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It’s Time to Rethink Our Welfare Policy
Earlier this week the New York Times reported that even as many states have skyrocketing unemployment, their welfare rolls are shrinking. As a researcher for a racial justice think tank, I’ve been traveling the country collecting accounts of how this recession is playing out in the lives of every day people. Millions who are out of work, losing homes and struggling to stay afloat are nevertheless denied access to Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF). The punitive rules established after twenty years of racially coded frenzy to “end welfare as we know it” have left Americans with no safety net during this deepening economic crisis.
TANF replaces the old Aid to Families with Dependent Children program (to insert the “temporary”) and its creation relied on mythologized images of the “welfare queen” driving Cadillacs conjured by Ronald Reagan’s presidential campaign. This kind of racial scapegoating, the politics many believe we outgrew with Obama’s election, vilified welfare recipients (who have always been mostly white) and led to rules that are so complicated and punitive that many struggling families cannot get the help they need. Now that all of us – not just people of color— are in recession free fall, there is nothing available to catch us. To fix TANF, we will have to put aside racial stereotypes to do what is best for the largest number of people.
When Welfare Reform passed in 1996, our macro economic outlook was optimistic and the rhetoric of "personal responsibility" was ubiquitous. The welfare rolls plummeted and conservative and liberals alike declared success. But unknown numbers of families (we mostly stopped counting) were left underemployed, underpaid and unable to comply with punitive regulations. According to Robert Wharton, the president and chief executive officer of the Community Economic Development Administration, "Ten years into welfare reform, caseloads may have decreased, but the number of people living in poverty has not". Welfare reform set up countless barriers to access. The most egregious of these are punitive work requirements and 5-year maximum time limits for lifetime eligibility.
One of the places I stopped in my travels was Detroit. Michigan has the highest unemployment in the country, passing 10 percent last month. Detroit has been hit even harder. Yet, reports the Times, the state cut its welfare rolls over 13 percent last year. In Michigan rules, like those in many states, public assistance is tied to work. A 30-year-old woman I met, lets call her A, lost her job as a teacher's assistant in a Detroit area public school, and then lost her TANF because she was no longer working. Now she has neither job nor welfare, and she's facing foreclosure with her four children. I heard dozens of examples like this. People who couldn't find a job, or even a decent volunteer opportunity, without childcare, transportation, and more help than the new welfare system provides.
A society cannot survive without a safety net and we don't have one during the worst economic crisis in decades. TANF needs serious reconsideration including a rescinding of punitive work requirements and an end to the time limits that cut people off after 5 years total enrollment. We need to ensure that families have access to supplementary benefits like food stamps, fully subsidized child care, transportation and housing assistance and we need to remove debilitating eligibility requirements that exclude many documented immigrants and people with past involvement with the criminal justice system. To do these things Americans have to be willing to move past their racial stereotypes about people of color and welfare.
The country recently came together in a proud moment to inaugurate our first president of color. We did so by putting our racial divisions aside in the name of collective economic self-interest. Now we need to do the same by rebuilding a system of support for everyone.
13 comments:
My sister us deouty director for Social Services in the county where she lives. This rural, county is suffering from economic troubles going back several. She has told me for years about all the people cut from assistance, yewt their budget goes up every year. She travels to conventions all over the country constantly. yet women and children are doing without. In my opinion this has been the primary cause for the decline in the school system to the point that according to her there is a 50% dropout rate. I graduated from that school and it shocks me to hear that.
But, in Decermber my sister was wracking her brain to find a way to dispose of over a million dollars because if she didn't they would have to give it back. She was calling around to other counties to find someone who could use the money for the purpose it was allocated for. She bought books, school supplies and clothes for every school kid that came in. They had that much left intheir budget, but they cannot give thsat money to people who really do need it.
It really just pisses me off. And she doesn't like it either, but her options are tied up so that people who need money simply are not eligible to get it.
APISHAPA
Obama won't touch it. He's not going to go anywhere near helping single mothers - be ya' anything. Should it be reformed? Yes, it should. It served it's purpose as was, and we need to grow again as a nation, but Obama has no ability to lead us in this fight. His disdain for both women and impoverished families is to great, and his fear of his race being held against him to threatening, for him to walk into this.
One more reason we should have nominated Hillary.
Thanks for posting this. The piece is upsetting and the writer's clear misunderstanding of who Obama really is - even at this late date - is more upsetting.
I would think 5 years on the rolls is enough. If you can't find a job in 5 years, something is really wrong with you.
Also, why is it wrong to ask someone to work while they get welfare? In my state at least, there are qualifying volunteer positions that will satisfy the requirement.
