Who Pays For Poverty?

By Mark Engler, TomPaine.com. Posted September 22, 2003.

The success of welfare reform is a faith-based proposition in Washington, D.C. This month, as lawmakers debate the reauthorization of welfare legislation, the conservatives on Capital Hill will offer their regular sermon on the virtues of "personal responsibility," ignoring the steady hemorrhage of jobs from the economy. And since welfare reform was a major legislative focus of President Clinton's "New Democrats," the other side of the aisle is unlikely to question the underlying belief that "ending welfare as we knew it" represented a triumph in social policy.

Out in the real world, however, the jobless recovery and enfeebled social protections are increasingly set on a collision course. Local legislators must confront an ugly truth about their "reformed" welfare systems: If critics charged that cutting welfare rolls had harmful impacts during the prosperous 1990s, the true extent of the damage is only emerging in the wake of the Bush recession.

"Yeah, there are lots of jobs available," went a joke about the workforce in the Clinton era: "I've got three of them." Since then, real wages haven't improved noticeably and extra work is harder to come by. Nonfarm payroll employment has dropped steadily since November 2001, shedding 579,000 jobs so far this year. Clinton's 1996 welfare reform replaced the cash entitlement-based Aid for Families with Dependent Children with the new Temporary Aid to Needy Families (TANF). Research suggests that in the context of the faltering economy, people who might have once received AFDC are far more likely to find entrenched poverty than living-wage work. Single mothers are in truly desperate straits according to a new report released by the Children's Defense Fund. "The number of jobless women with children not receiving welfare rose by 188,000 in one year, leaving a record three quarters of all single mothers without public assistance and causing a sudden surge in extreme child poverty," the report states. "Single parents entered the 2001 recession with less protection from a failing economy than in any recession in the last 20 years."

The details of this debacle get complicated. Under TANF, individual states receive block grants that allow them to customize their welfare systems. (As the late social theorist Teresa Brennan put it, there are now "50 Ways to Leave Your Welfare Benefits.") But Wisconsin's flagship W-2 program provides a revealing example. The program, which helped former Governor Tommy Thompson land a job as Bush's Secretary of Health and Human Services, is generally lauded as a success for cutting the number of families receiving cash assistance in half. The real results have been mixed at best.

A largely unnoticed AP story in May showed that W-2 was considerably more expensive for Wisconsin than the old welfare program. Although the state served fewer people, the welfare system cost $276.9 million more in the most recent budget period than during the last year of AFDC.

So what ever happened to "the end of big government"? Wisconsin realized that if you're going to force mothers to enter the job market rather than stay home to take care of their kids, you have to make provisions for child care. Under TANF in Wisconsin, the demand for child care has grown by 160 percent. (Ironically, many women entering the low-wage workforce end up stuck in jobs taking care of other peoples' kids, which, at hourly pay rates that make McDonald's look generous, isn't lifting anyone up by their boot straps.) Nor does job training come cheap. As Tommy Thompson himself has noted, if you want to create a "welfare-to-work" program that amounts to more than rhetoric, you have to be willing to pay for it.

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