welfare

Romney, Ryan, GOP Demand Obama Stop Strengthening Welfare Work Mandate

Leo Gerard — Tue, 18 Sep 2012 10:34:15 -0400

Republicans in two Congressional committees voted last week to press forward with legislation that would deny states the flexibility they requested to help more welfare recipients get jobs.

That’s right.

Not only that, Rep. Paul Ryan, the GOP vice presidential candidate, said last week he is eager to return to Washington this week for a floor vote on the Republican measure prohibiting the Obama administration from, as the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) described it:

“encouraging states to consider new, more effective ways to meet the goals of TANF (welfare), particularly helping parents successfully prepare for, find and retain employment.”

That’s right.

Republicans don’t want the Obama administration to help states get welfare recipients off the dole and into jobs. In July, Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney launched an attack on the administration’s offer to meet a demand from states for more flexibility so states could move more people to work instead of pushing more paper around. Now, Republicans in Congress are taking up the cause of thwarting Obama’s plan to grant states’ request for flexibility. Historically, Republicans supported moving welfare recipients off the federal rolls and onto private pay rolls. But they’re not going to let Obama get credit for accomplishing that.

This dispute began with an attempt by the Obama administration to reduce regulatory burdens. Here’s what President Obama wrote Feb. 28, 2011 in the Administrative Flexibility memo:

“I am instructing agencies to work closely with state, local, and tribal governments to identify administrative, regulatory, and legislative barriers in federally funded programs that currently prevent states, localities, and tribes, from efficiently using tax dollars to achieve the best results for their constituents.”

The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) took the directive seriously and asked states for suggestions. Some state officials complained about burdensome welfare reform paperwork requirements and asked if HHS would provide flexibility. Among them were Utah and Nevada, both of which have Republican governors. Utah also has a Republican supermajority in its legislature.
HHS responded with a memo to states issued on July 12. It offers states a chance to achieve flexibility through waiver of some welfare rules if states conduct HHS-approved pilot programs that move additional welfare recipients to work in measureable ways.

The memo states at least 10 times that the goal is increased employment. For example, there’s this:

“HHS will only consider approving waivers relating to the work participation requirements that make changes intended to lead to more effective means of meeting the work goals of TANF (welfare).

“Moreover, HHS is committed to ensuring that any demonstration projects approved under this authority will be focused on improving employment outcomes and contributing to the evidence base for effective programs; therefore, terms and conditions will require a federally-approved evaluation plan designed to build our knowledge base.”

In a letter that accompanied the memo, HHS repeats incessantly that all proposals must fulfill the goal of increased employment. Of the 21 sentences, at least 10 specify that less welfare and more work is mandated by the law, is important and will be required for waiver. For example, there’s this:

“The (HHS) Secretary is only interested in approving waivers if the state can explain in a compelling fashion why the proposed approach may be a more efficient or effective means to promote employment entry, retention, advancement, or access to jobs that offer opportunities for earnings and advancement that will allow participants to avoid dependence on government benefits.”

Despite all that, Mitt Romney began condemning the waiver offer immediately after it was issued. Congressional Republicans hope this week to bludgeon it to death with legislation forbidding HHS from providing the flexibility requested by governors, including Republicans Gary Herbert of Utah and Brian Sandoval of Nevada. Herbert’s state department of HHS wrote the federal HHS in 2011 seeking flexibility:

“Nevada is very interested in working with your staff to explore program waivers. . .”

Like welfare-to-work, Republicans have long supported “flexibility” for states in implementing federal mandates. For example, in 2005 every Republican governor in the nation – 29 of them – wrote Congress to support a bill that would have allowed waivers to welfare reform law requirements. The governors told Congress they wanted “flexibility to manage their TANF (welfare) programs.” The letter said:

“Increased waiver authority, allowable work activities, availability of partial work credit and the ability to coordinate state programs are all important aspects of moving recipients from welfare to work.”

Mitt Romney signed that letter. He was among the 29 governors seeking flexibility through waivers to manage welfare.

That’s right. The same Mitt Romney who now is denouncing the Obama administration’s effort to provide flexibility.

Now, Romney despises flexibility. Now, he hates waivers. Now, he’s demanding an end to the effort by HHS to give states the ability to experiment with pilot programs to increase the employment of welfare recipients.

