JeffersonClay posted:

This is some incredibly lazy analysis. First, poverty has been more effectively ameliorated by the safety net as both an absolute number and as a percentage of the total. Second, I told you exactly what metric I was using, the supplemental poverty measure. If you were capable, you might have attempted to determine if these hypothetical criticisms were in any meaningful way applicable to that measure. They are not. The SPM is based on the real cost of food, shelter, healthcare, etc. and is recalculated each year. The SPM is actually a good measure of poverty, and the article majorian posted explicitly defended it as such. If you’ve got a better one, by all means present it. It's not sufficient to argue "we can't measure poverty well, therefore you must be wrong".

JeffersonClay posted:

In any case the supplemental poverty measure takes into account the cost of food, and the measured level of poverty has literally never been lower. You're still arguing that a small number of people outside the labor force should outweigh the tens of millions of the working poor who have been lifted out of poverty.

JeffersonClay posted:

First, I'm not talking about the headline poverty rate, I'm referencing the supplemental poverty measure which is actually a good metric.

Second, your economic understanding is so pathetically shallow that you still don't understand that the arguments you're making are equally applicable to opposing a minimum wage hike. There are winners and losers in most policies. We should probably support policies where the number of poor people who benefit substantially outweigh the number of poor people who are harmed. I'm sympathetic to arguments that we should be more concerned about the poorest people, but you can't just be concerned with the lowest 1% and not the lowest 20%, unless you're comfortable arguing against the fight for $15.

Helsing posted:

Your political horizon is so pathetically shallow that you reflexively interpret that statement as saying that there must therefore be a zero sum battle for benefits between the somewhat poor and the extremely poor.

Ytlaya posted:

You completely ignored the parts of the post I said were most important. Specifically 1. the percent of people* in poverty is completely unrelated to the discussion of whether current Democrats would be willing to attempt the same sort of ambitious expansion of social welfare programs as past ones (this is why VitalSigns correctly mentioned the rest of my post wasn't necessary), and 2. it's loving dumb to attribute all variation in poverty to efficacy of the safety net.

quote:

Even more importantly, Helsing made an even better point (that you referenced) about the likely impact of Clinton's welfare reform on dramatically increasing severe poverty. I missed this point, but it is very important and even further debunks this frankly bizarre point you're trying to make. Extreme poverty is particulary important because it actually results in poo poo like people going hungry. As I said before, even most self-described centrists would not attempt to claim that current Democrats are more to the left economically than past Democrats.

Helsing posted:

The number of households who scrape by on less than two dollars a day or less - we're talking hundreds of thousands of people here, primarily women and children - has doubled, even taking into account SNAP and other in-kind benefits. The number of people who go to bed hungry every night - and now we're talking tens of millions of people - more than doubled since the 1990s.

These aren't small or irrelevant figures you loving ghoul, we're taking about a massive increase in hardship for millions of people in the wealthiest country on earth.

quote:

Other than grossly trying to downplay these numbers or pretend it's just "a small number of people" ( ) your only substantive reply is to suggest that somehow the tens of millions of hungry people or the hundreds of thousands of people living on $2 a day were the necessary cost of lifting everyone else out of poverty.

Is this really the defense you're going to cling to? That somehow the people who did worse after the mid-1990s were a virgin sacrifice who allowed the rest of the people around the poverty line to survive?

quote:

Anti-minimum wage arguments rely on a supply and demand model of labour markets and have absolutely no relation to this argument. I guess you intuitively know you're on weak ground here because you are desperate to shift the conversation to something else.

JeffersonClay posted:

What caused the spike in food insecurity and extreme poverty? The great recession.

quote:

2016 food insecurity is back to 1995 food insecurity levels. Again, I'm not arguing that the social safety net is sufficient. I'm arguing that it's doing a better job now than it has been previously. If we look at good metrics of poverty like the supplemental poverty measure, which take into account the entirety of poverty beyond food, like the cost of rent, medical care, and child care, the safety net has never been doing a better job.

quote:

The number of people in extreme poverty is, in fact, quite small compared to the number of people in poverty. We shouldn't ignore them, but we shouldn't focus on them to the exclusion of all other poor people. Yes, I am literally saying that the clinton welfare reforms hurt the bottom 1% and helped the bottom 20%. Do poverty programs need to be designed that way? No. Should we ignore the benefits to the bottom 20%, and focus only on the 1% when evaluating the efficacy of the social safety net? No.

quote:

The reason the minimum wage is relevant here, which you are apparently too dense to understand, is that if you evaluate poverty like I'm describing above-- caring only about the bottom 1%(poor people without wage income) and ignoring the bottom 20% (the working poor), you also come to the conclusion that the minimum wage is a policy that hurts the poor. I'm trying to explain the implications of your analysis. It isn't working, because you lack any depth of understanding on these issues.

quote:

Clinton-era welfare reforms haunt America's poorest families, critics say

Hillary Clinton’s support of 1996 welfare law thrust into 2016 election after Sanders attacks reforms for driving up number of people living in deep poverty

At the Cultural Cup food bank in Phoenix, Arizona, Sabiha Keskin has watched a growing trend in recent years of people forced to sell food stamps for cash to help pay the rent or utilities, and then coming to her food bank to feed their children.

“There’s a lot more single parents coming in, male and female, because they have cash issues,” said Keskin who herself relied on welfare payments to raise her five children after she served seven years in the US air force and then was unable to find work.

“I was on assistance for 18 years on and off. I got cash assistance, I got food stamps. That’s mostly gone today. When I first got out of the military we got food stamps and $725 in cash. Now it’s nothing like that. The system was better then. Now it’s a joke. Sometimes the money is so little people don’t even want to bother with the paperwork.”

In Arizona today, if Keskin even qualified for cash welfare payments at all they would be a fraction of what she once received. That is true across large parts of the US where the number of low-income parents who receive cash welfare payments they can use to pay bills or buy clothes for their children has been cut dramatically over the last two decades.

