Our First ‘Black’ President

Clinton-era welfare reforms haunt America’s poorest families, critics say
by Chris McGreal, The Guardian
Monday 7 March 2016 11.28 EST

In 1996, when welfare reforms were introduced in a coalition between President Bill Clinton and Republicans, 68% of families in the US living below the poverty line received cash assistance. That has since fallen to just 23% nationally and even lower in many southern states without alternative forms of welfare filling the gap. In Georgia, the proportion dropped from 98% to just 7%. The fall was only marginally less sharp in Arizona.

In July, Arizona will become the first state to reduce the payment of cash benefits to the lowest-income families to a maximum of 12 months in a lifetime. That comes on top of sharp reductions in the size of payments, which have effectively halved over the past two decades, and the scrapping of programmes to help the state’s poorest citizens find jobs.
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Clinton joined with the Republican-controlled US Congress to enact the most sweeping changes to welfare in a generation with the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act by tying benefits to work. Although initially hailed as a great success in getting parents caring for children into jobs, it has since been criticised for driving up the numbers of people living in deep poverty and for allowing states to reduce the welfare rolls by imposing onerous conditions and diverting funds to fill budget shortfalls.

On the campaign trail, Bernie Sanders attacked Hillary Clinton for her support of a law he said harmed the poor.

“What welfare reform did, in my view, was go after some of the weakest and most vulnerable people in this country,” he said at a press conference last month. “Since legislation was signed into law, the number of families living in extreme poverty has more than doubled.”
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Sanders’ criticism is backed by research, including by Kathryn J Edin and H Luke Shaefer in their book, $2.00 a Day: Living on Almost Nothing in America, which also estimates that the number of households living in extreme poverty has more than doubled since the 1996 legislation to about 1.5m.

At the core of the reform was a programme, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), that required most parents receiving cash grants to seek employment. The legislation provided for assistance with training and job placement, childcare and transport to work. The beneficiaries would receive assistance for five years.
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The final legislation was a compromise between Clinton and the Republican-controlled Congress led by Newt Gingrich who injected a key piece of conservative ideology by shifting control from the federal government to the states.

Two decades later, that has perhaps proven the single most important factor in determining the success of the reforms as some state legislatures plunder welfare grants to fund other programmes or severely curtail them out of ideological hostility.
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“We have a lot of policymakers who don’t get the connection that this is hurting kids because the definition of being on cash assistance is you have a minor child at home,” said McLaughlin. “We have this attitude in Arizona among some policymakers, and I’ve heard it just within the last week, that by kicking people off these programmes we’re helping them because when they’re not dependent on the programme they’ll go find a job.”
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McLaughlin said Arizona’s cuts have created a vicious circle in which the reduction in the availability of childcare has forced working parents to leave their children at home alone or in less than ideal circumstances which has in turn driven up the number placed in foster homes.

“Continuing to shrink the TANF programme and helping people get sustainable jobs is contributing to the increase in neglect reports coming to child services and is a factor in the number of kids being removed. We have a really high incidence of kids in foster care. Arizona is way off the charts compared to the rest of the nation,” she said.

In 2006 Bill Clinton declared the program a roaring success in a New York Times editorial.