Readings: Welfare Transformed by Robert Cherry
W. E. Smith, Editor, The Social Democrat
The Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program or TANF, is the U.S. government’s primary system of support for indigent families—welfare, as it is commonly known. In effect, TANF supports single mothers with children, who make up roughly half of TANF recipients, and children in the care of those other than their parents, who make up most of the rest of the TANF caseload. (Only 5% of the TANF caseload consists of two-adult households.) Presently a little more than 3 million American citizens receive support under the TANF program, living in about 1.5 million households. These households represent some of our most economically stressed fellow citizens, where both adults and children are likely to suffer the greatest economic and social marginalization.
One of the major legislative efforts of the Clinton presidency, TANF was created by the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunities Act of 1996. Hailed by Clinton and his allies as the fulfillment of a campaign promise to “change welfare as we know it,” the program was controversial at its inception and remains controversial today.
TANF replaced Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC), which had been established with the New Deal but had considerably expanded in the decades of the 60s, 70s and 80s. AFDC was an “entitlement” program, meaning that all who met the income and other eligibility requirements received a cash benefit without obligations of any kind. Responding to the common perception that AFDC (“welfare”) had disincentived work and encouraged both idleness and unprepared parenthood, TANF removed the “entitlement” aspect of assistance for needy families by requiring a certain percentage of able-bodied adult recipients to participate in “work-related” activities (work, education or training) as a condition of receiving benefits. The new program also placed a lifetime limit of 60 months that could be spent in the program (a limit that could be shortened, at the discretion of individual states, to 2 years). Since funding was provided primarily by the federal government, but implementation left to individual states, these basic guidelines were subject to a great amount of variation.
The program has largely been judged a failure by those in the social democracy camp, as poverty has increased since its inception while the number of people receiving benefits has decreased (13 million were receiving cash assistance in 1995, before passage of the reform, as against today’s 3 million). The Great Recession of 2008-2009 was particularly hard on low-income Americans, and TANF work requirements difficult to sustain with unemployment levels spiking to 10%. Consequently, many of those terminated under TANF time limits—including many children—are now living in poverty. Some conservative states, which have considerable flexibility to decide how to spend the federal block grants that make up the program, orient the funds toward purposes—such as support for state college systems—that do little to assist their most financially strapped families.
Welfare Transformed, by SUNY economics professor Robert Cherry, is a trenchant look into the world of welfare and welfare reform that, though published in 2007, is still relevant to today’s discussion. Cherry, thoroughly conversant in the academic research on welfare programs and a keen reporter of the political process, brings his book to life with myriad anecdotes about TANF recipients and their struggles. After TANF’s initial success in moving dependant women off of welfare and into work in the late 90s, the economic downturn of 2002-2004 diminished job opportunities and led to increasing numbers of time-limited recipients falling back into poverty. Cherry, who is a sympathetic advocate for the economically marginalized, acknowledges the program’s shortcomings but argues in this volume that it would be wrong to ignore lessons that have been learned from the program’s success in moving marginalized citizens into the economic mainstream. The Great Recession of 2008-2009 exacerbated the problems that had arisen during the milder 2002-2004 economic downturn, bringing TANF into even greater disrepute with its critics. The issues Cherry raises in Welfare Transformed remain critical to any discussion of solutions to economic and social marginalization among low-income families.
