Poverty Rises, Social Services Decline

From Saturday's Washington Post:

Taylor, 44, a single mother, had spent six years on public assistance. After 1996, when changes were made in welfare law to push people into work, she got a job that paid $400 a week and allowed her family to live independently. For the first time in a long time, she could afford to clothe and feed her two children, and even rent a duplex on the beach in Norfolk.

After losing her job last year, however, Taylor has been unable to find full-time work in an economy that still has a million fewer jobs than it did at the start of a brief recession more than three years ago.

She is back in poverty. But she hasn't gone back on welfare.

Her story illustrates a seeming paradox in the U.S. economy: Though the number of welfare recipients continues to decline, poverty rates -- particularly for single mothers and children -- have surged in recent years. Just last month, the government reported that the number of people on welfare had declined by 149,000 at the end of 2003 compared with 2002, while the number in poverty rose by 1.3 million. Those divergent trends offer fresh ammunition to both sides in the debate over whether, eight years after the fact, welfare reform is working.

Nationally, fewer than half of the families eligible for welfare received it in 2001, the most recent year for which statistics are available, compared with roughly 80 percent before the 1996 legislation. Reform supporters say that is exactly what the changes were meant to accomplish -- recasting welfare as a last resort instead of a crutch. "What is happening is that people are making do, without having to go back on welfare," said Douglas J. Besharov, a University of Maryland professor and resident scholar at the conservative American Enterprise Institute.

But some advocates for the poor say cases like Taylor's show that families are not getting the assistance they need at a time when a good job -- or any job -- can be hard to find. "The same people who fall through the employment net now also fall through the welfare net," said Ellen Bravo, outgoing director of the Milwaukee advocacy group 9to5, National Association of Working Women.

I'm all for finding ways to keep people off the welfare rolls. Yes, I actually believe that after a period of time, it becomes more of a societal "learned helplessness" than real aid.

However, I felt Clinton was wrong about the way he helped start welfare reform, and President Mood Swing (Bush) completely killed the economy for many Americans, vastly compounding the problem. Starving children aren't my idea of compassionate conservatism.