In 1996, when welfare reforms were introduced in a coalition between President Bill Clinton and Republicans, 68% of families in the US living below the poverty line received cash assistance. That has since fallen to just 23% nationally and even lower in many southern states without alternative forms of welfare filling the gap. In Georgia, the proportion dropped from 98% to just 7%. The fall was only marginally less sharp in Arizona.

In July, Arizona will become the first state to reduce the payment of cash benefits to the lowest-income families to a maximum of 12 months in a lifetime. That comes on top of sharp reductions in the size of payments, which have effectively halved over the past two decades, and the scrapping of programmes to help the state’s poorest citizens find jobs.

Critics of Arizona’s cuts blame the reforms championed by Bill Clinton and now thrust into the midst of the Democratic presidential campaign.

In 1996, Clinton joined with the Republican-controlled US Congress to enact the most sweeping changes to welfare in a generation with the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act by tying benefits to work. Although initially hailed as a great success in getting parents caring for children into jobs, it has since been criticised for driving up the numbers of people living in deep poverty and for allowing states to reduce the welfare rolls by imposing onerous conditions and diverting funds to fill budget shortfalls.

On the campaign trail, Bernie Sanders attacked Hillary Clinton for her support of a law he said harmed the poor.

“What welfare reform did, in my view, was go after some of the weakest and most vulnerable people in this country,” he said at a press conference last month. “Since legislation was signed into law, the number of families living in extreme poverty has more than doubled.”

Clinton’s campaign hit back by saying that under her husband’s administration the child poverty rate among African Americans fell 25% and unemployment was nearly halved.

But Sanders’ criticism is backed by research, including by Kathryn J Edin and H Luke Shaefer in their book, $2.00 a Day: Living on Almost Nothing in America, which also estimates that the number of households living in extreme poverty has more than doubled since the 1996 legislation to about 1.5m.

At the core of the reform was a programme, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), that required most parents receiving cash grants to seek employment. The legislation provided for assistance with training and job placement, childcare and transport to work. The beneficiaries would receive assistance for five years.

The reforms ran into resistance. Three senior officials in Clinton’s administration resigned in protest. One of them, Peter Edelman, an assistant secretary at the Department of Health and Human Services, predicted that the reforms would deepen poverty not alleviate it.


The final legislation was a compromise between Clinton and the Republican-controlled Congress led by Newt Gingrich who injected a key piece of conservative ideology by shifting control from the federal government to the states.

Two decades later, that has perhaps proven the single most important factor in determining the success of the reforms as some state legislatures plunder welfare grants to fund other programmes or severely curtail them out of ideological hostility.

Arizona, like other states, initially used its block grant from Washington of $220m to fund programmes intended to make the reforms a success.

Karen McLaughlin, who worked for the Arizona state agency responsible for overseeing benefits when the 1996 reforms came into effect, said it set up an array of programmes to help parents to find jobs, to provide childcare while they were at work and to help with training.

“Arizona within a few years had a mentoring programme for young fathers, transportation programmes, a programme called Wheels to Work where people donate cars and they would be fixed up to give to somebody who couldn’t get to work because in Phoenix we don’t have good public transportation so getting around is a big piece of being able to go to work,” she said.

Other states launched similar initiatives. The number of people claiming cash assistance in the US fell sharply. In 2006, five years after leaving office, Bill Clinton declared the reforms a success.

“The last 10 years have shown that we did in fact end welfare as we knew it, creating a new beginning for millions of Americans,” he wrote in the New York Times. “Welfare rolls have dropped substantially, from 12.2 million in 1996 to 4.5 million today.”

Today, economists attribute that fall less to welfare reform than to a decade of economic growth. Studies also show that while many parents were able to find work and come off cash assistance, TANF did not work nearly as well for the most vulnerable, including those who faced health issues.

The real test came with the deepest economic recession in a generation. The response of some states, such as California, was to shore up TANF as demand increased because of rising unemployment. Arizona and other states cut the programmes to divert money to fill budget shortfalls because of the recession – a legal move not possible before the 1996 reforms.

•••
Even for Arizona, taking food out of the mouths of children was a step too far.

Last week, the state legislature rejected a bill to cut off food stamps to thousands of low-income families if they receive other welfare benefits last week, with one lawmaker condemning the proposal as “self reliance through starvation”. Its Republican sponsor argued that going hungry would encourage parents to get off welfare and into work.

But the defeat of the bill is likely to prove only a bump on the state’s apparent drive to all but kill off welfare grants.

In 2010, even as unemployment surged past 11% in Arizona, the state legislature gutted many of the support programmes to the horror of officials who warned that the changes would “lead to greater dependency and increased costs”.

“Those programmes went away and so now we’re back to this really basic bare bones kind of programmes,” said McLaughlin who is now director of budget and research at the Children’s Action Alliance (CAA) in Phoenix. “We stripped out almost all the money out of the jobs programme. We’re not doing those mentoring programmes. We don’t have the transportation programmes.”

Arizona also moved to reduce the number of people eligible for TANF benefits by cutting the amount of time they were able to make claims from a limit of 60 months when the legislation was passed to 36 months in 2010 and just 12 months from 1 July. Other states have also reduced the time frame, although not as sharply.

The time limits have helped drive down the number of claims in Arizona from nearly 45,500 in 2005 to 10,013 in January of this year according to Arizona official statistics.

Arizona officials say the move will cut off grants covering 2,700 children in very low-income families. Typically a family of four must have an annual income of less than $5,000 to qualify for cash assistance.

“We have a lot of policymakers who don’t get the connection that this is hurting kids because the definition of being on cash assistance is you have a minor child at home,” said McLaughlin. “We have this attitude in Arizona among some policymakers, and I’ve heard it just within the last week, that by kicking people off these programmes we’re helping them because when they’re not dependent on the programme they’ll go find a job.”

