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Tuesday, August 22, 2006
 By David Blatt
Ten years ago this month, Congress approved a major overhaul of the nation's welfare laws, acting on President Clinton's famous pledge to "end welfare as we know it." The law replaced the old Aid to Families With Dependent Children program with a new program known as Temporary Assistance to Needy Families. TANF imposed lifetime term limits on cash assistance, created work participation requirements as a condition of assistance, and transformed an individual entitlement into a block grant that states could use to fund a wide range of work-related programs and services.
In at least some crucial respects, Clinton's pledge has been fulfilled. Under TANF, the number of families receiving monthly cash assistance payments plummeted. In Oklahoma, the welfare caseload fell from a peak of some 48,000 families in 1994 to just more than 14,000 families in 2001, and has fallen slightly further since.
Yet the point of welfare reform was never simply to reduce caseloads but rather to transform a system seen as trapping too many single-parent families in a cycle of welfare dependence into one that could help raise families, through employment, toward self-sufficiency.
Against this standard of assisting our neediest families succeed, the record of welfare reform is more mixed. In the first five years following passage of the welfare reform law, declining caseloads were accompanied by significant increases in the number of single parents in the work force and sharp drops in child poverty rates, especially for minority children. Low-income families were boosted by a strong labor market and by various public policies aimed at making work pay, including increases in the minimum wage, expansion of public health insurance coverage and increased funding for child care assistance. Yet even early on, the harsher rules left some families floundering.
Once the economy cooled down, the limits of welfare reform became more apparent. Since 2001, single-parent employment has fallen, poverty has grown, and the number of very poor families who are neither working nor getting help from basic assistance programs has soared. The impact has been felt by homeless shelters, food pantries and other community institutions that provide charity care to those unserved by public programs.
Congress last year passed a welfare reauthorization bill that focuses on increasing work participation rates among welfare recipients. Unfortunately, the new law provides few new resources to allow states to help those remaining cases that often have the greatest barriers to employment, including serious physical and mental health problems for which little help is available.
Faced with the threat of federal financial penalties for failing to increase work participation rates, states will have a strong incentive to find still more ways to keep poor families off the rolls rather than engaging in the difficult -- and costly -- work of helping poor parents prepare for and find employment.
If the promise of welfare reform is to be fulfilled, we must renew our efforts not only to end welfare as a way of life but to create the opportunities for those at the bottom of the economic ladder that will make welfare unnecessary.
Blatt is director of public policy for Community Action Project, an anti-poverty agency in Tulsa.
Posted at 8/22/2006 09:35:00 AM  
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