Cover
story Welfare reform
By TERESA MALCOLM
Vivian Hain calls the 1996 reform of
the welfare system welfare deform. In her experience with receiving
welfare in Alameda County, Calif., she said she has contended with unhelpful,
hard-to-reach caseworkers, been discouraged from educational opportunities and
has received inadequate assistance for expenses such as child care and
transportation, while being pushed into the job market at wages that fall below
subsistence level.
We want a fresh start so eventually we dont have to
rely on the county, Hain, 35, said. But how can you ever leave
welfare if they continue to knock you back?
But Patricia Capell in Kansas City, Mo., had high praise for the
changes brought about by the 1996 reform law. Before they were just
helping you stay on welfare, she said. You couldnt go to a
job interview there was no one to watch the kids and no way to get
there.
Now she receives assistance for both transportation and childcare.
Through Missouris Futures program, she received both job training and job
placement classes. You learn to become dependent on yourself, so you no
longer need welfare, said Capell, 30.
Meanwhile, both women rely on charitable agencies to help feed
their families. Hain takes her two daughters to the Alameda County Community
Food Bank, while Capell spoke to NCR as she waited for groceries at a
food pantry run by the Bishop Sullivan Center, supported by the Catholic
diocese.
The two womens stories illustrate the strengths and
weaknesses that observers see in the welfare system since Congress passed the
Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996. Most
agreed that the old system fostered welfare dependence and needed changing.
Within five years of passage of reform, the number of families on the rolls was
halved. But critics of welfare reform say that caseload reduction is not enough
poverty reduction for families both on and off the welfare rolls needs to be
made a goal.
The stories also illustrate that while welfare reform was supposed
to have streamlined the system, it remains a tangle of rules and regulations,
varying from state to state and sometimes from county to county. In the end,
there is little that is simple about welfare reform.
The [1996] welfare law was at best designed for a time of
prosperity, said Peter Edelman, professor of law at Georgetown University
Law Center. Its deeply flawed even in that context, but it is
totally inadequate for a time of recession.
Meanwhile, some proponents of the 1996 legislation promote a
tightening of work requirements and deplore that states have neglected the
welfare reform laws goal of strengthening marriage and families.
Lobbyists on both sides will bring these concerns to the debate
this year as Congress prepares to reauthorize the law, which expires Sept.
30.
Drop in caseload
The welfare caseload declined from 4.4 million families in 1996 to
2.2 million in 2000. To those who might credit the decline to a robust economy,
supporters of reform point out that during a similar period of economic growth
in the 1980s, welfare rolls remained stagnant.
Supporters of the welfare law also note that based on the
governments definition of poverty an income below $14,600 for a family of
three or $17,000 for a family of four the poverty rate has also fallen. In
addition, according to Census Bureau figures, child poverty fell every year
from 1995-99. Black child poverty, at 33.1 percent in 1999, is at its lowest
since the census began measuring it in 1974.
However, the drop in the poverty rate has not been as dramatic as
the drop in the welfare rolls. Those who have left the rolls were
finding in soup kitchens and shelters, said Sister of St. Joseph Mary
Elizabeth Clark of NETWORK, a Catholic social justice lobby. Theyre
not making a living wage. Theyre not in a situation where their health
care needs are met. Theyre trying to save on food so they can pay child
care.
For those still on welfare, legislation that was passed in times
of plenty imposed a federal five-year lifetime limit on benefits. Some states
set an even shorter period of time for people to receive benefits from
Temporary Assistance to Needy Families, the federal block grants to the states
that replaced the pre-1996 Aid to Families With Dependent Children. Now,
Temporary Assistance recipients are hitting those limits as the economy slips
into recession. The program, best known by its initials, TANF, is referred to
in bureaucratic circles as Tanif.
Some activists feared that reduced welfare caseloads would be used
as a reason to decrease funding for Temporary Assistance to Needy Families. But
in the current recession, that has not been proposed. The Bush
administrations 2003 budget calls for Congress to maintain state grants
at $16.7 billion per year. House Democrats have proposed an increase to at
least $20 billion over the next five years.
