Recession Reveals Cruelty and Failure of ‘Welfare Reform'The creeping pace of recovery from the recession of 2007-2009 continues to keep unemployment persistently high and inflict significant pain on people and families throughout the country. It also has tested the American safety net — and found it dangerously frayed. Whether our nation's leaders are capable of repairing the net is not at all clear. For that matter, it's not clear that some of them believe in a safety net at all anymore. The latest congressional squabbling over extending unemployment benefits hasn't inspired confidence. To be sure, some strands of the net are stretched but holding. The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (food stamps), for example, still provides a last barrier between millions of American families and debilitating hunger. But other pieces of the net gave way long ago, Exhibit A being so-called welfare reform. The Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program was created in 1996 as a radical reconfiguration of the welfare program known as Aid to Families with Dependent Children. The vaunted reform bill passed by a Republican Congress led by then-House Speaker Newt Gingrich and signed by Bill Clinton, a Democratic president then seeking re-election, was supposed to move people "from welfare to work." It never did that very well. Now, when there is little work to be had, the program has been revealed as an utter failure. The program's core structural defects, which critics had identified and warned of before the bill passed, has allowed growing numbers of vulnerable families with children to fall into deep poverty. TANF confirmed the obvious: The fastest and easiest way to reduce the number of low-income and impoverished Americans receiving assistance is simply to stop paying them and leave them to fend for themselves. In 1995, before reform, 62 percent of families with children below the income poverty line received assistance under AFDC.
In 1995 under AFDC, a qualifying below-poverty single-parent family with two children living in Missouri, for instance, could receive a monthly benefit of $292. In July 2011 under TANF, a comparable Missouri family could receive the same: $292. Adjusted for 15 years of inflation, that's a decrease of 29.8 percent, according to a study released last month by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a left-leaning think tank. The 1996 law that created TANF did not accommodate inflation or population growth. It eliminated uniform federal criteria for eligibility for assistance and removed a minimum federal guarantee of money that states needed to assist all those who met the qualifications and followed the rules. It also eased requirements that states provide people with job training, placement services, child care and Medicaid coverage as part of finding work, services that would continue during an initial transition period after a parent found employment. Not surprisingly, the 50 different TANF programs defined and operated by 50 budget-crunched states have failed to keep up with rising unemployment, according to Urban Institute figures. Between 2007 and 2010, the U.S. unemployment rate increased by 88 percent. During that same period, the national TANF caseload increased by just 14 percent. A tough, resilient generation of Americans learned first-hand from the Great Depression of the 1930s that anyone could end up poor, that there was neither shame nor blame attached to the condition and that the strength of our country and our communities lay in a shared commitment to protect each other from deprivation. They empowered their government to begin weaving a social and economic safety net to provide that protection to all Americans. Such values don't seem very fashionable today, at least not in the halls of government or the executive suites of their corporate patrons. But the effort continues, and the need remains. REPRINTED FROM THE ST. LOUIS POST-DISPATCH DISTRIBUTED BY CREATORS.COM
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