For all the praise former President Bill "Cigar-Soaker" Clinton receives, you'd think he'd saved the country from hordes of boogeymen while singlehandedly fixing the economic problems plaguing the nation.
I remember it differently and while I certainly preferred Clinton over the alternatives, I held my nose on this vote, just like I have for....hmmmm. Come to think of it, I've held my nose every single time I've voted over my entire lifetime.
Why is that?
Well, it's because none of the people who've run for president of this country have ever really given two shits about me or my "welfare." Took me many years to realize that I had to make it on my own, and perhaps having some decent mentors in my formative years may have helped change that. You know what they say, though; better late than never.
But oulda shoulda coulda blows and the truth of the matter is that I was mostly in charge of running my own life into the ground and it was because of government programs that I was able to correct course. Student loans and Pell Grants helped me go to college, and college helped me to find work that allowed me to do something novel, pay the rent and eat for the month. While I was going to school, my family received a few bucks in food stamps, that big, ugly paper funny money that everyone behind you saw when you were using them.
I didn't stay on "welfare" very long but it's because I had options that most folks in my position, hanging by a fingernail on the bottom rung of the socioeconomic ladder, didn't even know about.
And once you're down there, it's next to impossible to pull yourself up because the deck is stacked against you. It doesn't take but one economic monkey wrench to pitch poor folk into destitution, a fact I think is lost on most of us who have a credit card or a family that we can turn to in times of desperate need. Something as simple as a car repair, or needing new tires, or having a few days off due to a medical emergency, can shove a person out the damned job-door and directly into abject poverty.
Worse, rather than having a plan in place that helps a person when they're facing the initial emergency, like perhaps a small, government-backed personal loan system (that had the collection-teeth of a student loan, say) that could stave off or correct that "tipping point" problem, we as a society wait until the financial shit is chest deep on a person before throwing them a frayed, weak-ass lifeline.
The current "lifeline" in most states is an insult, and the trouble one must go through to receive it is not just humiliating, it's infuriating, degrading and often disgusting. This fact coalesces with the emotions for those of us who watch our government funnel billions of dollars of "aid" to countries that send suicide bombers our way and have fewer morals and ethics (but more oil) than a Texas roadhouse on a Saturday night.
When I worked with the HPRP grant a couple years ago, I remember families sitting across from me, balling their eyes out and telling me how they "never imagined" it could happen to them. I'm not talking about just the young folk here; I'm talking about people who'd been decades in their position at their company. People who, until the moment their world turned to runny feces, were part of the "pull yourself up by your bootstraps" chorus so many well-meaning but grossly ignorant people sing whenever the issue of welfare comes up.
Sometimes, we need to keep our mouths shut when we don't have a clue about what it takes to accomplish something, and even when one has been able, through perseverance and luck, to overcome the odds and the obstacles (self included), we need to be very careful about what we say, because what it took for us to extricate our situation may not be at all what someone else needs to do to free him/herself from the chains of poverty.
I suppose, if I had the luxury of hindsight to choose today, I'd rather have Bill then "Bama" because at least Bill had enough balls to stand up to assholes, and there seems to be no end to the butt-knots roaming the hallowed halls of Congress at the moment.
But I guarantee you, I'd still be holding my nose while I punched that chad....
Happy Birthday, Welfare Reform
Fifteen years after President Clinton cut a hole in the social safety net, poor Americans are paying the price.
| August 22, 2011
Fifteen years ago today, Bill
Clinton signed the law that created the program commonly known as
welfare-to-work, fulfilling a campaign promise to “end welfare as we
know it.” Today, there is little doubt that the Personal Responsibility
and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act did just that, removing what had
been a large cash-assistance program from the social safety net. The
decline continues. With the law’s federal authorization expiring
September 30 and the numbers of impoverished Americans climbing ever
higher, welfare is a dead letter in most states.
The effectiveness of a government aid program can best be judged
by its performance during periods of economic turmoil. By almost any
measure, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), the program
created by the 1996 law, has failed to cushion the neediest through
recessions. While in 2009 the food-stamp program responded to the
increased need for government assistance, growing by 57 percent, the number of TANF caseloads merely inched upward.
(It was the first time rolls increased since the law was enacted.) Six
states continued to shed recipients and the actual number of families in
need of assistance rose rapidly. At the heart of the worst recession in
80 years, TANF funds only
reached 4.5 million families, or 28 percent of those living in poverty.