It’s yet another Romney flipflop, another Romney Etch-A-Sketch moment. Said it once, erase it now. Romney figures GOP inconsistency doesn’t matter as long as it hurts President Obama somehow.

Let's Get This Straight: Welfare 'Reform' Was A Failure

Isaiah J. Poole — Fri, 09 Mar 2012 12:17:25 -0500

The "success" of the 1996 "welfare reform" pact between President Clinton and congressional conservatives is an hardy piece of conventional wisdom that you will hear repeated, and usually unchallenged, in the rare times that poverty comes up in the political discourse. The limits on cash benefits and the work requirements are frequently Exhibit A in the conservative case for further dismantling of economic supports for low-income people.

Just a couple of weeks ago, the Los Angeles Times published an op-ed from a Brookings scholar and a Yale professor, bluntly headlined, "Welfare reform worked."

But today's "This Week in Poverty" column in The Nation tells a different story.

A stunning report released by the University of Michigan’s National Poverty Center reveals that the number of US households living on less than $2 per person per day—a standard used by the World Bank to measure poverty in developing nations—rose by 130 percent between 1996 and 2011, from 636,000 to 1.46 million. The number of children living in these extreme conditions also doubled, from 1.4 million to 2.8 million.

The reason? In short: welfare reform, 1996—still touted by both parties as a smashing success.

The report concludes that the growth in extreme poverty “has been concentrated among those groups that were most affected by the 1996 welfare reform.” The law created the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) block grant, replacing Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC), which had guaranteed cash assistance to eligible families since 1935. Prior to welfare reform, 68 of every 100 poor families with children received cash assistance through AFDC. By 2010, just 27 of every 100 poor families received TANF assistance.

The availability of the "food stamp" program—now known as SNAP, or Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program—softens the blow of this extreme poverty, but even when SNAP benefits are counted, there has been a nearly 67 percent increase in the number of households living on less than $2 a day.

"Despite the presence of a substantial in-kind safety net, a significant number of households with children continue to slip through the cracks," the report said. "And it is unclear how households with no cash income—either from work, government programs, assets, friends, family members, or informal sources—are getting by even if they do manage to claim some form of in-kind benefit."

The report closes by saying that "it would be wrong to conclude that the U.S. safety net is strong, or even adequate, when one in five poor households with children are living without meaningful cash income."

Greg Kaufmann, who writes This Week in Poverty and who I interviewed recently, also chronicles some particularly frightening examples of states where things could get even worse for low-income people because of conservative ideological extremism. For example, Alabama is considering getting out of the TANF program altogether, denying itself $141 million in federal funding, because it does not want to comply with federal rules that the state spend its own tax dollars on the program.

Progressives are fighting with everything we have to create an economy in which self-reliance is a real option, not a right-wing talking point used to heckle those entrapped by no fault of their own in a dysfunctional economy. Welfare reform initially looked successful because of the rising economy of the late 1990s. As Kaufmann reports today, the reality of welfare reform looks more like this:

Jack Frech, director of the Athens County Department of Job and Family Services in Appalachian Ohio, where he has been doing this work since 1973, told me that the state has cracked down on people who fail to meet their thirty-hour weekly work requirement “and in the last six months or so they’ve driven at least 30,000 people off of assistance. The welfare caseload in Ohio is dropping rapidly. ”

He’s traveled throughout the county of late to see how conditions are changing.

“There’s a growing number of families out there—through the combination of time limits and sanctions—who have no cash whatsoever, they’re just surviving on food stamps,” he said. “The housing conditions—people are doubling, tripling up even in little trailers. These kids are hungry, they’re sleeping in chairs, or makeshift beds, crammed together. They can’t afford transportation—they’re stuck out in these communities with no way to go anywhere or do anything.”

Let's stop calling this "success."

Right-Wing Obstruction Will Cost Thousands Their Jobs

Isaiah J. Poole — Wed, 22 Sep 2010 14:18:34 -0400

Less than a week after the U.S. Census Bureau reported record levels of poverty in the United States, congressional leaders have informed members of a progressive jobs coalition that there will not be a vote before the November elections on a jobs program for low-income people that is set to expire on September 30.

In the absence of any action by Congress, many of the 250,000 people employed in the program stand to lose their jobs.

The culprit: Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and his conservative colleagues in the Senate. The program in question—the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families Emergency Contingency Fund—is not moving forward because McConnell's "hell no you can't" party won't allow a measure containing funding for the program to come to the Senate floor.

