Doin’ What You Have to Do

For most Americans, there is a deep resentment about paying taxes to cover welfare recipients, and the mantra to “end welfare as we know it” remains as popular today as it did in 1996 when then President Clinton signed into law the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996 (PRWORA), which gave rise to Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) program. These reforms placed time limits on such government support (generally 60 months), pushed recipients who could work into the labor force, put a ceiling on federal spending and allowed states to turn the needy away. Today, the next stage of welfare reform is focused on reducing food stamps and Medicaid (medical assistance for the poor), and it is at the heart deficit programs focused on a balanced budget.

With so many welfare recipients facing emotional or addiction problems, having unprotected sex and generating more mouths to feed without much concern for the consequences, and having dropped out of school before completing even a high school education, the sympathies of the ever-shrinking middle class have all but vaporized; they are have their own problems in an impaired job environment. The irony of reduced support for birth control and abortion among the same advocates of even lower commitments to the chronic poor seems to work at odds with the reduction in America’s commitment to cutting the social safety net.

The governing statute preceding PRWORA was the controversial Aid to Families with Dependent Children, which was a New Deal law passed in 1935. It spawned a lower class that moved from one generation to another while living on welfare. In the halcyon days of the early new millennium, the economy was robust, jobs were abundant, and anecdotal America was filled with success stories of welfare recipients who productively transitioned into the working world. The memory of that TANF success still lingers in the minds of most supporters of that legislation, even though in the current economic state, joblessness at the lowest and least educated rungs of our society is a multiple of the overall statistics, and most of these folks are no longer part of our national jobless rate because they have given up looking for work. They have little or nothing to offer the job market, and training programs for these less fortunate Americans are disappearing as deficit-reduction priorities dictate cutting wherever possible.

The opportunities to retrain are bad enough for those who have lost their jobs, but for those with even fewer skills, the prospects are truly terrible: “Federal money for the primary training program for dislocated workers is 18 percent lower in today’s dollars than it was in 2006, even though there are six million more people looking for work now. Funds used to provide basic job search services, like guidance on résumés and coaching for interviews, have fallen by 13 percent… Political fights have focused primarily on extensions of unemployment insurance, while the cuts in funds for training have passed with little debate and little notice… At the peak in 2000, the federal government was spending more than $2.1 billion a year in today’s dollars for training programs aimed at dislocated workers under the Workforce Investment Act. Stimulus funds added close to $1.5 billion over two years, but now annual spending has receded to about $1.2 billion.” New York Times, April 8^th. Even more Americans have given up looking for work, accepting poverty as their lot in life.

Programs such a food stamps have been a lifeline to those struggling during this recession. “A new study by the Agriculture Department [over a nine year period] has found that food stamps, one of the country’s largest social safety net programs, reduced the poverty rate substantially during the recent recession. The food stamp program, formally known as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, reduced the poverty rate by nearly 8 percent in 2009, the most recent year included in the study, a significant impact for a social program whose effects often go unnoticed by policy makers.

“The food stamp program is one of the largest antipoverty efforts in the country, serving more than 46 million people. But the extra income it provides is not counted in the government’s formal poverty measure, an omission that makes it difficult for officials to see the effects of the policy and get an accurate figure for the number of people beneath the poverty threshold, which was about $22,000 for a family of four in 2009.” New York Times, April 9^th. Like Medicaid, the SNAP program is facing deficit reduction challengers.

Desperation drives the very bottom of society, unable to find shelter even with relatives (who are often equally impoverished), to dependence on food stamps, Medicaid and “doin’ what you have to do,” which often embraces criminal activity from theft, dealing in stolen goods, drug dealing and prostitution… or selling blood as often as they can to blood banks that supply hospitals. The numbers statistics at the bottom are exceptionally unpleasant: “[T]he number of very poor families appears to be growing. Pamela Loprest and Austin Nichols, researchers at the Urban Institute, found that one in four low-income single mothers nationwide — about 1.5 million — are jobless and without cash aid. That is twice the rate the researchers found under the old welfare law. More than 40 percent remain that way for more than a year, and many have mental or physical disabilities, sick children or problems with domestic violence.

“Using a different definition of distress, Luke Shaefer of the University of Michigan and Kathryn Edin of Harvard examined the share of households with children in a given month living on less than $2 per person per day. It has nearly doubled since 1996, to almost 4 percent. Even when counting food stamps as cash, they found one of every 50 children live in such a household… The Census Bureau uses a third measure, ‘deep poverty,’ which it defines as living on less than half of the amount needed to escape poverty (for a family of three, that means living on less than $9,000 a year). About 10 percent of households headed by women report incomes that low, a bit less than the peak under the old law but still the highest level in 18 years.” New York Times, April 7^th.

As states hit their own deficit walls, they are diverting federal money earmarked for welfare for other social programs, leaving their coffers even lower to help TANF families. For example, “Arizona spends most of the federal money on other human services programs, especially foster care and adoption services, while using just one-third for cash benefits and work programs — the core purposes of Temporary Assistance for Needy Families. If it did not use the federal welfare money, the state would have to finance more of those programs itself.” NY Times.

For those who argue that Americans should not be mandated to support the poor with their tax dollars – that basic charity (often religiously-base) should fill that void – the available charitable dollars for this needy cause is a mere drop in the bucket compared to the actual costs. So in a world where training programs are disappearing, inner city schools are not educating and jobs at almost every level are scarce, what exactly are our choices? And even if you blame irresponsible adults for their condition – where disease and disability are not the cause – how do you explain that situation to the children, who seem destined to grow up to perpetuate poverty? And what are the real costs – especially from crime and the pressures on our criminal justice system – to society of not taking care of the chronic poor, particularly in bad economic times? What are your suggestions?

I’m Peter Dekom, and there seem to be no good and clear answers to this conundrum.