According to the Center on Budget and Polity Priorities (CBPP) the number of TANF recipients fell in 16 states, including Texas, Kansas and Louisiana, even as unemployment and economic hardship increased.

The value of individual benefits has also fallen sharply. Congress has not increased the funding for TANF in two decades which, thanks to inflation, means a fall in real terms of more than one-third. Some states have nevertheless increased individual payments. Others have made no increase at all while Arizona has cut the average monthly TANF payment per person from $123 a decade ago to $92 last year.

Among those who defended the cuts in the Arizona legislature was Republican state senator Kelli Ward.

“I tell my kids all the time that the decisions we make have rewards or consequences and if I don’t ever let them face those consequences, they can’t get back on the path to rewards,” said Ward who is running for the US Senate against John McCain. “As a society, we are encouraging people at times to make poor decisions, and then we reward them.”


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Thom Reilly, of the Morrison Institute for Public Policy in Phoenix, said he regards the idea behind the reforms as sound but that the law was flawed in allowing states to divert the welfare grant to other programmes.

“The basic components of providing job training, childcare and transportation are sound principles that were never in existence before that. The problem is the block grant component which allows states to divert those moneys to other programmes, and particularly the ability to tap into those funds when state coffers were very low during the recession which had this ripple effect,” he said. “Then you also have this ‘pull yourself up by the bootstraps’ philosophy in Arizona that has slowly but steadily been chipping away at the programme. There’s very little of the money even being used for the original intent of the programme.”

Arizona receives about $200m a year to spend on TANF but diverts more than half of that to other programmes, particularly child welfare because of rising numbers of children taken into care.

McLaughlin said Arizona’s cuts have created a vicious circle in which the reduction in the availability of childcare has forced working parents to leave their children at home alone or in less than ideal circumstances which has in turn driven up the number placed in foster homes.

“Continuing to shrink the TANF programme and helping people get sustainable jobs is contributing to the increase in neglect reports coming to child services and is a factor in the number of kids being removed. We have a really high incidence of kids in foster care. Arizona is way off the charts compared to the rest of the nation,” she said.

The Arizona department of economic security did not respond to a request for an interview.

"The Worst Thing Bill Clinton Has Done", Peter Edelman, The Atlantic, MARCH 1997 posted:

HOW BAD IS IT, REALLY?

BEFORE I begin my critique, I need to say something about the motivations of those who genuinely support this new approach. Some of them, anyway, had in my estimation gotten impatient with the chronicity of a significant part of the welfare caseload and the apparent intractability of the problem. I believe they had essentially decided that handing everything over to the states was the only thing left to try that didn't cost a huge amount of money. They may well understand that there will be a certain amount of suffering, and may believe that the bucket of ice-cold water being thrown on poor people now will result in a future generation that will take much more personal responsibility for itself and its children. I think they have made a terrible mistake, as I will try to show, but I respect the frustration that motivated at least some of them. How bad, then, is it? Very bad. The story has never been fully told, because so many of those who would have shouted their opposition from the rooftops if a Republican President had done this were boxed in by their desire to see the President re-elected and in some cases by their own votes for the bill (of which, many in the Senate had been foreordained by the President's squeeze play in September of 1995).

The same de facto conspiracy of silence has enveloped the issue of whether the bill can be easily fixed. The President got a free ride through the elections on that point because no one on his side, myself included, wanted to call him on it. He even made a campaign issue of it, saying that one reason he should be re-elected was that only he could be trusted to fix the flaws in the legislation. David Broder wrote in The Washington Post in late August that re-electing the President in response to this plea would be like giving Jack the Ripper a scholarship to medical school.

Why is the new law so bad? To begin with, it turned out that after all the noise and heat over the past two years about balancing the budget, the only deep, multi-year budget cuts actually enacted were those in this bill, affecting low-income people.

The magnitude of the impact is stunning. Its dimensions were estimated by the Urban Institute, using the same model that produced the Department of Health and Human Services study a year earlier. To ensure credibility for the study, its authors made optimistic assumptions: two thirds of long-term recipients would find jobs, and all states would maintain their current levels of financial support for the benefit structure. Nonetheless, the study showed, the bill would move 2.6 million people, including 1.1 million children, into poverty. It also predicted some powerful effects not contained in the previous year's analysis, which had been constrained in what it could cover because it had been sponsored by the Administration. The new study showed that a total of 11 million families—10 percent of all American families—would lose income under the bill. This included more than eight million families with children, many of them working families affected by the food-stamp cuts, which would lose an average of about $1,300 per family. Many working families with income a little above what we call the poverty line (right now $12,158 for a family of three) would lose income without being made officially poor, and many families already poor would be made poorer.

The view expressed by the White House and by Hill Democrats, who wanted to put their votes for the bill in the best light, was that the parts of the bill affecting immigrants and food stamps were awful (and would be re-addressed in the future) but that the welfare-reform part of the bill was basically all right. The immigrant and food-stamp parts of the bill are awful, but so is the welfare part.

The immigrant provisions are strong stuff. Most legal immigrants currently in the country and nearly all future legal immigrants are to be denied Supplemental Security Income and food stamps. States have the option of denying them Medicaid and welfare as well. New immigrants will be excluded from most federal means-tested programs, including Medicaid, for the first five years they are in the country. All of this will save about $22 billion over the next six years—about 40 percent of the savings in the bill. The SSI cuts are the worst. Almost 800,000 legal immigrants receive SSI, and most of these will be cut off. Many elderly and disabled noncitizens who have been in the United States for a long time and lack the mental capacity to do what is necessary to become citizens will be thrown out of their homes or out of nursing homes or other group residential settings that are no longer reimbursed for their care.

