Ten years ago, on Aug. 22, President Clinton signed into law a welfare reform bill that has failed low-income families. The law dismantled the federal welfare program for poor single mothers -- Aid to Families with Dependent Children. It replaced this 60-year-old New Deal program with a new one, Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF).
TANF imposed a five-year lifetime limit on recipients and allowed states to use federal welfare funds not only for cash benefits, but also for childcare, job training, transportation costs and other expenses. This flexibility was intended to encourage poor women with children to re-enter the work force. But it also gave states more leeway to purge poor people from the rolls.
According to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, more than half of the families that have been dropped from welfare rolls should be getting assistance. And while welfare rolls have been cut by 60 percent in the past 10 years -- a statistic that proponents frequently cite as evidence of the success of welfare reform -- the 1996 law has been ineffective in helping many TANF recipients escape poverty.
Families that moved from welfare to work have fared relatively poorly. Though they are better off than they were 10 years ago, their wages are still low, averaging $8 an hour without benefits. Only one out of every three former TANF recipients has health insurance, according to the Urban Institute. Equally troubling, only one-third worked all four quarters of the year. This means that although recipients are working, they are not obtaining jobs that can adequately support their families.
To address this, Congress and President Bush need to increase educational opportunities. Pursuit of education is a primary way for low-income people to move up the occupational ladder. But in 2002, 42 percent of welfare recipients did not have a high school diploma. The Institute for Women's Policy Research recently found that single mothers who complete a degree program earn 75 percent more than those without a degree.
Yet a few months ago, the Bush administration reauthorized TANF with stricter guidelines, discouraging education and real job training. TANF regulations now also prohibit recipients from counting participation in degree-oriented college courses as part of their work requirement -- which some states had previously allowed. Consequently, recipients choosing to enroll in school are required to work for 30 hours a week for their benefits -- in addition to class and study time -- while caring for their children.
Creating these hoops makes it nearly impossible for recipients to move up the occupational ladder and permanently out of poverty. Welfare was always an imperfect program and was far from generous. Even prior to 1996, it paid meager benefits, stigmatized its recipients and required them to navigate a bureaucratic maze to obtain assistance. Hardly a panacea for most recipients, it, at the very least, enabled poor families to survive in moments of crisis. TANF does not even do that.
By limiting educational advancement, it is taking away one of the few avenues available for poor women to make a better life for themselves and their children. There is little to celebrate on this 10-year anniversary.
Premilla Nadasen is associate professor of history at Queens College and is author of "Welfare Warriors: The Welfare Rights Movement in the United States" (Routledge, 2005). This column was produced for the Progressive Media Project, which is run by The Progressive magazine, and distributed by the Tribune News Service.