TULSA, Okla. — In 1996, President Bill Clinton signed a controversial compromise bill for welfare reform, promising to “end welfare as we know it.”
I was sympathetic to that goal at the time, but I’ve decided that I was wrong. What I’ve found over the years is that welfare “reform” is a misnomer and that cash welfare is essentially dead, leaving some families with children utterly destitute.
Every year I hold a “win a trip” contest to choose a university student to accompany me on a reporting trip to cover global poverty in places like Congo or Myanmar. This year we decided to journey as well to Tulsa, in the heartland of America, because the embarrassing truth is that welfare reform has resulted in a layer of destitution that echoes poverty in countries like Bangladesh.
Recent research finds that, because of welfare reform, roughly 3 million American children live in households with incomes of less than $2 per person per day, a global metric of extreme poverty. That’s one American child in 25. They would be counted as extremely poor if they lived in Africa.
So my win-a-trip winner, Cassidy McDonald, an aspiring journalist from the University of Notre Dame, and I interviewed families in Tulsa. Extreme poverty is not the same in the U.S. as in Africa, for America has better safety nets from the government and from churches and charities. But it’s still staggering, and instead of mitigating the problem, “welfare reform” has exacerbated it.
I supported welfare reform because initially it seemed to be working. Liberal predictions of children sleeping on grates did not come to pass, and on the contrary, there was a burst of employment for low-income single mothers as people moved from welfare to work.
But the employment bump stalled, and the replacement program for welfare, called Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, or TANF, has pretty much collapsed, especially in Republican states like Oklahoma. There are now more postage stamp collectors in America than there are families collecting cash welfare, and so kids like Hailey grow up in chaotic households in which there is simply no money.
“Welfare is dead,” declares an important book, “$2 a Day,” an exposé of extreme poverty by Kathryn J. Edin and H. Luke Shaefer. It is their research that finds that roughly three million American children live in households earning less than $2 per person per day.
Yet it’s also true that the old welfare system was a wreck, creating dependency and cycles of poverty.
“I think welfare reform was good,” Ashley Hene, 29, told me, even though she has run into the replacement program’s time limits. “Everybody was taking advantage of it.”
So here’s where I come down. Welfare reform has failed, but the solution is not a reversion to the old program. Rather, let’s build new programs targeting children in particular and drawing from the growing base of evidence of what works.
That starts with free, long-acting birth control for young women who want it (70 percent of pregnancies among young single women are unplanned). Follow that with high-quality early-childhood programs and prekindergarten, drug treatment, parenting coaching and financial literacy training, and a much greater emphasis on jobs programs to usher the poor into the labor force and bring them income.
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