The food-stamp cuts are very troubling too. Exclusive of the food-stamp cuts for immigrants, they involve savings of about $24 billion. Almost half of that is in across-the-board cuts in the way benefits are calculated. About two thirds of the benefit reductions will be borne by families with children, many of them working families (thus reflecting a policy outcome wildly inconsistent with the stated purposes of the overall bill). Perhaps the most troubling cut is the one limiting food stamps to three months out of every three years for unemployed adults under age fifty who are not raising children. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities describes this as "probably the single harshest provision written into a major safety net program in at least 30 years" -- although it turns out that more states than the drafters anticipated can ask for an exception that was written to accommodate places with disproportionate unemployment. One of the great strengths of food stamps until now has been that it was the one major program for the poor in which help was based only on need, with no reference to family status or age. It was the safety net under the safety net. That principle of pure need-based eligibility has now been breached.

Neither the cuts for immigrants nor the food-stamp cuts have anything to do with welfare reform. Many of them are just mean, with no good policy justification. The bill also contains other budget and benefit reductions unrelated to welfare. The definition of SSI eligibility for disabled children has been narrowed, which will result in removal from the rolls of 100,000 to 200,000 of the 965,000 children who currently receive SSI. Although there was broad agreement that some tightening in eligibility was warranted, the changes actually made will result in the loss of coverage for some children who if they were adults would be considered disabled. Particularly affected are children with multiple impairments no one of which is severe enough to meet the new, more stringent criteria. Child-nutrition programs have also been cut, by nearly $3 billion over six years, affecting meals for children in family day care and in the summer food program. Federal funding for social services has been cut by a six-year total of $2.5 billion. This is a 15 percent cut in an important area, and will hamper the states in providing exactly the kind of counseling and support that families often need if a parent is going to succeed in the workplace.

So this is hardly just a welfare bill. In fact, most of its budget reductions come in programs for the poor other than welfare, and many of them affect working families. Many of them are just cuts, not reform. (The bill also contains an elaborate reform of federal child-support laws, which had broad bipartisan support and could easily have been enacted as separate legislation.)


THIS brings us to welfare itself. Basically, the block grants mean that the states can now do almost anything they want—even provide no cash benefits at all. There is no requirement in the new law that the assistance provided to needy families be in the form of cash. States may contract out any or all of what they do to charitable, religious, or private organizations, and provide certificates or vouchers to recipients of assistance which can be redeemed with a contract organization. So the whole system could be run by a corporation or a religious organization if a state so chooses (although the latter could raise constitutional questions, depending on how the arrangement is configured). Or a state could delegate everything to the counties, since the law explicitly says that the program need not be run “in a uniform manner” throughout a state, and the counties could have varying benefit and program frameworks. For good or for ill, the states are in the process of working their way through an enormous—indeed, a bewildering—array of choices, which many of them are ill equipped to make, and which outside advocates are working hard to help them make well.

The change in the structure is total. Previously there was a national definition of eligibility. With some limitations regarding two-parent families, any needy family with children could get help. There were rules about participation in work and training, but anybody who played by the rules could continue to get assistance. If people were thrown off the rolls without justification, they could get a hearing to set things right, and could go to court if necessary. The system will no longer work that way.

The other major structural change is that federal money is now capped. The block grants total $16.4 billion annually for the country, with no new funding for jobs and training and placement efforts, which are in fact very expensive activities to carry out. For the first couple of years most of the states will get a little more money than they have been getting, because the formula gives them what they were spending a couple of years ago, and welfare rolls have actually decreased somewhat almost everywhere (a fact frequently touted by the President, although one might wonder why the new law was so urgently needed if the rolls had gone down by more than two million people without it).

Many governors are currently crowing about this “windfall” of new federal money. But what they are not telling their voters is that the federal funding will stay the same for the next six years, with no adjustment for inflation or population growth, so by 2002 states will have considerably less federal money to spend than they would have had under AFDC. The states will soon have to choose between benefits and job-related activities, with the very real possibility that they will run out of federal money before the end of a given year. A small contingency fund exists for recessions, and an even smaller fund to compensate for disproportionate population increases, but it is easy to foresee a time when states will have to either tell applicants to wait for the next fiscal year or spend their own money to keep benefits flowing.

The bill closes its eyes to all the facts and complexities of the real world and essentially says to recipients, Find a job. That has a nice bumper-sticker ring to it. But as a one-size-fits-all recipe it is totally unrealistic.

Total cutoffs of help will be felt right away only by immigrants and disabled children—not insignificant exceptions. The big hit, which could be very big, will come when the time limits go into effect—in five years, or less if the state so chooses—or when a recession hits. State treasuries are relatively flush at the moment, with the nation in the midst of a modest boom period. When the time limits first take effect, a large group of people in each state will fall into the abyss all at once. Otherwise the effects will be fairly gradual. Calcutta will not break out instantly on American streets.

To the extent that there are any constraints on the states in the new law, they are negative. The two largest—and they are very large—are the time limit and the work-participation requirements.

There is a cumulative lifetime limit of five years on benefits paid for with federal money, and states are free to impose shorter time limits if they like. One exception is permitted, to be applied at the state's discretion: as much as 20 percent of the caseload at any particular time may be people who have already received assistance for five years. This sounds promising until one understands that about half the current caseload is composed of people who have been on the rolls longer than five years. A recent study sponsored by the Kaiser Foundation found that 30 percent of the caseload is composed of women who are caring for disabled children or are disabled themselves. The time limits will be especially tough in states that have large areas in chronic recession—for example, the coal-mining areas of Appalachia. And they will be even tougher when the country as a whole sinks into recession. It will make no difference if a recipient has played by all the rules and sought work faithfully, as required. When the limit is reached and the state is unable or unwilling to grant an exception, welfare will be over for that family forever.

