Working In These Times
Welfare: A Worsening Deal for Nearly Everyone Involved
(Photo courtesy Racewire.org)
Ever since the economy took a nose dive, welfare has turned into even a worse deal for nearly everyone involved.
More people are broke, so they turn to welfare. The feds have only so much money to spread around, so there is a greater pinch for scare welfare dollars.
And because money-strapped states have to cut wherever they can, folks on welfare get pushed further aside and short-changed even more.
This has not been an unexpected symptom for an economy that has gone sour for millions. The problem with this scenario is that this time, there is unlikely to be any financial rainbow waiting down the road for the thousands, who have slipped to the bottom of the economic ladder.
Come September, the immediacy of the situation may become quite clear. That is when added money pumped into the states by the federal government to help them with their added welfare burdens runs out.
Before the economic collapse, most of the nation was under pressure to meet new federal guidelines that took effect in 2005, which called for states to put more welfare recipients into jobs or markedly boost their efforts to find work.
Along came the nation’s economic woes in 2007, however, and the reality for welfare recipients and the states changed markedly. The General Accounting Office (GAO) details the changes in a recently released report.
Between December 2007 and September 2009, the number of families on welfare has grown by six percent, according to the GAO report. But that number is deceptive because the increases have variedly widely among the states and among recipients themselves.
For example, there was a 57 percent increase in the number of two-parent families nationally receiving welfare. However, in Florida, which has suffered greatly in the economic wipeout, the number of two-parent households on welfare jumped 200 percent.
Likewise, Oregon saw a 48-percent increase in families on welfare. Vermont had a 28-percent increase and Texas’s welfare rolls went up 16 percent, the GAO report shows.
In several states where GAO workers looked into the situation, they learned that a number of the new welfare recipients formerly owned their own small businesses, and were unable to apply for unemployment benefits.
Despite the infusion of money for the state welfare programs from the Recovery Act last fall, many states have had to make cutbacks in terms of money or manpower. Oregon slashed the money it gives to welfare recipients from $150 a month to $100 a month in July last year and is on schedule to cut that down to $50 a month in October, the GAO said.
So what will happen for the new arrivals on the welfare rolls and the long-termers, the folks still on the rolls after a nearly 50 percent drop in the number of families on the dole since welfare rules were tightened in 1997?
More will struggle harder and fail to get unstuck, more will attempt to live on less than before, and more will just give up. And you can imagine what their lives will be like.
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Comments
“...the number of families on welfare has grown by six percent, according to the GAO report. But that number is deceptive because…”
It’s actually even more complicated than that. The central point of President Clinton’s welfare “reform” policies is that we no longer have a need-based entitlement. No matter how desperate your circumstances are, you might or might not get a few crumbs of aid, depending on unrelated factors. For example, counties are provided with financial incentives to keep their welfare rolls below a certain number, regardless of circumstances, so people are, indeed, simply turned away. Or it can be as simple a matter as getting a workfare intake worker whose workload is already too big, and doesn’t want to begin processing another new case. There is simply no record of the number of applicants who are turned away.
Workfare is, surprisingly, a subject that has had virtually no public attention. These are temp jobs, often part-time, that pay minimum wage or less, supplemented with some food stamps and a Medicaid card (we “liberated” people from cash benefits). When you apply for aid, you are assigned to a workfare job. It’ll keep you going for a few more weeks. From there, you might or might not (a) find a regular, paying job; (b) be assigned to another workfare job; (c) simply have your case closed. Or none of the above.
It isn’t clear where all these workfare jobs come from. However, we have observed cases where businesses will put a chunk of their workforce on “indefinite layoff”, only to put in an order (via county welfare/workfare office) for a number of replacement workers. When that bunch of workfare labor has worked long enough to qualify for permanent jobs, they, too, are “laid off,” replaced by another batch of workfare workers. Today, there’s an abundant supply of super-cheap domestic labor. This has dramatically reduced labor costs for some businesses; on a large scale, businesses get rich off of super-cheap workfare labor, sans the expense of moving our jobs to foreign countries, while America grows poorer.
We really should begin looking at how our welfare “reform” policies not only so severely hurt so many of our fellow citizens, but at how it has been used to suppress wages,
break up unions and worsen conditions for all American workers.
Meant to add: Another thing that makes welfare rolls an unreliable indication of US poverty is the very strict lifetime time limits. When you reach the deadline (which, I think, varies by state—last I heard, it’s 3 yrs in Wisconsin), your case is simply closed, you can’t re-apply, so that’s the end of the road.
Thanks for adding your comments, Stephen
While we struggle to keep people from accessing welfare we fund the most expensive military in the world! We pay more for our military than any other country in the world; alas!....more than all other countries combined! No wonder we cannot afford welfare and so many other things!
While we protect France and Germany, THEY can afford to pay for health care for their citizens as well as many other things we don’t even think about!
When will the military be placed ‘on the table’ for cuts so that we can afford things that are SO necessary! Surely we can protect ourselves without being the largest military in the world?