Cherry sets the stage by limning the conflicting ideological positions around the Clinton welfare reform, as well as his own evolving position on the issue. “Virtually all liberal advocacy groups,” he states, “recoiled at the prospect that the [AFDC] entitlement would be terminated.” A rallying point for opponents of the reform was muckraker Barbara Ehrenreich’s best-selling book Nickel and Dimed (2000), in which she recounts the difficulties she experienced trying to support herself on income from minimum-wage jobs. “How, we wondered,” Ehrenreich wrote, “were the roughly four million women about to be booted into the labor market by welfare reform going to make it on $6 or $7 an hour?” Cherry, a longtime student of poverty remediation, initially shared the misgivings of other critics of the reform. But, he writes, he eventually came to believe “that the process President Clinton began effectively altered certain behavioral traits that were impeding the well-being of many poor mothers and their children.” Critics like Ehrenreich, he carefully explains, skewed the debate unfairly by ignoring all of the government aid—food stamps, housing credits, childcare subsidies, and an expanded Earned Income Tax Credit, to name the major ones—available to the working poor over and above the wages made on the job. Such critics also ignored positive psychological effects of participating in worklife, the successes the program achieved in compelling absent fathers to contribute to their children’s upkeep, and the spur the program gave to vocational training programs at the community college level. Still, Cherry is no all-in supporter of the reform. “Far too many welfare mothers . . . were needlessly vicitimized by insensitive welfare requirements,” he writes, and “more enlightened policies surely could have reduced the share of welfare leavers whose lives were harmed during the Clinton boom.” Cherry’s point is that, while working to correct TANF’s failures, it would be a mistake not to learn from the many cases in which the welfare-to-work approach has improved people’s lives.
Cherry’s account of the bitter Democratic Party internecine warfare that accompanied the formulation and passage of the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act is gripping. Political pressure had been building throughout the 80s for welfare reform, for much had changed since the AFDC program first became a fixture in American life in the 1960s. Many more women were working, 60% in 1980 as compared to 25% in 1960, and the expectation was no longer that the only proper place for a mother was at home with her children. In addition, teen pregnancy had increased dramatically: up 15-20% just between the years 1985 and 1989, and an increasing share of these births were to single moms (95% in some communities). Then, in the early 90s, welfare caseloads saw a dramatic upswing—27% between 1990 and 1994. All of these factors, along with a growing public perception that welfare as it then existed had created a “culture of dependency” characterized by unwed mothers and a non-existent work ethic, made it almost imperative that any politician seeking national office address the issue. Bill Clinton, fighting against the label of “tax and spend” liberal, made reforming welfare a major plank in his 1992 campaign, and once in office he began to work on the issue. His administration’s original bill, however, brought him up against a solid wall of opposition by members of the Democratic caucus in Congress as well as welfare advocacy groups. (Ironically, this bill was far more generous than the bill which ultimately passed in 1996: there were no lifetime limits for recipients; recipients could receive benefits for two years before being required to take a job; and jobs would be be provided in either the public sector or in private sector jobs subsidized by the federal government. And according to the Republican staffer responsible for welfare reform issues in Congress, congressional Republicans, then in a minority and prepared to bargain, were ready to pass the measure.)
Unfortunately, the 1994 mid-term elections intervened, in which Newt Gingrich led a new-right majority into control of Congress: further welfare reform debate would take place on a very different footing. Congressional Republicans now wanted lifetime limits on benefits, more leeway for states, and even orphanages for the children of those who refused to participate in work requirements (this latter provision was not included in the final legislation). Clinton was caught between entitlement advocates, who decried the Republican-influenced compromise emerging in Congress as “a moral blot on [Clinton’s] presidency,” (Marianne Wright Edelman, CEO of the Children’s Defense Fund) and congressional Democrats from more conservative districts, who needed a welfare reform success going into the 1996 elections. Clinton’s ultimate decision to sign the compromise package incurred the lasting enmity of AFDC supporters and led to the resignation of key administration personnel, including Peter Edelman, husband of Children’s Defense Fund president Marian Wright Edelmann.
Having covered TANF’s beleagured inception, Cherry digs into the day-to-day business of moving dependant single mothers into the world of work. The many case studies he references, from his own research and that of welfare researchers David Shipley, Jason Deparle, Liza Featherstone and others, support the idea of a dysfunctional “culture of dependency” (which Cherry takes great pains to deconstruct) but also provide much less publicized evidence of a great desire to work and be included among welfare recipients. One mother, a high-school dropout, had worked only sporadically because “getting up for work every day seems hard.” Another AFDC recipient, a participant continually in abusive relationships with men, had trouble keeping a job because, as she put it, “I don’t really work that well with people.” Instead, she “partied from Sunday to Saturday,” which “ain’t’ leaving much room in between.” Angie, who lived in an extended-family household of welfare recipients, had no problem with child care when she was employed for 18 months, because between the three men and two women living in the household, none had a steady job. Another member of the household, Opal, saw work as “something to avoid.” And “while these women continued to collect welfare, they partied all night long.” After the passage of TANF, when Angie was confronted with a loss of benefits if she did not take a volunteer community service job, she immediately went back to work at the nursing home where she had previously been employed. Researcher DeParle found that for a “surprising number of [welfare mothers] like Angie . . . a small push or pull was all it took.”
