WELFARE REFORM Dole rolls fall; poverty surges

Reform opponents say more poor people are suffering.
WASHINGTON POST
Tina Taylor was a model of what welfare reform was supposed to do.
A single mother, Taylor had spent six years on public assistance. After 1996, when changes were made in welfare law to push people into work, she got a job that paid $400 a week and allowed her family to live independently. For the first time in a long time, she could afford to clothe and feed her two children, and even rent a duplex on the beach in Norfolk, Va.
After losing her job last year, however, Taylor has been unable to find full-time work in an economy that still has a million fewer jobs than it did at the start of a brief recession more than three years ago.
She is back in poverty. But she hasn't gone back on welfare.
An apparent paradox
Her story illustrates a seeming paradox in the U.S. economy: Although the number of welfare recipients continues to decline, poverty rates -- particularly for single mothers and children -- have surged in recent years. Just last month, the government reported that the number of people on welfare had declined by 149,000 at the end of 2003 compared with 2002, while the number in poverty rose by 1.3 million. Those divergent trends offer fresh ammunition to both sides in the debate over whether, eight years after the fact, welfare reform is working.
Nationally, fewer than half of the families eligible for welfare received it in 2001, the most recent year for which statistics are available, compared with roughly 80 percent before the 1996 legislation. Reform supporters say that is exactly what the changes were meant to accomplish -- recasting welfare as a last resort instead of a crutch. "What is happening is that people are making do, without having to go back on welfare," said Douglas J. Besharov, a University of Maryland professor and resident scholar at the conservative American Enterprise Institute.
Still need help
But some advocates for the poor say cases like Taylor's show that families are not getting the assistance they need at a time when a good job -- or any job -- can be hard to find. "The same people who fall through the employment net now also fall through the welfare net," said Ellen Bravo, outgoing director of the Milwaukee advocacy group 9to5, National Association of Working Women.
In Taylor's case, she mistakenly thought that if she enrolled in welfare, she would have to give up her child-support payments. No one at the social services office told her about a recent policy change that would entitle her to welfare benefits and child support, she said. For more than a year, her family lived in what the census defines as "deep" poverty -- earning less than half the poverty level of $14,824 for an adult supporting two children. In Taylor's case, she was getting by on about $217 a month in child support and $274 in food stamps.
"I worked my way out of poverty," said Taylor, 44, recalling the days when she had a degree of financial independence. "Now I'm all the way at the bottom again."
Bravo said stories like Taylor's are not uncommon. The state welfare agencies that administer the program, she said, have an incentive to keep people off the rolls because they're striving to meet targets for reducing their caseloads. "The program was designed with a premium put on getting people off the rolls. The idea was ending welfare rather than ending poverty; reducing caseloads rather than reducing suffering," she said.
Reform lawThe 1996 reform, which was passed by a Republican Congress and signed by Democratic President Clinton, ended the federal entitlement to welfare benefits and transformed the system into a series of state-run programs funded by U.S. government grants. The new programs imposed limits on the amount of time recipients could stay on welfare -- generally two consecutive years, or five over a lifetime. They also required many recipients to look for work or participate in training programs before they could receive their checks. In the first few years after the law passed, as the economy moved toward full employment in the late 1990s, millions left the welfare rolls for jobs.
There were 4.9 million people on welfare as of the end of 2003, down 3 percent from the year before and less than half the 12.2 million total from August 1996. The poverty rates also dropped in the first few years after the legislation's passage, from 13.7 percent in 1996 to 11.3 percent in 2000.
But since 2001, even as the welfare rolls continued to decline, the poverty rate has increased, climbing to 12.5 percent last year, or 35.9 million people. Of those, 12.9 million were children. The number of families in deep poverty rose 10 percent, to 3.2 million in 2003. The percentage of single-mother families living in poverty also jumped, to 28 percent from a recent low of 25.4 percent in 2000.
Too little is done
Lawrence Mishel, president of the Economic Policy Institute, said the rise in poverty can be traced to a poor job market coupled with a social safety net that doesn't do enough to help those who can't find work. Mishel said public assistance has been shifted away from helping the jobless with welfare and toward giving a boost to those working in low-income jobs through programs like the earned-income tax credit.
That's fine when the economy produces millions of new jobs, he said, but not when it's sputtering. "You can imagine welfare reform as a fair-weather ship," Mishel said. "It does okay at 4 percent unemployment, but not very well when you're in a recession."