Who was in the room: about three faculty on a committee of two dozen. The student association: "We were not consulted … we weren't even given a heads up." (LAist; CalMatters)

Circle up — six minutes

Turn to the three or four people around you. Nobody moves a chair.

Pick one:

1. "Equitable access" was the stated goal. You are the beneficiary. What did you actually get — and did everyone get the same thing? What would have to be true for the claim to hold?
2. Who paid for it — and is that the group that gets the benefit?
3. Nobody asked you. Who was in the room when this was decided, and who wasn't? Who is in the room when a TANF or SNAP rule changes?

Report a side. "Both sides have a point" gets one more minute in the huddle.

That question has a name

Policy feedback. Once made, a policy builds its own constituency and sets the terms of the next fight. Paul Pierson, "When Effect Becomes Cause" — Week 4.

You just ran the drill on a policy you are inside of. Discussion Paper 1 asks you to run it on someone else's:

Pick one person or moment from Growing Up Poor in America and one claim from Howard ch. 3 or Pierson. Say what the film does to the claim — illustrates it, complicates it, or contradicts it. Then decide: is this a policy-feedback story, and if so, which policy?

Due Friday 9/18, 11:59 p.m., on Canvas. Part 2 of the film comes in Week 4.

Monday I left you a question

If poverty is a knot and not a line — what number would tell us we're making progress?

Before the number: the map. Howard's chapter is about which programs we count, and how we sort them.

Figures on the next five slides were checked against current sources on 9/7, after class. Where a number has moved, you get what we said in the room and what the record says now.

Howard's map: the two tiers

The textbook story: the upper tier is larger, more generous, more uniform, more popular, and harder to cut. The lower tier is the one Americans say they hate.

Cracks in the tiers

• Same family, same program. TANF, family of three: $201 in Texas, $636 in Connecticut (as taught — these are Howard's July 2000 figures). 2023: $327 and $833. The real spread is now Arkansas $204 to New Hampshire $1,243. Six-fold.
• Same hand. Lose it to amputation: $185,100 in Indiana, $419,354 in Illinois (as taught: $53,500 and $181,700). Workers' comp is upper tier.
• Unemployment insurance reached 37 percent of the unemployed in 2000. In 2024: 27 percent. Minnesota 56, Kentucky 9.
• Medicaid spends $20,305 per aged enrollee, Medicare about $16,000 (as taught: $10,000 and $6,000) — but ask me what Medicaid is buying.
• Americans say they hate "welfare." Ask about Medicaid and favorability is 83 percent, four points behind Medicare.

Howard's rule: if one of the Big Three doesn't fit the model, build a better model. Verdict: reject the tiers.

Desmond's puzzle: the flatline

Fifty-four years, and the official rate never left the 10-to-15 percent band. Hold that word.

Over those same years, what the government spent on its thirteen largest anti-poverty programs, per person and adjusted for inflation, went from $1,015 (1980) to $3,419 (2017). More than three times the money.

Three times the spending. The same share of people poor. Why? Desmond tries three explanations and rules each one out:

• We got stingy. No: spending rose even under Reagan.
• Immigration. No: the states that took in the most immigrants saw poverty hold or fall.
• Single parents. No: single mothers aren't poorer in countries with universal programs, and when a Milwaukee program raised incomes, marriage rates rose with them.

Which poverty rate?

Monday's question: if poverty is a knot, what number would show progress? It depends on the yardstick.

The flatline uses the official measure: a 1960s food budget times three, cash income only. It never sees SNAP, the EITC, housing help, or a stimulus check — the programs that grew.

Count those, and the rate stops holding still:

The expanded Child Tax Credit arrived in 2021 and expired at the end of it. Children in poverty: 3.8 million, then 9.0 million. One provision, one year, five million children.

Fantasy, in Growing Up Poor in America: "That stimulus, that paid half my bills." The official measure records her as exactly as poor as before.

The line didn't move because of what the line counts.

Where the dollars leak

Desmond's other answer: some of the money never reaches a family at all. He calls it a leaky bucket.

• TANF, the cash-welfare program: in 2020, states spent 22 cents of every TANF dollar on cash for families; in 2023, 25 cents. About $6 billion sat unspent then. Now $10 billion — 62 percent of a full year's block grant, and three-quarters of it not even committed.
• Texas spends 2 cents on the dollar. Hawaii and Tennessee are sitting on reserves worth four to five times their entire annual grant.
• 21 families get TANF for every 100 in poverty. In 1996 it was 68.
• Waiting is a leak. Becky, in the film, approved for pandemic unemployment: "Everything is still pending, though, so I haven't gotten anything yet."
• Conditions are a leak. Crystal, Shawn's mother in the film: "I am still required to work my hours for my assistance … maybe my assistance could get shut down."

Back to Howard's map. Crystal's household runs on food stamps, HUD housing help, disability cash, and free school lunch at the same time: four programs, from both "tiers," in one trailer. The tiers sort programs on paper. No family lives in just one.

Two books, one question

• Howard: the map you were handed doesn't describe the territory.
• Desmond: the money on the map doesn't all arrive.

So when Americans say they hate "welfare" — which program are they picturing? Is it even on Howard's map?

Due and next

• Discussion Paper 1 — Growing Up Poor in America, both parts, with Howard ch. 3 and Pierson: Friday 9/18, 11:59 p.m., Canvas. Keep film notes now — a person, a scene, a moment.
• Pre-survey, if you missed it today: by Friday 9/11.
• Labor Day Monday 9/7 — no class. Week 3 is Wednesday 9/9 only: Howard ch. 1, Desmond chs. 3–4.