So, Finance Minister Tonio Fenech remarks that benefits for single mothers are under review and he finds himself accused of instigating a witch hunt. Sixteen years ago, US President Bill Clinton found himself in an analogous position, with the added complication that much of the opposition came from his own political party.
The US case is worth revisiting. It puts into perspective what the minister wrote, in response to his critics, in this newspaper on Tuesday. It also helps us see better the significance of what he left out.
In 1992, one of Mr Clinton's principal campaign promises was "to put an end to welfare as we know it". It referred particularly to cash benefits received by single mothers. The benefits, widely unpopular, were believed to encourage economic dependency and unwed motherhood.
Mr Clinton acted quickly, going against his own Democrat Party's instincts. By 2000, the number of families on welfare had gone down from 4.8 million to 2.2 million.
The President's motives were mixed. His partisan calculation was to stop welfare being a damaging electoral issue for Democrats. But he also wanted to reform aspects of welfare, which seemed objectively perverse.
The programme of Aid To Families With Dependent Children (AFDC) discouraged unwed expectant parents from marrying, since married couples were ineligible. It discouraged mothers from working by reducing their AFDC payments if they did. And, since the payments seldom covered basic expenses, it encouraged single mothers to work illegally.
Would anyone in his right mind create a system like this? Yes: if you are President Franklin Delano Roosevelt; if you are enacting the New Deal in the 1930s not the 1990s; if the "single mothers" you intend to help are mostly widows; and if the general social expectation is that mothers with children ought ideally to stay at home and not go out to work.
One did not have to be crazy to create the system. But it was crazy to keep it as social insurance for a very different kind of recipient in a very different society.
Mr Clinton believed that by getting single mothers into work, it would be politically easier to increase financial aid for the working poor (it helped taxpayers see "single mothers" as "working mothers"). He managed to do this in significant ways, although not as much as he wanted since, after 1994, he had to work with a hostile, Republican Party-dominated Congress.
The changes were hard on mothers who could not work regularly because of chronically sick children (or parents). And, without good childcare provision, single mothers working 40 hours per week were unable to supervise their children properly; in trying, they often suffered from burnout. However, in his prize-winning book, American Dream (Viking, 2005), an eight-year review of the reform that included detailed interviews with welfare recipients, the journalist Jason DeParle showed that the changes were mostly a relative success.
Two issues are worth highlighting as particularly relevant for Malta in ways that go beyond the question of benefits for single mothers (which are different from those in the US).
First, any reform or audit of the welfare system should not be judged in piecemeal fashion. The impact on recipients depends on what the final balance sheet of costs and benefits looks like.
Second, there is no such thing as timeless excellence when evaluating a welfare system. A safety net is only effective if it shadows the movements of contemporary society. In the US case, defending a system built for the 1930s was not necessarily in the interests of those who needed welfare in the 1990s.
Where does that leave Minister Fenech? In Tuesday's article, he spoke to the first point but not to the second.
He emphasised that the crackdown on benefit fraud, and review of incentives, would favour the balance sheet of the truly needy, as the system would be able to move more money their way.
We will know if he means it by tracing where the money is going. But would it help us know if the system is keeping up with society's movements?
Malta today is a very different society from the one on which our current welfare system was based. Despite occasional tweaking, the latter was structured to take, as its norm, one (male) breadwinner per family, occupying the same job for a lifetime, in a society whose birth-rate was above replacement levels.
That is not who we are today. As shown by the Today Public Policy Institute report, The Sustainability Of Malta's Social Security System, just defending the amount of money flowing within the system, without longer-term planning, is actually a poor defence for the system's survival. Under the current dispensation, after 2012 there will be a funding shortfall, which will reach almost €192 million by 2015. (Disclosure: As a TPPI board member, I approved the report's publication.)
With huge, looming figures like that, the minister needs to be working on more than just fraud and incentives for this budget. The report suggests a bipartisan approach to a new philosophy of welfare, designed to protect inclusivity, not undermine it.
Given the reaction to his mention of single mothers, one can understand why Mr Fenech has stayed away from the subject of long-term welfare reform. But that cannot be good news for those with an effective welfare system to heart.
ranierfsadni@europe.com