Under the work-participation requirements, 25 percent of the caseload must be working or in training this year, and 50 percent by 2002. For two-parent families 75 percent of the caseload must be working or in training, and the number goes up to 90 percent in two years. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that the bill falls $12 billion short of providing enough funding over the next six years for the states to meet the work requirements. Even the highly advertised increased child-care funding falls more than $1 billion short of providing enough funding for all who would have to work in order for the work requirements to be satisfied. States that fail to meet the work requirements lose increasing percentages of their block grants.

The states are given a rather Machiavellian out. The law in effect assumes that any reduction in the rolls reflects people who have gone to work. So states have a de facto incentive to get people off the rolls in any way they can, not necessarily by getting them into work activities.

The states can shift a big chunk of their own money out of the program if they want to. There is no matching requirement for the states, only a maintenance-of-effort requirement that each state keep spending at least 80 percent of what it was previously contributing. This will allow as much as $40 billion nationally to be withheld from paying benefits over the next six years, on top of the $55 billion cut by the bill itself. Moreover, the 80 percent requirement is a static number, so the funding base will immediately start being eroded by inflation.

Besides being able to transfer some of their own money out, the states are allowed to transfer up to 30 percent of their federal block grants to spending on child care or other social services. Among other things, this will encourage them to adopt time limits shorter than five years, because this would save federal money that could then be devoted to child care and other help that families need in order to be able to go to work. Hobson's choice will flourish.

The contingency fund to cushion against the impact of recessions or local economic crises is wholly inadequate—$2 billion over five years. Welfare costs rose by $6 billion in three years during the recession of the early nineties.

The federal AFDC law required the states to make decisions on applications within forty-five days and to pay, retroactively if necessary, from the thirtieth day after the application was put in. There is no such requirement in the new law. All we know from the new law is that the state has to tell the Secretary of Health and Human Services what its “objective criteria” will be for “the delivery of benefits,” and how it will accord “fair and equitable treatment” to recipients, including how it will give “adversely affected” recipients an opportunity to be heard. This is weak, to say the least.

FIFTY WELFARE POLICIES

GIVEN this framework, what can we predict will happen? No state will want to be a magnet for people from other states by virtue of a relatively generous benefit structure. This is common sense, unfortunately. As states seek to ensure that they are not more generous than their neighbors, they will try to make their benefit structures less, not more, attractive. If states delegate decisions about benefit levels to their counties, the race to the bottom will develop within states as well.

I do not wish to imply that all states, or even most states, are going to take the opportunity to engage in punitive policy behavior. There will be a political dynamic in the process whereby each state implements the law. Advocates can organize and express themselves to good effect, and legislatures can frustrate or soften governors’ intentions. There is another important ameliorating factor: many welfare administrators are concerned about the dangers that lie in the new law and will seek to implement it as constructively as they can, working to avoid some of the more radical negative possibilities.

Citizens can make a difference in what happens in their state. They can push to make sure that it doesn't adopt a time limit shorter than five years, doesn't reduce its own investment of funds, doesn't cut benefits, doesn't transfer money out of the block grant, doesn't dismantle procedural protections, and doesn't create bureaucratic hurdles that will discourage recipients. They can press for state and local funds to help legal immigrants who have been cut off from SSI or food stamps and children who have been victimized by the time limits. They can advocate an energetic and realistic jobs and training strategy, with maximum involvement by the private sector. And they can begin organizing and putting together the elements of a real fix, which I will lay out shortly.

THE JOBS GAP

EVEN given effective advocacy, relatively responsive legislatures and welfare administrators, and serious efforts to find private-sector jobs, the deck is stacked against success, especially in states that have high concentrations of poverty and large welfare caseloads. The basic issue is jobs. There simply are not enough jobs now. Four million adults are receiving Aid to Families with Dependent Children. Half of them are long-term recipients. In city after city around America the number of people who will have to find jobs will quickly dwarf the number of new jobs created in recent years. Many cities have actually lost jobs over the past five to ten years. New York City, for example, has lost 227,000 jobs since 1990, and the New York metropolitan area overall has lost 260,000 over the same period. New York City had more than 300,000 adults in the AFDC caseload in 1995, to say nothing of the adults without dependent children who are receiving general assistance. Statistics aside, all one has to do is go to Chicago, or to Youngstown, Ohio, or to Newark, or peruse William Julius Wilson's powerful new book, When Work Disappears, to get the point. The fact is that there are not enough appropriate private-sector jobs in appropriate locations even now, when unemployment is about as low as it ever gets in this country.

For some people, staying on welfare was dictated by economics, because it involved a choice between the “poor support” of welfare, to use the Harvard professor David Ellwood's term, and the even worse situation of a low-wage job, with its take-home pay reduced by the out-of-pocket costs of commuting and day care, and the potentially incalculable effects of losing health coverage. With time limits these people will no longer have that choice, unappetizing as it was, and will be forced to take a job that leaves them even deeper in poverty. How many people will be able to get and keep a job, even a lousy job, is impossible to say, but it is far from all of those who have been on welfare for an extended period of time.

The labor market, even in its current relatively heated state, is not friendly to people with little education and few marketable skills, poor work habits, and various personal and family problems that interfere with regular and punctual attendance. People spend long spells on welfare or are headed in that direction for reasons other than economic choice or, for that matter, laziness. If we are going to put long-term welfare recipients to work—and we should make every effort to do so—it will be difficult and it will cost money to train people, to place them, and to provide continuing support so that they can keep a job once they get it. If they are to have child care and health coverage, that will cost still more. Many of the jobs that people will get will not offer health coverage, so transitional Medicaid for a year or two will not suffice. People who have been on welfare for a long time will too often not make it in their first job and will need continuing help toward and into a second job. Both because the private sector may well not produce enough jobs right away and because not all welfare recipients will be ready for immediate placement in a private-sector job, it will be appropriate also to use public jobs or jobs with nonprofit organizations at least as a transition if not as permanent positions. All of this costs real money.

