December 14, 2011
I’ll always remember the day President Clinton signed Temporary
Assistance to Needy Families (TANF), or welfare reform, into law. It was
August 1996, and I was reading the morning paper in Barstow,
California, completing the last leg of a cross-country road trip I’d
taken with my daughter to celebrate my finishing school. Having just
earned my bachelor’s degree from the University of California, Berkeley,
I would finally earn enough to get my family off welfare—and out of
poverty—for good. As I read the news that the Personal Responsibility
and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act had become law, I hung my head
and cried. I felt like I’d crossed a bridge just as it collapsed behind
me, and worried what would become of mothers who remained trapped on the
other side.
Since 1996, politicians have bragged about passing welfare reform. Even
House Speaker John Boehner recently praised TANF as a bipartisan
success. But successful at what? If kicking low-income children and
their families off welfare is the measure, then TANF was a huge success.
States were given bonuses for reducing their caseloads rather than
reducing poverty. As long as families were off the rolls, it didn’t
matter how or why. Studies show that parents were ten times more likely
to get cut off welfare because of punitive sanctions than because they
got jobs paying enough to “income off.” In many states, “full family”
sanctions cut low-income children off welfare along with their parents.
Under the “work first” mantra, TANF caseloads plummeted by almost 70
percent, as nearly 9 million low-income parents and children were purged
from the national welfare rolls by 2008. Given the four goals of
TANF—promoting low-wage work, encouraging marriage, reducing caseloads
and curtailing out-of-wedlock births—these outcomes are no surprise. But
if the measure of success is poverty reduction, TANF has failed.
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