That's not the only jobs program that's not moving. Progressive activists have been told that the Local Jobs for America Act, which would directly fund public-sector and social-service jobs, is also unlikely to come up for a vote this fall. That's not a surprise, frankly, because the conventional wisdom has been that neither the Democratic congressional leadership nor the White House has the stomach to fight a battle over a multibillion-dollar jobs bill weeks before the congressional midterm elections. (The Huffington Post did report late Wednesday that Senate Democrats will push for a vote on an "American Jobs and Ending Offshoring" bill within the next two weeks. That bill waives payroll taxes for new hires for two years while ending a loophole that allows corporations to avoid taxes on income earned overseas.)

Still, the impending expiration of the TANF Emergency Fund program is a stunning blow.

Last week 30 senators, all Democrats, signed a letter urging the program be continued. "Without immediate Congressional action, tens of thousands of jobs will be lost in the coming days and weeks," the letter says in part. "Job losses in the states and counties with the large subsidized employment programs could see substantial increases in their unemployment rate. Small businesses that have relied on the fund to expand during the recession and rehire laid-off employees will once again face financial uncertainty. And states may implement reductions in cash assistance, assistance which is effective in stimulating the economy because the poor families receiving it spend virtually every cent in their local economy immediately to meet basic needs."

It's another example of conservative hypocrisy. As we've noted before, the jobs component of the TANF Emergency Fund does precisely what many conservatives say public policy for out-of-work low-income people should do: Get people who would otherwise be on welfare off the dole and into a productive, private-sector job.

The $5 billion emergency fund program was included in the Recovery Act package Congress passed in 2009, and the administration is seeking an additional $2.5 billion in funding for fiscal 2011, which begins October 1.

Liz Schott and LaDonna Pavetti of the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities earlier this month wrote that the program "has been a 'win-win-win,' helping unemployed families find work, businesses expand capacity in a difficult economic environment, and local economies cope with the recession. Without the fund, some 120,000 young people would not have had summer jobs and some 130,000 parents would not have had jobs to provide for their families’ basic needs; they would also have lost a valuable opportunity to build skills for the future."

NPR recently told the story of David Sullivan, an unemployed Chicago resident who got a $10-an-hour hotel maintenance job through the TANF program. Schott and Pavotti share other anecdotes and testimonials from around the country, including one from South Carolina officials who say that their state's welfare caseload, which had been rising during the recession, dropped after it launched its subsidized jobs program.

The House has twice approved funding to extend the program, but block-and-blame Republicans are not budging on their contention that $2.5 billion to keep low-income people working and above the poverty line is not something that the nation can afford—but we can afford $80 billion in just the next two years alone to continue the Bush tax cuts for the richest 2 percent of Americans.

Last week Sen. Max Baucus, D-Mont., introduced a jobs and "tax extenders" bill that included money for continuing the TANF Emergency Fund. That legislation, however, was blocked by McConnell and his band of do-nothings within moments after it was introduced. It turns out their actions answered a question I asked last week—Are Senate conservatives so desperate to hold the economy hostage to their political ambitions and ideological rigidity that they would block even Baucus's relatively unambitious bill?—before I even asked it.

No doubt when the pink slips start to be issued next week for these TANF workers they will be tempted to blame the Obama administration and the Democrats in Congress for not fighting hard enough for them. But the real blame lies with a right wing in Congress that has become so rigid, self-righteous and control-obsessed that it would rather see people unemployed and starving in the streets, as the rich party on in their enclaves with their tax breaks, than have a modest amount of tax dollars go into a program that not only reflects moderately progressive policy but also fundamental human decency.

Welfare Caseloads Rising

OurFuture.org Staff — Mon, 05 May 2008 11:52:52 -0400

Federal data for the last half of 2007 show welfare rolls rose about 0.6 percent, and 27 states reported increases. That follows a decline of 68 percent since a Cointon-area federal law imposed work requirements, time limits and penalties for recipients who don't follow the rules.

QUESTION HILLARY

QUESTION HILLARY — Tue, 05 Feb 2008 14:10:28 -0500

At QUESTION HILLARY™ we feature sparkling parochial humor and spastic political commentary not unlike NBC News that may not be suitable for some of you larger DNC interns: Tongue in somebody else's cheek is strongly advised.