AT a time of unprecedented budget crises, it is unthinkable that we should roll back welfare reform — yet that’s what’s happening. In New York and other states, and on the federal level, lawmakers are broadening eligibility, eliminating work requirements and raising cash pay-outs.
The drive is to substitute all sorts of social and educational services for work requirements — despite overwhelming evidence that such assistance doesn’t lead to employment.
As a nation, we’ll come to regret these decisions, because welfare reform has worked — and worked well. It must be preserved.
For over a decade, able-bodied Americans have had to work in order to receive cash assistance. But the February 2009 federal stimulus package essentially rolled back the Welfare Reform Act: It suspended the block-grant system at the core of the 1996 reform, for a system where Washington reimburses states for 80 percent of the cost of new enrollees.
In short, Congress is essentially bribing states to pad their welfare rolls — and the bribe is even more generous than the one in the pre-reform system.
As a result, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has just reversed California’s core welfare policy by eliminating the work requirements for residents. Here in New York, at least three bills introduced in the Assembly or state Senate would push us down the same road.
The bills basically push for more counseling, education and training — while weakening, or even removing, work requirements. Introduced by left-leaning legislators, mostly from the metropolitan area, they assume that the main purpose of the ’90s reforms was to make welfare eligibility so onerous that most would be shunted away from dependence.
That’s false. The Welfare Reform Act, passed by a Republican Congress and signed into law by Democratic President Bill Clinton in 1996, was a bipartisan response to the failure of education and training as first strikes in reducing welfare rolls. The goal was to help recipients lift themselves out of poverty by getting jobs.
It’s no surprise that today’s economy is causing more people to apply for welfare nationwide and especially in New York, with its devastated financial-services sector. But the economic pressures are no reason to roll back welfare reforms that have more than met their promise.
The number of welfare recipients in New York state dropped from more than 950,000 in 1999 to 527,597 in July 2009 (the most recent figures from the Office of Temporary and Disability Assistance).
The number of people getting temporary assistance is up slightly more than 4 percent statewide since July 2008, but the city has seen only a 1.6 percent increase.
Considering the double-digit rises seen in welfare cases nationwide, New York is doing well, indeed. For example, the number of families on public assistance in Florida jumped 15.2 percent from July 2008 to July 2009, while California’s welfare rolls are projected to reach 557,000 families in 2010 from 466,000 families in 2008 — a 19.5 percent jump.
It’s not that the Empire State’s economy is any better than that of other populous states. Statewide, unemployment was 9 percent in August ’09, versus 5.7 percent in August ’08. In the city, it was 10.3 percent in August, compared to 5.9 percent a year earlier.
Why have the city’s welfare rolls stayed low despite rising unemployment? Because the Bloomberg administration has consistently embraced the principles of welfare reform: “Work first” works best.
Staying committed to “work first” entails careful management of public-assistance cases to guard against watering down the city’s welfare programs. The success of this approach is obvious: From 2006 to 2008, while US poverty rates for individuals and children were flat, the poverty rates of those two groups in New York City declined. This contradicts the critics who claim that the city’s “work first” policy hurts families.
Independent research bears out the wisdom of “work first.” The Manpower Demonstration Research Corp. — a group that spent years promoting training and other “human-capital investment” as the way out of welfare — in April 2002 wrote a policy brief about the role of education and training in welfare reform. It found that “whether the goal is reducing poverty, reducing dependency, saving money or helping children, there is no evidence to support a rigid education-or-training-first policy.”
Furthermore, an in-depth December 2008 study on behalf of the US Department of Labor found that job-retraining programs, especially those into which dislocated workers are pushed, provide little long-term benefit.
Article XVII of the state Constitution requires New York to provide for the “aid, care and support of the needy” — but it carries no obligation to provide unlimited or even unfettered access to public funds. As job losses mount, non-cash assistance will continue to be a valuable resource for New Yorkers. But we must remain vigilant in protecting the policies that have powered welfare-reform success.
Peter Cove founded America Works, which has been finding jobs for hard-to-place workers for 25 years. Lee Bowes is the CEO of America Works.