By contrast, in 1995, the old welfare system covered 13.5 million
families, or 75 percent of those living in poverty.
 |
(President
Clinton prepares to sign legislation in the Rose Garden of the White
House Thursday, Aug. 22, 1996, overhauling America’s welfare system.
AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)
|
TANF was perhaps never designed to meet the need; reducing the number
of families on welfare was the point of reform. The Clinton law
achieved this by instituting strict requirements and radically altering
the state-federal relationship. No family can receive more than five
years of federal TANF funds in total (there had previously been no time
limit). States are required to meet a 50 percent Work Participation
Rate, which means that, for half the caseload, one or more adults are
required to participate in a narrowly defined set of work activities for
30 hours every week. States that do not meet the Work Participation
Rate can be subjected to a financial penalty. Many state and county
agencies include their own hurdles to enrollment, including drug
testing, finger printing, and mug shots. “In the process of trying to
impose very stringent work requirements, we’ve lost the program’s
ability to provide a safety net for the people who are unable to find
work,” says LaDonna Pavetti, the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities’
vice president for family income support.
The funding mechanism creates further complications. Federal money is distributed in a block grant that provides an annual lump sum of $16.6 billion, with no allotted increases for recession, population growth, or rises in the cost of living. Even in the best of times, this federal funding suffers the persistent grind of inflation (the real value of TANF has fallen by 28 percent since 1996). In the old system, funds increased in response to greater need.
In exchange for the block grant, states are given near-total autonomy over the design of their programs, except when it comes to the emphasis on work. Most eligibility requirements, benefit levels, time limits—even the option of providing cash assistance at all—are largely decided locally. “Programs vary tremendously across the country,” says Sheila R. Zedlewski of the Urban Institute. “Some states are much more generous … continuing TANF as a safety-net program. In other states, it is so minimal that it really isn’t viable anymore.”
Many states choose the minimalist route. In Georgia, before reform, for every 100 families in poverty, there were 98 families helped by welfare. Now only 8 families in every 100 receive TANF money, and the caseloads have continued to decline during the recession despite a poverty rate over 16 percent In 2010, Wyoming had a bare 306 families on its welfare rolls, or 1 percent of the state’s population below the poverty line. Mississippi allows 12,804 families on the rolls but only gives a family of three $170 a month (which is an annual income that equals 11 percent of the poverty line, or $2,040 a year). Other states simply boot people off TANF long before the federal time limit is up. Arizona shortened its time limit from the typical 60 months to 24 months.
None of this is helped by the fact that even nominal TANF funds are lower today than they were in 1996. Welfare-to-work locked in the levels of welfare revenue states received in the last year before reform took hold. Realizing this would freeze dramatic disparities between states, Congress created a $19 billion supplementary fund to support poor states. A minuscule $5 billion contingency was created in case of recession. Neither of these revenue sources is available any longer; the original contingency fund was exhausted in December 2009, while additional funds provided in the stimulus bill were used up by December 2010. Congress failed to renew the supplement for 2011, leaving already struggling states with even less money.
The truth is, the old system’s benefits never provided enough to lift families out of poverty, and the program offered little funding for work programs, leaving families to stagnate with few options besides cash assistance. The 1996 law tried to address those concerns but did so in the context of almost full employment. Lawmakers were confident that shrinking the welfare rolls would mean more people were going to work. If families were no longer receiving assistance, it meant they didn’t need it because now they had jobs. At least at first, many did. Rebecca Blank, the acting secretary of commerce, estimated that more than half of adults leaving the welfare rolls initially found employment. Then, by 2001, the number of families living in poverty began climbing steadily upward, and the newly stringent state welfare rules prevented the needy from getting help.
“Between 2000 and the recession, welfare reform’s achievements gradually dropped off,” says Peter Edelman, who acted as one of Clinton’s assistant secretaries of health and human services and quit in protest of welfare reform. “The fact that there were higher numbers of people with incomes lower than half the poverty line was clearly linked to the fact that cash assistance was simply not available in many states.”
The country is clearly no longer operating with full employment, and the number of jobs that the program’s stringent work requirements necessitate simply don’t exist. TANF beneficiaries have also changed dramatically since 1996. When 14 million people were on the rolls, many could find a job with the right aid, training, and motivation. The caseload today is much smaller, and is therefore not so diverse. The families who have struggled through poverty the longest are often dealing with other problems—like domestic violence, mental-health issues, serious medical conditions, extremely low education levels—that limit their ability to find work even when the economy is booming. With the economy in decline, a system that counts on the neediest families finding gainful employment is one that leaves too many without anywhere to turn.
