Another look at welfare reform

It's hard to believe that Clinton's Welfare Reform law was passed ten years ago (when I was in college). Now is as good a time as any to look back and review its successes and failures. Because its successes are considered received wisdom by both Democratic and Republican politicians as well as the mainstream media, it might be worth perusing Nathan Newman's recent blog post entitled, quite appropriately, "Welfare "Reform": Ten Years Later". Some of Newman's points well worth considering are:

While the booming economy in the late 1990s made initial cuts in welfare caseloads relatively easy as job growth surged, the real test came when the 2001 recession hit. And the result was that, after a reduction in poverty and some gains in income by the poor in the 1990s, child poverty began climbing again in the last few years.
And the new Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF) program in many cases was no longer there to help. Where there were 4.6 million families receiving cash benefits in 1996, only 2.1 million were receiving benefits by 2002-- and estimates are that over half that reduction (57%) came from cutting off families still in need but no longer receiving help from TANF programs.

Of families receiving welfare, the good news was that more were finding work: 39% finding some work in the preceding 12 months in 2002 versus 31% back in 1997. But a large number of single-adult families had no work and no longer received any help. By 2002, one in five former welfare recipients had no job and no cash welfare, a total of 1 million poor single mothers in this "no work, no welfare" group across the country.

A Johns Hopkins study of current and former recipients in three cities found that when all former TANF recipients are considered — those with jobs and those without jobs — the average income gains of those who left TANF were about the same as those who had not left the TANF program.

Even most families previously on welfare that have found work have ended up in dead-end jobs, with median hourly wages hovering around $8.00 in 2002, and only one-third of these workers have health insurance through their jobs. As the Urban Institute writes, "Research suggests that many of these families will never 'grow out' of low-income status with age and experience."

Look, this is an incredibly complicated issue and I am far from being an expert in welfare policy. But it behooves politicians and policy analysts to consider the bad, along with the good, that has resulted from the most significant change in the welfare state in the last decade. While millions have left welfare and found jobs thanks to reform, millions more have been left behind. It's important to keep the complete picture in mind when evaluating the program's success.