TANF funding needs to be at least the same as that provided in the
1996 law, Clark said. NETWORK supports an increase in funding. People
still left on the rolls need even more attention in their situation, she
said.
Lobbying for the poor
To prepare for reauthorization of welfare reform, NETWORK began a
campaign in October called Making a Noise about the Need, designed
to train activists to lobby for the interests of poor people. Twenty-one
daylong workshops will be offered through May in 16 states.
An important key to poverty reduction, many analysts say, is
supports for working families to raise them out of poverty. These work
supports can include programs separate from TANF, such as food stamps,
Medicaid and the State Child Health Insurance Program, and the federal Earned
Income Tax Credit. Furthermore, states unused funds from the federal
block grants for TANF can be used for programs for needy working families,
including assistance with childcare, transportation and housing costs. Another
support known as work disregards considers only a portion of the
familys income when determining eligibility for cash assistance.
Work supports may have the best chance of finding a positive
reception with Congress and with the public, said Ron Haskins, guest scholar at
the Brookings Institution and a former Republican staff member of the House
Ways and Means Committee. The politics of helping working families is
potentially much more popular than the politics of welfare, he said.
Until recently, Haskins served as co-director of the Brookings Welfare Reform
& Beyond initiative. In February, he took on a temporary position as senior
adviser for welfare policy at the White House.
The availability of work supports varies from state to state, and
in some states, from county to county.
There are so many states that arent doing much to help
people find jobs and keep jobs once they have them, Edelman said.
Often a state will have a small initiative in some area a little
transportation assistance, or a little child care. But that initiative may not
be very consequential in the context of the states overall
policy.
More than welfare needed
Whether a person gets out of poverty is determined by more than
simply welfare. The minimum wage, food stamps, health coverage and unemployment
compensation are part of a long list of policies that affect whether people can
make ends meet which requires a minimum income at a higher level than
what we call the poverty level, Edelman added.
According to the Brookings Institution, fewer than half of mothers
who leave welfare for work are receiving food stamps, even though they remain
eligible. As many as 60 percent, according to one good study, do not get
them even though they are qualified, Haskins told NCR. To
some extent the same is true of Medicaid. There was a drop in eligible families
receiving it, but there has been some recovery there.
Clark said that more outreach is necessary to inform people who
have left the welfare rolls that they are still entitled to food stamps and
Medicaid, and better training is needed for TANF caseworkers. In some
cases, the caseworkers were not clear and people were being misinformed,
she said. They were going away from the TANF office with the
understanding that they were cut off from all public assistance.
Catholic Charities USA has recommended in testimony to Congress
that families leaving welfare should automatically continue to receive food
stamps and Medicaid without any further paperwork. Even if they know they
are still eligible, to reapply they have to go down and spend all day at the
welfare office filling out 14-page forms for food stamps and 24 pages for
Medicaid, said Sharon Daly, vice president for social policy for Catholic
Charities USA. It might actually take two full days. Many states require
reapplication every three months, others every six months. In that critical
first year when parents are working, other benefits ought to be provided
automatically, so the parent doesnt have to take time off work not
only losing hourly wages but possibly losing the job.
On Jan. 9, the Bush administration proposed the restoration of
food stamp benefits for legal immigrants who have lived in the United States
for five years, reversing a provision of the 1996 welfare law that was
vehemently opposed by many activists.
Robert Rector, senior research fellow with the Heritage
Foundation, a conservative think-tank, is in favor of work supports such as the
Earned Income Tax Credit. However, he maintains that the key to helping the
working poor is to strengthen work requirements. Its very
misleading to say that people are working hard but are still poor, he
told NCR. The average hours worked reported by the working poor, he
said, is close to 1,000 hours a year about half of the year. The reality
is that the working poor are poor because theyre not working much,
Rector said. Strengthen the work requirement in the welfare program and
for food stamps, insist the parent put in at least 30 hours a week, and if they
dont do that they have to be engaged in a job search or community
service. Push them into the labor market and their earnings will go
up.
Wisconsin is the model on work, Rector said. Its the
only state that has a universal work requirement for all TANF recipients. The
caseload is down over 90 percent, and child poverty has been cut in half.