Reforming welfare in a progressive fashion is unlikely, however. A recent Harvard study shows that one of the central, driving passions of the Tea Party’s animus is “‘handouts’ perceived as going to unworthy or freeloading people.” Cash assistance has never been popular in America, and expanding such a program is even less likely in today’s austerity-obsessed Congress and statehouses. In the current political moment, any reforms to TANF are likely to only further weaken the policy. In the meantime, we have abandoned welfare, and many families are suffering for it.
The funding mechanism creates further complications. Federal money is distributed in a block grant that provides an annual lump sum of $16.6 billion, with no allotted increases for recession, population growth, or rises in the cost of living. Even in the best of times, this federal funding suffers the persistent grind of inflation (the real value of TANF has fallen by 28 percent since 1996). In the old system, funds increased in response to greater need.
In exchange for the block grant, states are given near-total autonomy over the design of their programs, except when it comes to the emphasis on work. Most eligibility requirements, benefit levels, time limits—even the option of providing cash assistance at all—are largely decided locally. “Programs vary tremendously across the country,” says Sheila R. Zedlewski of the Urban Institute. “Some states are much more generous … continuing TANF as a safety-net program. In other states, it is so minimal that it really isn’t viable anymore.”
Many states choose the minimalist route. In Georgia, before reform, for every 100 families in poverty, there were 98 families helped by welfare. Now only 8 families in every 100 receive TANF money, and the caseloads have continued to decline during the recession despite a poverty rate over 16 percent In 2010, Wyoming had a bare 306 families on its welfare rolls, or 1 percent of the state’s population below the poverty line. Mississippi allows 12,804 families on the rolls but only gives a family of three $170 a month (which is an annual income that equals 11 percent of the poverty line, or $2,040 a year). Other states simply boot people off TANF long before the federal time limit is up. Arizona shortened its time limit from the typical 60 months to 24 months.
None of this is helped by the fact that even nominal TANF funds are lower today than they were in 1996. Welfare-to-work locked in the levels of welfare revenue states received in the last year before reform took hold. Realizing this would freeze dramatic disparities between states, Congress created a $19 billion supplementary fund to support poor states. A minuscule $5 billion contingency was created in case of recession. Neither of these revenue sources is available any longer; the original contingency fund was exhausted in December 2009, while additional funds provided in the stimulus bill were used up by December 2010. Congress failed to renew the supplement for 2011, leaving already struggling states with even less money.
The truth is, the old system’s benefits never provided enough to lift families out of poverty, and the program offered little funding for work programs, leaving families to stagnate with few options besides cash assistance. The 1996 law tried to address those concerns but did so in the context of almost full employment. Lawmakers were confident that shrinking the welfare rolls would mean more people were going to work. If families were no longer receiving assistance, it meant they didn’t need it because now they had jobs. At least at first, many did. Rebecca Blank, the acting secretary of commerce, estimated that more than half of adults leaving the welfare rolls initially found employment. Then, by 2001, the number of families living in poverty began climbing steadily upward, and the newly stringent state welfare rules prevented the needy from getting help.
“Between 2000 and the recession, welfare reform’s achievements gradually dropped off,” says Peter Edelman, who acted as one of Clinton’s assistant secretaries of health and human services and quit in protest of welfare reform. “The fact that there were higher numbers of people with incomes lower than half the poverty line was clearly linked to the fact that cash assistance was simply not available in many states.”
The country is clearly no longer operating with full employment, and the number of jobs that the program’s stringent work requirements necessitate simply don’t exist. TANF beneficiaries have also changed dramatically since 1996. When 14 million people were on the rolls, many could find a job with the right aid, training, and motivation. The caseload today is much smaller, and is therefore not so diverse. The families who have struggled through poverty the longest are often dealing with other problems—like domestic violence, mental-health issues, serious medical conditions, extremely low education levels—that limit their ability to find work even when the economy is booming. With the economy in decline, a system that counts on the neediest families finding gainful employment is one that leaves too many without anywhere to turn.
Reforming welfare in a progressive fashion is unlikely, however. A recent Harvard study shows that one of the central, driving passions of the Tea Party’s animus is “‘handouts’ perceived as going to unworthy or freeloading people.” Cash assistance has never been popular in America, and expanding such a program is even less likely in today’s austerity-obsessed Congress and statehouses. In the current political moment, any reforms to TANF are likely to only further weaken the policy. In the meantime, we have abandoned welfare, and many families are suffering for it.
