Making welfare work: Today, the goal is a job

Making welfare work: Today, the goal is a job
Knight Ridder/Tribune News Service
(KRT)
The following editorial appeared in the San Jose Mercury News on Tuesday, Oct. 14:
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Back when "being on welfare" meant getting a check in the mail every month, the main job of welfare offices was to decide who was eligible and how much to give them.
Today, the goal is to get people off welfare and into jobs, which means providing training, child care, bus passes, uniforms -- even tattoo removal. That's a lot more complicated than writing checks, but it's a lot more worthwhile if it helps families become self-sufficient.
New federal figures reported in the New York Times show that the nation's welfare programs now spend less on cash payments than on job-related services. That's a remarkable turnaround from the days before the 1996 welfare reform law went into effect.
Welfare rolls also have declined dramatically since 1996, as states have invested in helping people get jobs -- and have cut families off of cash assistance when they reached federal time limits.
But anyone who thought reforming welfare was going to save money wasn't being realistic. The cost of providing services to keep people working continues to climb. New welfare legislation has been tied up in Congress for two years in part because lawmakers can't agree on how much more to spend on childcare -- $1 billion or $6 billion. Unable to reach agreement, lawmakers extended the current bill until March and will take it up again next year.
With federal and state governments facing growing budget deficits, money for job-related services are being cut even as the number of people on welfare is starting to increase. That's disturbing. In Santa Clara County, the high-tech bust has led to an increase of families on welfare from 11,000 in 2000 to almost 13,000 today. Yet officials had to trim $5 million from their $50 million welfare budget this year.
Having transformed welfare from a permanent handout to a temporary hand up, Congress can't now abandon working poor families. Welfare reform can't be declared a success until it provides a dependable bridge to self-sufficiency in good times and bad.
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