APISHAPA,
when do people have to take responsibility for themselves? The parents and their kids who drop out of school are ultimately the ones responsible for the kids' inability to find a job later.
My grandparents were Grapes of Wrath poor, but they managed to raise kids who went to college. Now, these people can't even get their kids to school, and you are saying that it is social services fault? Give me a break!
We need to create jobs and bring back those that were exported, and then there would be little need for welfare except as a last resort.
Those who committed economic treason should be held accountable for their actions.
We whine about those on "welfare" but those who are getting millions off the taxpayer get little in the way of condemnation.
Aapparently MWAM lives in a world where welfare queens and their bastard sons are too busy playing B'Ball and blinging tha bling to actually get down to work, and that is what is plugging up all the safety nets. MWAM does not live in a land where educated white people are losing their homes, where people with college degrees are getting their asses handed to them on pink slips, nor where the economy is crumbling... no MWAM must live in a Pastoral Reganesque, where the wealth trickles down, and the only people with no work are those who don't want to do any....
Grapes of Wrath my ass.
One more reason we should have nominated Hillary
There may have been reasons, but this would not have been such a reason.
It was BILL CLINTON who made these changes occur, and PROGRESSIVES in his administration who resigned in protest. I know that is going to make heads spin around here, as it portrays Joe's catechism (Clinton/DLC GOOD, Progressives BAD)in reverse order.
Bill Clinton had vetoed the GOP's draconian version of welfare reform twice, but had promised it as an early '92 campaign pledge himself. Coming into the re-election season, he had advisor Dick Morris telling him that if he let the third GOP try at it go through, he'd win re-election more easily than if he did not let it go through (although he would win in either case, per Morris).
That was the Faustian bargain made by Bill Clinton with Dick Morris' aid and advice, and protested by the progressives and the anti-DLCers. While the most dire warnings of its effect failed to materialize at the time, they are now manifesting.
So how to respond to this? Should we pre-emptively blame the new guy, BHO, as a gutless wonder, and credit Hillary as someone who'd better handle this? When it was her HUSBAND'S gutless and self-serving work that created this mess? I find this unpersuasive, although your mileage may vary.
XI
MAWM,
To answer your questions - there is an entire transportation/childcare/housing clusterfuck that arises. IT's not that it's wrong to require them to work, it's that too many of the women don't have the resources to make it manageable. It results in women in rural areas spending hours and hours in transit because they don't own a car, and mass transit won't get them to where the jobs are. IT results in women in areas of high unemployment spending hours and hours in transit to get to where the jobs are. It's just not a productive use of anyone's time.
The biggest difficulty for mothers on relief is childcare. Most of them have mothers who work, so they cannot rely on family to take care of the kids while they go to work. So, then they're stuck paying the vast majority of their salary for childcare and there is no way for them to get stabilized - the necessary step before getting ahead.
Most women leave assistance when their last child enters school - because that's when they can finally afford to work. Childcare is, at a minimum, $80 a week and most places are far higher than that.
And finally, most women who are on assistance longer than a couple years, are dealing with health issues - either their own or their child's. Contrary to popular mythology, there are very few multi-generational families of welfare recipients and the vast majority of those recipients have long term, multi-generational physical, emotional and psychiatric illnesses. And both TANF and AFDC are/were far cheaper for the counties than dealing with those issues are.
We could eliminate most poverty among single mothers by simply creating programs that allow mothers to get a real education that leads to a real career - whether it's a 6 month pharmacy tech training, a one year LVN training program or even graduate level work. But we don't do that. We make it almost impossible for a single mom to go to school. And if we would bitte the bullet and develop the proper programs and housing, we could make them far more prosperous, and make their children far less likely to use public resources, and far more likely to go to college in their own right, simply by creating a program that allows them to work part time, and go to school full time. But nothing like that exists.
Listen, I'm smart and I'm frugal. When I left my husband, I couldn't figure out a way to go to school and keep a roof over my head and my child's head - and it's tougher now than it was in the 80s. If I can't do it, I guarantee you that the vast majority of women who've never had a family member go to college couldn't do it either.
Years ago, there was an experiment in Ohio where they provided childcare to high school age single mothers so that they could finish their high schooling. Much to the astonishment of state officials, all of the young women instantly enrolled and were incredibly grateful for the opportunity. Previously lousy students suddenly became super-students scrambling to catch up with the stuff they'd never paid attention to before. Here in Cali, we instituted a job training program called GAIN. The state officials built in penalties for women who refused to enroll. The progam was filled within the first day or two and the women who weren't accepted, were begging for the program to be expanded. Single mothers desperately want and need the ability to get training, but we do not provide it.
