Thinking on Welfare.

During some editing of my resume, which I do from time to time, I saw a topic that I hadn’t come across for a while; welfare.

As a doctoral student in the mid-90s, I did my data gathering with women who were participants in a welfare-to-work program. The project outlined the circumstance under which this social service department was managing their client load, and how changes in how they carried out their work had been altered in the wake of the Republican Contract with America. To learn more of program changes on the grassroots level, i.e. how women and their families were affected, I also interviewed staff at the private company running the program for the agency, as well as social workers who were tasked with safe-guarding the well-being of women participants and their children.

This small outing down memory lane begs the question of the current status of welfare supports in the U.S. Is welfare even a concept in the 21st century? What are the programs incorporated in this model? Are they growing, shrinking, staying the same?

Nowadays, there’s lots of talk of cutting Social Security, Medicaid, and Medicaid, even abolishing them completely, and if we don’t vote in the fall to keep those programs intact, they might be gone, pouff, just like that!

But really, how many people, and who are they, who rely on the kinds of welfare program that most people mean when they talk about welfare – supports to mothers with children, and people who don’t work. Named entitlement programs means that citizens are entitled to receive support, despite many opinions to the contrary.

A moniker that surrounds one of the groups entitled to supports, mothers and their children, is “Welfare Queen”. The slur had been around for a while already when Reagan in 1980’s made it his signature slogan, and the smear remains, even though a program that was the last to actually directly support mothers with dependent children was abolished in 1996, almost 30 years ago. It is only dying a slow death.

That year, Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) was replaced by Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF). The new acronym gave away its intent quite succinctly – short term and conditional. And not necessarily intended to support mothers who had small children they cared for on their own. Instead, targeted support was whittling away at a steady pace, with education on the chopping block first; the safety net that mothers had been able to rely on since 1935 was rapidly disappearing.

A quick Google search yielded some interesting numbers.

About 7.5 million people, 2% of the U.S. population received federally administered payment, so called Social Security Income, (SSI) as of December 2022. 30% were over 65 y o, and received an average monthly payment of $622. That is around $8,000 annually.

70 million people, or about 1 in every 5 U.S. residents, collected other Social Security benefits, according to 2022 numbers. 89% of them were older, as in retired and the elderly. The remaining 20% received Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI) or were young survivors of deceased workers.

Moving from income security to sustenance, i.e. food, participation in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) varies across states. In 2022, SNAP served an average of 41.1 million people per month, or 12.3 percent of U.S. residents. If you see the letters EBT, which stands for Electronic Benefit Transfer, at a check out or in a window of a store, it’s often the card used to access those funds to buy food.

SNAP has been a controversial program, both because it’s considered a hand-out, but also because it actually props up farmers and agri-business; which by the way has a strong lobby advocating for a continuation of the program.

The supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants and children, WIC for short, averaged 12.13 million in the monthly eligible population (2021). But in an average month in 2021, WIC served only half of those eligible for the support. A telling statistic on food insecurity of children in the U.S. is that 53% of infants in the U.S. received WIC benefits.

Food insecurity is a reality in the U.S. Just this year, 15 Republican governors rejected federal funding to help feed poor children over summer break; with no cost to the states themselves. Most of these states are in the south, where child poverty is already high. Research, and common sense, shows that when children are hungry they don’t learn, mirroring a steep decline in reading and math scores among 4th graders from 2019 to 2022. While “the share of children living in deep poverty rose from 1.4 percent of all children in 2021 to 3.3 percent in 2022,” overall child poverty doubled to 12.4 in 2022.

Looking more specifically at income assistance, how then is TANF doing? Approximately 1 million families, 2.8 million individual recipients, received TANF- or MOE-funded assistance, according to 2022 numbers. Together, 50 states share $16.5B in TANF federal block grants. The maintenance-of-efforts (MOE) note is telling – it requires that a state must spend at least a specified amount of state funds for benefits and services for members of needy families each year. Back in 1996, when Bill Clinton decided to rip up the JOBS Act of 1988, which was working just fine, TANF was created with block grants, which could be spent on other things, not just welfare spending. Hence the MOE requirement; because there’s at least one state that used those funds to build stadiums, or other that just added extra cash to their coffers. Despite the mandates, in 2021, “states spent only about a fifth of the funds on basic assistance”, while in other states, as little as 10% of the funds went to the intended purposes.

Reports show that about 50% of the TANF families consist of one female adult and one child. 1/3 are African American, 1/3 are White and 28 percent are of Hispanic origin.

TANF mandates providing assistance to needy families so that children can be cared for in their own homes or with relatives. Next, it stresses that support seeks to end dependence on government benefits by promoting job training, job placement, and, … marriage. It aims at preventing and reducing the incidence of out-of-wedlock births, which is at an all-time low, so success on that parameter. Finally, TANF has a mandate to encourage the formation and maintenance of two-parent families.

In the early 2000s, G.W. Bush initiated several programs to increase marriage rates among poor people, and threw millions of dollars to states to ‘train’ people in how to get and stay married – without any research backing that such programs had been or would be effective. Cash payment was a popular incentive. The Bush administration also instituted sexual abstinence programs for teenagers, but that’s a topic for another day.

Welfare has been a punching bag for decades, but at the moment, welfare is not a common subject among pundits or MSM, or any other outlet, unless it’s about fraud, which stands at 9.2% of all payments. Regardless, mothers’ plight to care for their children, to find work, child care, transportation, has not changed despite the reforms, and the difficulty to survive, or having a chance to thrive, as a single parent remains.

As of 2022, U.S. GNP is north of $26 trillion. The caption in the photo, “None of your problems are because someone is on welfare” illustrates that a measly $16.5B in overall welfare subsidies, including SSI, is no reason that the average American is hampered by these programs. Rather, people who often complain about welfare are on Medicare or are recipients of other - popular - programs themselves. As a reference, the newly released budget for Pentagon stands at $850B.

What the numbers and the different programs show is that collecting grievances for helping American in dire straits under the umbrella of “welfare” is not doing anybody any justice. Social security benefits earned during a lifetime of hard work is technically lumped together with TANF, as welfare. So who’s to judge who deserves what, when often it’s about getting someone back on their feet, to allow someone to find a home, or feed a child.

In a response to the Bush era programs, Barbara Ehrenreich, in her NYTimes essay “Let them Eat Wedding Cake” (2004), pointed out that programs that are forcing women from one dependency to another – from the state onto a man – is not only not feasible, it is not the solution to poverty, neither for women nor children.

What is, in my view, will be the topic for a another blog.