For a lot of people it will not work at all. Kansas City's experience is sadly instructive here. In the past two years, in a very well-designed and well-implemented effort, a local program was able to put 1,409 out of 15,562 welfare recipients to work. As of last December only 730 were still at work. The efforts of Toby Herr and Project Match in Chicago's Cabrini-Green public-housing project are another case in point. Working individually and intensively with women and supporting them through successive jobs until they found one they were able to keep, Herr had managed to place 54 percent of her clients in year-round jobs at the end of five years. This is a remarkable (and unusual) success rate, but it also shows how unrealistic is a structure that offers only a 20 percent exception to the five-year time limit.

I want to be very clear: I am not questioning the willingness of long-term welfare recipients to work. Their unemployment is significantly related to their capacity to work, whether for personal or family reasons, far more than to their willingness to work. Many long-term welfare recipients are functionally disabled even if they are not disabled in a legal sense. News coverage of what the new law will mean has been replete with heartbreaking stories of women who desperately want to work but have severe trouble learning how to operate a cash register or can't remember basic things they need to master. A study in the state of Washington shows that 36 percent of the caseload have learning disabilities that have never been remediated. Many others have disabled children or parents for whom they are the primary caretakers. Large numbers are victims of domestic violence and risk physical retaliation if they enter the workplace. These personal and family problems make such people poor candidates for work in the best of circumstances. Arbitrary time limits on their benefits will not make them likelier to gain and hold employment. When unemployment goes back up to six or seven or eight percent nationally, as it will at some point, the idea that the private sector will employ and continue to employ those who are the hardest to employ will be even more fanciful than it is at the current, relatively propitious moment.

When the time limits take effect, the realities occasioned by the meeting of a bottom-line-based labor market with so many of our society’s last hired and first fired will come into focus. Of course, a considerable number will not fall off the cliff. An increased number will have obtained jobs along the way. The time limits will help some people to discipline themselves and ration their years of available assistance. Some will move in with family or friends when their benefits are exhausted. The 20 percent exception will help as well.

But there will be suffering. Some of the damage will be obvious—more homelessness, for example, with more demand on already strapped shelters and soup kitchens. The ensuing problems will also appear as increases in the incidence of other problems, directly but perhaps not provably owing to the impact of the welfare bill. There will be more malnutrition and more crime, increased infant mortality, and increased drug and alcohol abuse. There will be increased family violence and abuse against children and women, and a consequent significant spillover of the problem into the already overloaded child-welfare system and battered-women's shelters.

JeffersonClay posted:

The Atlantic, "20 Years Since Welfare 'Reform'", KATHRYN EDIN AND H. LUKE SHAEFER AUG 22, 2016 posted:

20 Years Since Welfare 'Reform'

America’s poorest are still dealing with the consequences of the legislation that Bill Clinton signed into law two decades ago today.

KATHRYN EDIN AND H. LUKE SHAEFER AUG 22, 2016

As recently as April of this year, former president Bill Clinton defended the welfare reform bill he signed into law on August 22, 1996—twenty years ago today—as one of the great accomplishments of his presidency. The bill scrapped the welfare program known as Aid to Families With Dependent Children (AFDC) and created a new one that lasts to this day—Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF). There was a grandiose idea behind the change: TANF was no simple safety net; it was also meant to be a springboard to self-sufficiency through employment, which it encouraged recipients to find work by imposing work requirements and limiting how long they could receive benefits.

Today, across the country, welfare is—at best—a shadow of its former self. In much of the Deep South and parts of the West, it has all but disappeared. In the aftermath of welfare reform, there has been a sharp rise in the number of households with children reporting incomes of less than $2 per person per day, a fact we documented in our book, $2 a Day. As of 2012, according to the most reliable government data available on the subject, roughly 3 million American children spend at least three months in a calendar year living on virtually no money. Numerous other sources of data confirm these findings. According to the most recent data available (2014), TANF rolls are now down to about 850,000 adults with their 2.5 million children—a whopping decline of 75 percent from 1996. TANF was meant to “replace” AFDC. What it did in reality was essentially kill the U.S. cash welfare system. (We use the term “cash welfare” to distinguish it from other forms of assistance, such as housing vouchers and food stamps, which have pre-designated uses.)

Cleveland, where the Republicans hosted their convention this year, is one of the poorest cities in the country and a place where the effects of this reform can be seen most plainly. What has happened to welfare in Cuyahoga County, which includes Cleveland and its inner suburbs, is reflective of its fate elsewhere in the nation. Currently, the county’s TANF-to-poverty ratio (the fraction of poor families with children who are actually receiving help from the program) sits at 22 percent—right about at Ohio’s, and the nation’s, average. (In some states, it is dramatically lower, such as Georgia, where it is just six, and Texas, where it is five.)

What’s happened to poor people as a result? Since 2013, we’ve spent considerable time in the city trying to find out. Each year, we catch up with several families who, in 2013, had spent at least three months living without money income exceeding $2 per person per day. To deepen our perspective, we also spend time trying to understand what’s going on for the city’s poorest, more broadly speaking. Earlier this month, one of us—Kathryn—spent a day talking to supplicants at a west-side food pantry. She spent an afternoon walking the streets of one neighborhood, striking up casual conversations with residents as they took out the garbage or sat on their porches. Yet the toughest experience was when Kathryn went for a ride-along with bailiffs assigned to the Cleveland Housing Court as they went about their daily rounds, evicting a family from their west-side apartment mid-meal.

Prior to August 22, 1996, families such as that one—families with little or no cash income—were entitled by law to a check from the government, thanks to AFDC. The program had many flaws. Yet it provided a cash floor that could have eased the hardships of folks at the end of their ropes.