Cherry’s tales of the women who succeeded in entering the world of work from welfare are inspiring. Sheila was the fifth of 12 children her mother had with seven different partners. Responsible for her younger siblings from the age of 11, she and her siblings suffered rape and abuse at the hands of her mother’s boyfriends. Sheila, in turn, became a welfare mother, but TANF helped her to break the pattern. At the time of Cherry’s writing, she was “looking forward to the future, studying to pass the test for a truck driver’s license.”
Cherry faults critics of welfare-to-work for neglecting the positive parenting, social and pyschological effects of moving from welfare dependency to work. Welfare leaver Mishonda, who found a job packaging Avon products, “felt good about her ability to raise her wages from $7 to $11 per hour and two small financial awards she received.” Mishonda was inspired by being able to make a contribution to her fellow human beings: “You’re doing your part to make someone else happy,” she told researchers. One mother spoke of the increased cred she had adquired in the eyes of her children after going to work: “All of my children think more of me, no longer see me lying around.” The respondent Peaches remarked favorably on the new social contacts she had made through the workplace: “I can enjoy myself and be a real person and have something to talk about besides who screwed who, who shot who, so and so’s dead.” For Kyesha, whose siblings had succumbed to street life and drugs, a Harlem Burger King had become “the center of her social universe, the place she spends nearly all of her time, the source of all of her closest friends and romantic attachments.”
Cherry bolsters these anecdotal tales of TANF success in its early years with a raft of statistics. One national study found that former AFDC recipients who either found work or combined welfare and work under TANF enjoyed a mean disposable income of $17,205—as against $8,244 for those who remained dependant on welfare alone. In a study of New Jersey’s TANF program, “WorkFirst,” of the three-fourths of recipients who left the welfare rolls, two-thirds were still working 30 months later. A study of Washington state’s program found that median earnings of welfare leavers increased by 60%.
The picture was not all rosy, however. In the 1999-2001 period, 36.5 % of welfare leavers did not earn enough, by their wages alone, to rise above the federal government’s ridiculously low poverty threshold ($14,000 for a family of three in 2000). With other government benefits included, 14.2% of these leavers were still trying to live on incomes below even that meager amount. Even in the boom Clinton years, for those welfare recipients facing the biggest challenges in moving to work (domestic violence, chemical addiction, poor health, low education), the consequences of TANF could be disastrous. The worst-off of these, says researcher DeParle, “parceled out their kids, then trudged through the snow to sleep on church floors.” During the economic downturn of 2002-2004, when jobs became harder to find and wages at the low end of the spectrum stagnated, the situation for this most vulnerable group deteriorated further.
This brings us back to Cherry’s thesis, which we noted at the beginning of this article: though TANF, even before problems created by the Great Recession of 2008, has been far from an unmitigated success (indeed has cast many of our poorest citizens further into poverty) the individual victories it has achieved in moving millions of welfare recipients into greater economic inclusion deserve to be studied and built upon. Cherry is not without prescriptions for improving the system. He spends a chapter on “training programs that work,” noting the successes of community college vocational programs, often working with the local private sector, in preparing welfare leavers for work. He argues convincingly that the federal government’s longstanding practice of deliberately slowing the economy when unemployment reaches its fictive “full-employment” point of 4.5% is hurting both the employment prospects and earning power of those at the lowest end of the income spectrum. Finally, he argues for higher minium wages and an enlargement of the Earned Income Tax Credit, and much-expanded childcare opportunities for low-income single moms.