Single moms face a huge wall of housing/transpo/childcare. Landlords don't want to rent rooms or singles to someone with a child. In LA, bus passes are necessary for everyone over 5 - so a single mom who doesn't own a car is spending $170 on bus passes. How do you do that on $8 an hour?
That's a lot of info, MAWM, but that is what the situation is.
Icallbu Llshitonthat, why do you bring race into the discussion. Your race baiting is really offensive. Contrary to your prejudice, I am a liberal and I can't stand Reagan. My objection to one of the previous commenters posts was that I believe personal responsibility needs to be a factor in the whole welfare question.
Lori, I do not know the ins and outs of each states' program, and I would hope the system could be changed if instead of giving a helping hand it unduly burdens a person. If the work requirement means commuting 4 hours per day, then let's alter the requirements to handle exceptions like these.
My point is that the aim of welfare should be to lift someone out of poverty, and that won't happen unless there is some incentive to take personal responsibility. Getting a check with no string is something that human beings should never have.
Apparently, Anonymous, you prefer Ronald Reagan's welfare reform with it's dollar in/dollar out provision which was putting mothers in jail for babysitting on the side to buy their kids birthday presents. I'd be interested in hearing why you think Reagan's welfare program was superior to Clinton's but I suspect you don't actually know anything about what welfare was like before.
I volunteered with a program at the time that was helping move mothers off of welfare into the workforce under Reagan's welfare and saw the transition that happened with Clinton first hand. While it was far from ideal, it allowed a lot more women to survive with dignity than had been the case before. Some of the states cooked up some truly ugly programs, but those ugly programs always existed.
Clinton's reform provided a manageable way off of welfare - time to stabilize. With Reagan's version, the minute you began earning money, all of it was deducted from your grant leaving no roof for the transition. No ability to buy transportation passes, to pay for childcare, to buy appropriate clothes for the work force - going from living quite a bit below the povery level to working is expensive. Clinton's plan recognized that and allowed for it. It also finally forced the states to have their case workers help the moms find a job - and quite a few of them need real help.
As an example, I was helping a young Latino mom one time, who had held fast food jobs before. But she was trying to find something that paid enough to support her and her child. I showed up to help prepare her for interviews and found her wearing, for a job interview, an ivory cat suit, with an ivory lace overdress, ivory spike high heels and lots and lots of pearls. She thought she looked cute, and that looking cute was the key to getting a job. Her dad was a fireman and her mom had never worked - she had no idea how to go about getting a job. Once the states allowed the case workers to get involved, they had a way to help deal with those issues.
Yes, we need to reform it again. But people who preferred Reagan's version to clinton's hopefully won't have much say this time out. I know there are progressive points to be scored by scorning Clinton's plan, but I was on the ground working with moms and I know which version I saw work better.
BTW, Clinton's reform left GOP governors howling for the changes the Democrats had always wanted and could never get. Hopefully, that will happen with the next reform.
Yes, Hillary would do a far better version than what we have now, because she wouldn't have the ultra-hostile and conservative congress to work with that Bill had. BTW, when the house held hearings on the matter in the 90s, not a single welfare mom testified and virtually all of the testimony came from men who ran the programs. Bet you didn't know that.
Mawm,
Life on welfare and TANF is almost impossible without cheating. Most mothers desperately want to be off but cannot earn sufficient money to keep a roof over their head while paying for childcare - that is the single biggest issue. A generation ago, grandmum was at home and did the honors. Those days are long gone.
every time any entity creates a program that allows women to either get schooling, or pull together the resources to get off welfare, they are instantly flooded with applicants. There is very little lack incentive but there is a monstrously large lack of resources for these mothers.
Clinton didn't get his plan. That is why he vetoed the GOP-style welfare reform twice. He didn't get his plan the third time around, either.
Even when he signed the third plan, he mentioned that it had large flaws that needed fixing. They did revisit it, and changed some of the more harmful provisions with regard to immigrants. However, the worst flaw was that what had been an entitlement to welfare, if one met the criteria, was changed to a strictly time delimited program. After whatever time limit had been passed for any recipient, they no longer had any right or ability to get any federal aid of this kind at all, ever again. No cash stipend, no food stamps.
Not if unemployment rose to double digits, not if they had minor children at home, nor for any other reason. SOL.
Bill Clinton should have vetoed the third GOP attempt and all subsequent attempts at welfare reform, until these horrible flaws were removed. He need not have signed it in '96, except for his election consideration.
The notion that Hillary would not confront as hostile a Republican Congress as Bill did-- why do you say that? Of course she would have, and even had they been forgetting, her arrival would have been a wake up call back to hostility mode.
XI
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