TANF ought to be able to help—albeit temporarily, as the name implies. Yet many of the people we have studied have never received it. One woman, a high-school graduate and a mother of two, told us she doesn’t think it’s worth it. She believes that in order to meet the program’s requirements, she would have to work full time at a make-work job, leaving her no time to find legitimate employment.

Others have tried to get it and failed. When one mother we know lost her job at Walmart after her only means of transportation failed, she initially refused to apply for TANF out of pride, insisting that she was a worker, not a leach on the government. Finally, after months of fruitless job search, plus a list of health diagnoses a mile long, she broke down and applied. Since then, she has been sent away three times, all for no legitimate reason we, as TANF experts, can discern. Now, she, her daughter, and her fiancé are tripled-up with friends in a house that lacks heat and running water but offers a free roof over her head.

And many more aren’t even aware TANF is available. During her visit to the west-side food pantry a few weeks ago, Kathryn met families camping in unfinished basements of friends, a couple who survived a Cleveland winter while sleeping in a tent (they advised finding a thick mattress to keep your body off the ground and to keep a candle burning), and a family in the process of breaking apart—the three children parceled off to relatives—until a laid-off Ford assembly line worker and his partner of 14 years, who cleaned suburban homes until her car was repossessed, can secure stable jobs and a place to live. When we asked why they didn’t apply for TANF, we were met with blank stares. If our experiences across the city this summer are any guide, many poor Clevelanders—even those in desperate straits—don’t even realize the program exists.

We’ve traveled to many different parts of the country getting to know people in need. While greedy, heartless landlords were sometimes a source of their troubles, their biggest problem—by far—has been the lack of access to a cash safety net—money—when failing to find or keep a job. In 21st-century America, a family needs at least some cash to have any chance at stability. Only money can pay the rent (though a minority of families get subsidies via a housing voucher). Only money buys socks, underwear, and school supplies. Money is what’s needed to keep the utilities on. Each of the families we followed—technically eligible if our reading of the rules is right—weren’t getting that money from TANF.

How did they survive? Nearly all had sold plasma from time to time, some regularly. In 2014, so-called “donations” hit an all-time high at 32.5 million, triple the rate recorded a decade prior. They collected tin cans for an average yield of about $1 an hour. They traded away their food stamps, usually at the going rate of 50 or 60 cents on the dollar. Some traded sex for cash or—more commonly—the payment of their cell phone bill, a room to stay in, a meal, or some other kind of help. One 15-year-old was lured into a sexual relationship with her teacher on the promise of food. Yet these desperately needy families either didn’t know the program existed, felt the stigma and hassle weren’t worth it, or had been rebuffed at the welfare office.

Some would argue that families are better off without cash welfare. Franklin Delano Roosevelt warned that welfare was “a narcotic, a subtle destroyer of the human spirit.” Yet even Ron Haskins, one of the Republican architects of the program, recognizes that the problem of “disconnected mothers”—those neither working nor on welfare—is “a serious policy issue, that its magnitude is increasing, and that in two decades the nation has not figured out how to address the problem.”

Why has TANF left so many needy families behind? Its advocates argue that it reduces dependency and promotes work. Its critics contend that the time limits and work requirements it imposes are too punitive. Yet a careful look under the hood reveals that both of these claims fail to grasp the fundamental nature of what TANF has become.

To put it plainly, TANF is not really a welfare program at all. Peter Germanis, a conservative expert on welfare policy and former Reagan White House aide, describes it best, as a “fixed and flexible funding stream”—think slush fund—for states, provided by what are known as “block grants.” Yes, some block-grant dollars are used to provide cash aid to struggling families. But three of every four dollars allocated to TANF is directed toward other purposes.

How can this be? After the 1996 welfare reform bill was signed into law, states were no longer obligated to give out a dime to those in need. The rules governing TANF are so flexible that states can potentially eliminate cash handouts all together. What’s more, TANF’s rules threaten to penalize states that continue to provide cash assistance, such as California, Minnesota, Oregon, and Vermont. It is easier to comply with TANF regulations by simply pushing people off the rolls, as Cuyahoga County has done.

Built into the very core of TANF are perverse incentives for states to shed families from the welfare rolls. If they do so, they get to keep the money and use it for other things. And outside of what’s spent on cash aid, there is virtually no meaningful oversight on how the rest of the money is spent.

If past is prologue, the dollars devoted to cash assistance will only continue to dwindle. Even in 2006, TANF had far greater reach than it does now. Meanwhile, counts of the number of families knocking on the doors of the nation’s food pantries have reached the highest point ever recorded. “Donations” of blood plasma in exchange for cash have tripled in the last decade. School-aged children are increasingly likely to be homeless or doubled up. In sum, on many measures, child and family wellbeing has taken a nosedive.

Welfare reform is certainly not the only factor driving these trends. An increasingly perilous low-wage labor market and a growing affordable-housing crisis are critical drivers too. Yet a simple thought experiment brings the role of welfare reform in focus. Imagine a world in which states are prohibited by law from denying any family who meets eligibility criteria. Now envision a world in which denying a family in need is perfectly legal, and states who do so get to keep the cash. This is America before and after welfare reform. On the eve of welfare reform, roughly seven in 10 poor families claimed cash aid; only about two in 10 now do so. If the safeguards governing AFDC were in place today, this sort of extreme poverty would be a fraction of what it is now.

What are states doing with their TANF dollars if they aren’t providing cash welfare to families? Some states, such as Ohio, spend a considerable portion on child care, no doubt a boon to the working poor, yet folks not in jobs or in work programs aren’t eligible. Likewise other states, such as Wisconsin, use some of their block grant to fund state tax credits that benefit the working poor.

But the remainder goes to an assortment of other activities not necessarily benefitting the impoverished at all. Michigan funds college scholarships for young adults with no children, under the rationale that doing so may reduce teen pregnancy. Texas spends a large chunk of its block grant on its child welfare-system, an expense the state would have to assume responsibility for otherwise. When TANF is used to pay for giveaways for the non-poor or to plug budget holes, it becomes welfare for states and not for people.

