"Helping" the poor

The NYT contributes a piece assessing a decade of welfare "reform". I'll let a Congresscritter give you the review:

“We have been vindicated by the results,” said Representative E. Clay Shaw Jr., Republican of Florida and an architect of the 1996 law who was vilified at the time. “Welfare reform was one of the most successful policy changes in our nation’s history.”

Wow. And what sort of metric are we using to determine success?:

When it was passed, some opponents offered dire predictions that the law would make things worse for the poor. But the number of people on welfare has plunged to 4.4 million, down 60 percent. Employment of single mothers is up. Child support collections have nearly doubled.

Sounds great! Until you actually think about it.

I'm not going to quibble with the increase in child support payments, although I will mention that in order to receive federal assistance, single mothers are required to disclose the identity of their child's father. There were lots of fears that this may endanger the woman and her child if they had left after being victims of abuse. I don't know the numbers on this... I'd be curious to know if anyone is even tracking instances of domestic violence that have been linked to the paternity disclosures.

Examining the claim that fewer people are on welfare. Okay - that's true. If their goal was to reduce the number of people receiving public assistance - reduce the number by kicking them off welfare - then they certainly succeeded. If their goal was to help alleviate poverty, however...

As for the claim that the numbers of single mothers working have increased, these women have primarily gone into low-wage, no benefit jobs with little chance for advancement:

Chevaughn L. Stephens of Seattle, a 29-year-old mother of three, said: “The emphasis on work first did not help me at all. It kept me back. It kept me from getting the education and skills I needed.”

In the last decade, Ms. Stephens said, she has had jobs as a waitress, a taxi dispatcher and a telephone sales representative. She is taking courses to get a high school equivalency certificate, needed for better-paying jobs.

So by success, Representative Shaw must be referring to the creation of a new desperately poor workforce willing to work the shit jobs in our nation and not get uppity about it. How noble.

Other notable points made in the article:

One of the most significant features of the 1996 law was the five-year limit on assistance for any family. Democrats feared it would cause immense hardship. To the surprise of welfare officials and policy analysts, most welfare recipients came nowhere near the limit.

But the looming time limit may nevertheless have influenced the choices and behavior of welfare recipients. Professor Grogger said many people, aware of the deadline, left welfare after only a couple of years so they could “save the benefits for a rainy day.”

Prof. Grogger, an economist (obviously) from the University of Chicago (natch), misses the boat here, mainly because he bought in to the trope of the long-term welfare addict perpetuated by the GOP in their long PR battle waged in the years and decades leading up to the 1996 welfare reform law. By and large, most of the people who received public assistance were experiencing a short-term crisis and eventually left welfare as their situation resolved itself. What you do see, however, is cycles of going on and off of assistance.

Welfare reform can only be deemed a success in making an already vulnerable population more dependent on and powerless against a system of exploitation, leaving them trapped at the margins of society.