By mid, TANF was keeping only , households above the threshold on a monthly basis. Even those that seem longer term have so many applicants per opening that even the best workers get fired at the slightest inconvenience to managers, like what happened to former two-time Parma, Ohio, Walmart cashier of the month Rae McCormick, who is featured in the book.
The program has since expired. Other solutions like fair scheduling regulations and wage theft enforcement would also help. And wage theft is common. But TANF itself remains a major sticking point. The incentives and requirements TANF has imposed upon states actually hinder their ability to run effective work programs. When we spoke, she had just come from a meeting of state TANF agency representatives.
There is some hope from the wiggle room that TANF has around the funding it provides to states. In real dollars, inflation has reduced the value of TANF funds by roughly 30 percent. The Equity Factor is made possible with the support of the Surdna Foundation. A return to that normality means embracing deep inequity and injustice as tolerable features of city life and city-building practice. That is unacceptable. The program is improving and the help provided to mothers who actually receive payments is substantial.
But future improvement is constrained by the fact that many of the fathers of poor mothers have limited income, especially when they are young. Even so, the nation should continue its current course of aggressive improvement in the child support program.
The frequency of paternity establishment, which more than doubled between and , is one of the great successes of social policy in recent decades and implies that the program can expect to continue its current path of modest improvement. One policy that would lead to instant improvement in the financial status of single mothers is reversing the current practice of government retention of some child support payments to mothers who spent time on welfare.
Approximately half the money collected on overdue child support owed to mothers who have left welfare is retained by states as an offset for welfare payments. Greater access to education and training would seem to be an obvious solution to the low wages earned by less skilled workers.
For this reason, the pre welfare system stressed the importance of helping recipients acquire skills before taking a job. In addition, welfare leavers have the same opportunities to access community colleges, tuition assistance through Pell grants, and other forms of training as the rest of the low-income population.
This approach might be especially appropriate for mothers returning to the welfare rolls because they have been laid off from their jobs during a recession. Not all education and training programs are effective. But programs that are closely aligned to the needs of employers, that use existing institutions such as community colleges, and that train for jobs in high growth sectors such as health care could probably help families move up the occupational ladder. Calls for more state flexibility in the use of TANF funds for such purposes, and especially for demonstration programs, are likely to be an important part of the reauthorization debate.
There are a variety of other support programs that low-income working families can access, including housing assistance, transportation assistance, and several child nutrition programs. Indeed, one problem for families is that there are a multitude of programs, all with somewhat different eligibility rules and administrative systems. Finding the time to apply, or reapply, for all of these different forms of assistance can be an exercise in frustration for an employed parent trying to balance work and care of children, especially if the benefits are uncertain or small.
The result is that many families simply give up and fail to receive benefits for which they are eligible. A possible solution is to establish a single application process for as many of these benefits as possible, to allow families to apply at times and places consistent with their work obligations, and to extend eligibility certification periods for those in regular jobs.
If a single application for the EITC, the child tax credit, food stamps, Medicaid, and a child care voucher or tax credit could be established, it would go a long way toward solving the problems these families experience with bureaucratic hurdles. It would also make more visible a troubling feature of the entire system: as earnings increase these benefits disappear at a rapid rate, thereby undermining one of the goals of a system that is supposed to reward work. Unfortunately, there are no easy solutions to this problem, since making benefit reduction rates less steep would be very costly to the federal budget.
Before welfare was reformed in , the prevailing assumption was that low rates of employment among less educated mothers reflected, to a large degree, a dearth of jobs for which they qualified. But the experience of the late s proved that even low-skilled individuals can, if pushed by the welfare system, pulled by the work support system, and buoyed by a strong economy, find work and increase their earnings.
Employment rates among women with less than a high school degree, for example, increased from 33 percent to 53 percent between and , according to the Urban Institute. But there will always be some adults for whom finding a private-sector job is difficult and the number of such people invariably increases substantially during an economic downturn. Adults with an adequate work history who have been laid off rather than quit their job and who want to work full-time qualify for unemployment insurance.
Proposals have been made to broaden coverage by including the most recent quarter of work in the base period earnings calculation; to include those seeking part-time as well as full-time work; to make the weekly benefit more generous; and to extend benefits from the normal 26 weeks to 39 weeks. If enacted, these reforms would increase the proportion of newly employed welfare mothers eligible for unemployment insurance. Even so, many mothers would remain ineligible, mainly because they often voluntarily leave rather than lose their jobs.
In addition, the vast majority of adults who have left welfare since have not exhausted their five-year time limit and thus would be eligible to return to the welfare rolls. Also worrisome is the possibility that fiscally-strapped states will not have sufficient funds during a recession to pay for both rising caseloads and continued work supports. Without some encouragement and assistance from the federal government, states are likely to cut back on existing work support services, such as child care, and channel the funds into paying for cash assistance.
The progress that has been made over the past five years in linking many of the welfare poor to jobs could be threatened. To avoid this outcome, the federal government needs, at a minimum, to maintain existing TANF funding and may want to provide a cyclically based contingency fund to the states.
A contingency fund was provided in the law but it expired at the end of fiscal Some states have been able to save a portion of their TANF block grant and can draw down these rainy day funds to pay for rising caseloads.
But others have exhausted these surpluses, responding in part to congressional prompting that they should use them or lose them. Still another possibility is that the economy will remain somewhat depressed for a lengthy period and fail to replicate the very low unemployment conditions of the late s.
In this case, states may want to provide community service jobs for those unable to find work in the private sector. In the absence of such programs, it will be hard for states to enforce existing work requirements and time limits on welfare. The availability of community service jobs is not only the ultimate safety net but helps to discriminate between those who really want to work and those who use the perceived lack of jobs as a reason to stay home.
So far only a few states and communities have felt the need to provide jobs of last resort for those unable to find jobs in the private sector. The reform of the welfare system in has tended to overshadow equally important reforms in the work support system over the past decade and a half. Not only has the federal government expanded its support—especially for the EITC, Medicaid, and child care—but the states have used the funds freed up by the decline in their welfare caseloads to invest heavily in these same supports.
When Congress takes up welfare reform reauthorization in , policies to maintain and improve the work support system should be an important part of the debate. Overview of Work Support System The welfare reform law represents a fundamental shift in how the federal government provides support to destitute families. As a result, the typical one-parent family with children was far better off working than on welfare, and employment rates among this group increased dramatically, due to the strong economy of the s, welfare reform, and the availability of these expanded work supports This evolution toward a work-based system of support progressed further as a result of state responses to the welfare law.
Related Books. Global Cities By , and. Asia in Washington By Kent E. Related Topics Poverty U. Metro Areas. More on U. The Avenue America has an infrastructure bill. What happens next? Kane , and Andrew Bourne. They hold the key to our collective future Amy Liu and Alan Berube. Perhaps most importantly, our current welfare system gets the incentives wrong. For example, it discourages work and marriage.
The loss of benefits, combined with taxes and the cost of employment, can leave some people worse off financially if they take a job. A UBI could solve many of those problems. Booker is one of the candidates seeking the Democratic presidential nomination in But there are many important questions to be answered before a UBI should be thought of as a legitimate policy option.
Newark, however, is unlikely to tell us much. That would amount to little more than continuing our current approach to fighting poverty of throwing a little money at the problem.
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