5 Welfare Reform

There continues to be much debate about the numbers of people of working age in the UK who are dependent on benefits and not working. While no leading UK politician’s are, as yet, publicly discussing the merits of the changes pushed through in the USA by President Clinton, I know they are privately very impressed. I confidently predict that if the recent Freud report recommendations, for the Department of Work and Pensions, do not produce the desired results, then a future Conservative or Labour government will move to reform benefits, American style. I thought the following article from the Sunday Times waltzed quite nicely through the changes and debate in the USA.

From The Sunday Times
March 04, 2007
How America tried to cut single parents the welfare way
Did Bill Clinton find a way to aid family life? It’s complicated, says Tony Allen-Mills
When America marked the 10th anniversary of former President Bill Clinton’s sweeping welfare reforms of 1996, there was an improbable reaction in right-wing Republican circles. Conservatives who normally regard anyone named Clinton as an agent of Satan were to be found huddled in Washington corridors, admitting that maybe their arch-nemesis had done something right.
The president who had boldly promised “to end welfare as we know it” turned out to have done exactly that. It took a comparatively liberal Democratic president to achieve what right-wing ideologues had been opining about for years — a fundamental shift in welfare policy that forced millions of dole-seekers to work.
Despite dire warnings that families would starve and children die in the streets, Clinton pushed through a reform package that imposed strict limits on benefit entitlements and deadlines for recipients to begin fending for themselves.
The results, at first glance, appear staggering. There had been no significant decline in the number of American welfare cases for almost half a century, yet within five years, caseloads had dropped at least 60%. In some states that introduced extensive back-to-work programmes, dole queues were cut by up to 80%.
Yet before anyone in Britain leaps to conclude that what worked for Clinton would work for new Labour, meet Vivyan Adair, a former welfare recipient who got on her bike, took a university degree and became an assistant professor at Hamilton College in upstate New York.
“If the goal of welfare reform was to get people off the welfare rolls, bravo,” said Adair. “If the goal was to reduce poverty and give people economic and job stability, it was not a success.”
Through the blizzard of statistics that descends on any debate about politicians and social engineering, there is one that stands out in the continuing controversy over the impact of Clinton’s reforms.
Having identified single-parent families as the biggest drain on welfare funds, Clinton set out to promote the traditional nuclear family as the surest economic safeguard against poverty. His reforms abolished automatic cash grants for single mothers and effectively forced them to work at least part-time.
Yet a federal study by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention last year showed that despite many different measures to prevent unplanned pregnancies and to promote family life, out-of-wedlock births have reached a record high.
Almost 40% of children born in America are now born to single mothers, compared to 33% before Clinton’s reforms. For the first time in US history, married couples have become a minority, accounting for only 49.7% of US households.
Both right and left have seized on these figures as evidence in a continuing dispute over how much poverty really exists in America, and to what extent government policies are aggravating or relieving it.
The debate is complicated by ethnic, racial and geographic issues — 68% of black children are born out of wedlock. The only thing that seems clear is that America’s welfare revolution cannot yet be declared an enviable success.
In one respect Clinton helped usher in a genuine transformation. Teenagers of all races are having fewer babies. Despite an overall increase in single-parent families, the unmarried teen birthrate has fallen to its lowest level since the late 1980s.
Various groups have claimed credit for the trend, from liberals promoting contra-ception to evangelical Christians who have launched chastity campaigns. Clinton’s admirers also claim that his crackdown on welfare made young women realise they would not be able to rely on government handouts if they became pregnant.
Yet just as teenagers were changing their lives, the birth rate for single women in their twenties and thirties began to rise. Older women who remain unmarried are increasingly deciding to have children on their own. Different kinds of economic pressures then emerge as these women struggle to balance their children and their jobs.
“The chief goal of Clinton’s 1996 statute, as revealed by its preamble, was to reverse the decades-long decline in the nuclear family,” said Professor Amy Wax of the University of Pennsylvania law school. “If judged by this objective, welfare reform has been an abysmal failure.”
Wax argues that requiring single mothers to work has done little to discourage single-motherhood and obliges state governments to prop up one-parent families in different ways — with tax credits or food, health and other benefits. “The possibility of economic self-sufficiency has been mugged by reality,” said Wax.
Further clouding the welfare issue are new claims that the number of American families living in severe poverty reached its highest level for more than 30 years in 2005. A study last month of the recently released 2005 census statistics found that nearly 16m Americans were classified as severely poor, up 26% from 2000.
The study by the McClatchy newspaper group defined “severely” poor as individuals earning less than $5,080 (£2,610) a year and families of four with an annual income of $9,903 — half the official poverty line.
Several experts claimed these statistics reflected the creation of a permanent underclass. Conservative researchers say the statistics were not reliable as many poor people underreport their incomes.
Arloc Sherman, a senior researcher at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a liberal think tank, offered a different interpretation. “What you see in the data are more and more single moms with children, who lose their jobs and who aren’t being caught by a safety net,” he said.