What states spend astonishingly little on—besides cash assistance—is helping the poor find employment. In 2014, Ohio—which is about at the national average here—allocated only 8 percent of combined federal and state TANF funding to vital “hand-up” activities linking recipients to jobs.

Ronald Regan brought the image of the infamous—albeit mythical—welfare queen into the national consciousness. Bill Clinton probably owes his first term in office to his promise to “end welfare as we know it,” and possibly his second to signing the reform into law. Both politicians railed against AFDC’s so-called “perverse disincentives.” TANF offered states a lot of flexibility to innovate, to allow a flowering of new ideas to help the poor. But that’s not what the country got. Instead it got a new kind of welfare queens: states. States, not people, are using TANF to close the holes in their budgets. It is states, not people, who are falling prey to the “perverse disincentives” of welfare.

quote:

Imagine a world in which states are prohibited by law from denying any family who meets eligibility criteria. Now envision a world in which denying a family in need is perfectly legal, and states who do so get to keep the cash. This is America before and after welfare reform. On the eve of welfare reform, roughly seven in 10 poor families claimed cash aid; only about two in 10 now do so. If the safeguards governing AFDC were in place today, this sort of extreme poverty would be a fraction of what it is now

Helsing posted:

Let's just pull that one quote out for the sake of emphasis:

Helsing posted:

You think putting a five year lifetime cap on welfare assistance, or switching to block grants (which gave those dastardly Republican state governments you blame for everything a lot more leeway to cut cut cut) was a good move?

archangelwar posted:

Honestly it seems fairly uncontroversial that the narrative of "haircuts on the top have occurred, but there has been worsening material conditions" is compelling in undermining a position in support of positive gain based only on SPM or other broad metrics. SPM is definitely a better choice than many, but it is not compelling for qualitative analysis implied by some of the original assertions. I guess I just don't find much value in tautologically defining broad assertions as being narrowly defined any directional movement of a single indicator, especially in terms of policy. Especially of interest could be an investigation into the possible wealth removal effects of the increasingly nonviable capitalist consumer liquidity bandaids and the exacerbating effects on inequality and mental distress. Not that anyone should do my homework for me, but I increasingly wonder if we traded meaningful gains for counter productive but marker moving tactics with an expiring shelf life, not to mention the malignant growth of toxic cultural ideas injected into the American "philosophical" zeitgeist.

Nevvy Z posted:

"Leftists": Hey guys, did you hear about how Hillary Clinton sold the blood of the people she enslaved?

Also "leftists": Why didn't that bitch inspire people to vote for her better?

Nevvy Z posted:

"Leftists": Hey guys, did you hear about how Hillary Clinton sold the blood of the people she enslaved?

Also "leftists": Why didn't that bitch inspire people to vote for her better?

Nevvy Z posted:

"Leftists": Hey guys, did you hear about how Hillary Clinton sold the blood of the people she enslaved?

Also "leftists": Why didn't that bitch inspire people to vote for her better?

Nevvy Z posted:

"Leftists": Hey guys, did you hear about how Hillary Clinton sold the blood of the people she enslaved?

Also "leftists": Why didn't that bitch inspire people to vote for her better?

Nevvy Z posted:

"Leftists": Hey guys, did you hear about how Hillary Clinton sold the blood of the people she enslaved?

Also "leftists": Why didn't that bitch inspire people to vote for her better?

Condiv posted:

so are we still pretending that prison labor is not slave labor? after that racist southern sheriff demonstrated it so well?

https://twitter.com/ShaunKing/status/918431668658212865

Nevvy Z posted:

"Leftists": Hey guys, did you hear about how Hillary Clinton sold the blood of the people she enslaved?

Majorian posted:

That’s a pretty unfair (and remarkably callous) way of casting a genuinely valid objection to the state of affairs that the Clintons helped create.

quote:

The blood trade program stayed in operation until Bill Clinton moved to Washington. It was finally shut down in 1993 by his successor, Jim “Guy” Tucker.

Heaps of Sheeps posted:

I mean, they were just continuing an Arkansas tradition, there's no way Clinton could have put an end to it!

Oh wait

https://www.counterpunch.org/2015/09/04/arkansas-bloodsuckers-the-clintons-prisoners-and-the-blood-trade/


I mean, sure, they guy got taken out during Whitewater, but hey, at least he was just a little bit better than Slick Willy.

Majorian posted:

Amazingly, Salon ran a pretty good expose on this in 1998. I...really wish the Sanders campaign had gotten their hands on this, and ran with it. Because holy poo poo, given everything that's come out about her since the election, Hillary Clinton should never have been a candidate for president.

Trabisnikof posted:

It wasn't like they didn't have oppo, the Sanders campaign wasn't that poorly run. They had all this stuff and opted not to use it.

yronic heroism posted:

P sure goons stanning for the Vietnam war itt is still worse than defending the Washington post in some other thread but somehow WL stays silent about that.

Calibanibal posted:

What's this? One of the lurkers has thrown a chair into the ring at Wampa Lord!!!

Mr Hootington posted:

Lol Hillary Clinton.

https://twitter.com/NomikiKonst/status/919606169231966209

Very good.

NaanViolence posted:

Yeah...I put them on ignore sometimes. He/she is a pretty bad poster for exactly this reason and comes across as one of those edgy "I have BPD!!!!1" types.

Heck Yes! Loam! posted:

The "left" would do the same as Fox news, they are completely indistinguishable in their talking points. But the left isn't like the nazi's because...

Majorian posted:

Loam, if you're reading this, I really think you owe us an explanation for this quote, because uh...

Trabisnikof posted:

Aren't you supposed to only call out posts from this thread?

Trabisnikof posted:

Aren't you supposed to only call out posts from this thread?