Those who remain on the rolls may be among the hard-to-employ, he
said, but they are still required to engage in community service
activities.
One of the reasons Wisconsin is a model is that the state has
allotted its own resources to not only match, but exceed the federal block
grant for TANF. They havent met all the need, but they have
understood that need for big investments in work supports, said Deborah
Weinstein, director of the family income division of the Childrens
Defense Fund.
Difficult to earn living wage
However, Wisconsin was one of the states included in a Network
Welfare Reform Watch study that revealed the difficulty of those leaving
welfare rolls to earn a living wage, Clark said. Even in Wisconsin, which
has the best record, we see many people who are working coming to our
agencies, she told NCR.
Meanwhile, welfare recipients who do not find work may first face
sanctions having their benefits reduced or eliminated and ultimately they reach
the end of their cash benefits, having exceeded their lifetime limit.
Researchers say that many families who have been sanctioned for
not complying with TANF requirements have multiple barriers to employment, such
as low education levels, limited work experience, language barriers, greater
incidence of domestic violence, physical and mental health problems, and lack
of support services such as child care and transportation.
In a paper published by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities
in March, Heidi Goldberg noted that many states have sanction policies that are
more severe than required by the federal TANF law. States may impose sanctions
for the first instance of noncompliance, and for a longer period of time than
federal law requires.
Goldberg called such penalties counterproductive, because
the sanction destabilizes the family and reduces the chance that a parent can
adequately support the family without welfare. She urged that a wider
range of activities count toward the work participation requirement including
substance abuse treatment, mental health counseling, and education and training
programs.
According to Daly, efforts to place welfare recipients in jobs
concentrated on the easiest cases. There has not been much attention to
the hard-to-serve cases. These people have already been cheated once. They
didnt get the specialized education they need, and here theyre
about to be cheated again unless Congress says we need to pay attention to
them.
Those still on the welfare rolls may also face the expiration of
the federal five-year lifetime limit on TANF payments. Some states have set
even shorter time limits. While many activists would like to see the time limit
eliminated completely, they are pushing for more exceptions. The welfare reform
law allowed for exceptions of up to 20 percent of the current families on TANF
a total that has been halved since 1996.
Its very worrisome that just as more families start
exhausting the time-limited benefits, there will be fewer jobs for people to go
to, and theyre losing the jobs they have, Weinstein said.
We know people who move from welfare disproportionately
entered service jobs, jobs in the hospitality industry, restaurants, hotels,
travel-related jobs all of which were hurt badly after Sept. 11, she
said. Making the emphasis on poverty reduction, not just caseload
reduction, is more important than ever.
Government officials in several states including Pennsylvania, New
Jersey, Washington, New York and Minnesota have proposed plans to ease time
limits in some form in light of the recession.
The Childrens Defense Fund advocates that states should be
allowed to set categories of people, such as those with physical or mental
disabilities or those caring for someone with a disability, who can be exempted
from the time limit rather than an artificial 20 percent exemption
provided for in the federal law, Weinstein said.
The clock is ticking for both Vivian Hain and Patricia Capell.
In Alameda County, Hain is participating in a community service
work program to get a year extension on Californias 18-month limit on
cash benefits for adults. She is in the program while going to school
full-time, studying multimedia design without assistance from CalWorks, the
California welfare program. The volunteer work is taking my time from
studying and from my children, she said. Instead of forcing her into
work, they should let me finish school so I have no excuses. Hain
expects to earn her degree by spring 2003.
Off and on for the past five years, Capell has been taking courses
part-time at a community college in the Kansas City area, working toward a
degree in geology. She has used up about half of her five-year lifetime limit
on welfare payments, which makes her a little nervous, she said, especially
since losing her job in the summer. But in another two years, Ill
be out of college, and I wont need it at all, she said.
For those having difficulties, we need to figure out new
ways to help them, Haskins told NCR. Get them in the work
force, with work supports, and a new attention to education and training. The
key ingredients are individual effort, individual responsibility plus public
benefits.
Teresa Malcolm is NCR news editor. Her e-mail address is
tmalcolm@natcath.org
National Catholic Reporter, March 1,
2002
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