THE WELFARE JUNGLE
The
ironic reality was that this horrid, over-the-top solution launched new laws
that created just that effect. The entire WELFARE SYSTEM was immediately
retooled by Bill CLINTON. The improvements? A jobless mother and father could
no longer dare ask for welfare. The father would have to move out of the house
for his wife to seek aid as a single parent. No matter where the father hid,
the government would pursue him,
threatening Poppa with jail if he couldn’t raise child support each
month to pay Gov back for its aid. Plenty of men were imprisoned and there were
fathers who simply suicided.
Over-the-top testing of the waters by some pundit has
frequently presaged changes in law. Nazi Geneticists toyed
with ridding the concept of gassing homosexuals, retards, miscreants and
cripples and when not enough people hollered, instead, gassed Jews. However, when
l8th century writer Jonathan Swift in his “ MODEST PROPOSAL” suggested that
having the children of the poor Catholic Irish cooked and eaten by the rich
Presbyterians would solve the problem of starving Catholics once and for all,
that was not a similar testing of the waters and a broaching of serious intent.
I don’t know what happened in the wake of Swift’s proposal ….although 115 years
later, when the Potato famine hit, the rich Prebyterian landowners did leave
the poor Catholic spud eaters to die in the streets of starvation when they
could have easily served soup in public kitchens, so maybe Swift was reading
English minds. Not quite a deliberate testing of the waters, though.
But NEWT was different. History tells us that within months of Newt’s Final Solution, Welfare was over with! So maybe GINGRICH was the conservative right wing charm.
Mommy Rabbit, your kiddies are so
cute! They don’t look like you.
Are they all from one father? Forgive me for being nosy.
I'm the Welfare System. I'm here to HELP YOU!
SO….
How many men can we nail…..err, the fathers’ names please?
And
that was just the beginning of the end. Clinton had other improvements. Single
mothers could only receive public aid for two years, then they had to start
cleaning freeways to pay back the city. This allowed the city to fire union
workers who had previously before being fired, earned three times the money per
hour and Medical and dental benefits. Suddenly Welfare was saving the city
money!
In the years that followed the demise of guaranteed AFDC welfare and food stamp benefits to SINGLE PARENTS WITH BABIES millions of American children were added to the nearly two million already living in sub poverty many without either of their parents.
By 1999 as many as 2.3 million children were in foster care or living in the homes of grandparents, other relatives or friends, according to a recent report by the RAND Corporation, the National Bureau of Economic Research and the University of California.
In
California, under 900,000 families had aid. See http://www.acf.dhhs.gov/programs/opre/timetren/tca.htm
Among low-income children, the share living without
a biological, adoptive or stepparent in the household rose a full percentage
point, to 6 percent in 1999, up from 5 percent in 1997. At thesame time there
was a decline in the number of single parent families.
President Bush, along with conservative and liberal politicians alike, hailed the reduction of the number of one-parent families as a confirmation that the 1996 Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA) promoted “family values.” If this refers to what exists in the human soul that makes children feel nurtured, parented, and what makes a future generation of nurtured children grow into nurturing adults, this is another Bush lie. READ THE ACT HERE:
When the PRWORA act comes up for reauthorization later this year, Bush wants Congress to divert $100 million annually from federal welfare dollars to programs designed to promote marriage.
New research, however, indicates a large part of the decrease in the number of single-parent families was due to parents being forced to abandon their children so they could get a job under the welfare-to-work provisions of the new law. The decline appeared to be the greatest among black families and accompanied reports of record numbers of mothers entering the workforce.
By analyzing smaller demographic groups within the larger population categories used in earlier research, researchers produced evidence contradicting the one-sided Bush optimism establishing a direct connection between welfare reform and the breakup of families.
Recognizing that welfare reform actually began in several states in the early 1990s, the researchers compared the family status of children in 1989 with data compiled up to March 2001. By looking back to years before any state had federal waivers in place, they captured effects of welfare reform missed in earlier studies.
By 1996 half the states were employing federal waivers to dismantle various aspects of Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC). Federal legislation in late 1996 changed the name of the federally-funded AFDC program to Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF).Funds were converted to block grants to states and strict work requirements and lifetime time limits were imposed.
In one population heavily impacted by welfare, black children living in the central city, the longer states had experimented with welfare reform and the more enthusiastically they enforced the new restrictions, the greater the increase in children living with neither parent. After taking into account other social factors, they estimated welfare reform led to a doubling of the percentage of black central city children living with neither parent, or an additional 206,000 persons. The authors note “it is rare in social science research to find such large effects of policy on behavior.”
Another trend they identified indicates that welfare reform is forcing women into marriages that are likely to break up, with a higher incidence of separation and divorce.
One welfare official in the Bush administration cynically claimed welfare reform was exposing unfit parents. The researchers showed, however, that households where children went to live after being separated from their parents were no better off financially than the ones they left.
Extreme poverty in households with children The economic stresses on low-income families are severe and increased between the mid-1990s and the end of the decade, despite the record stock market boom. In April the Urban Institute published a report showing 300,000 more persons in single-parent families lived in extreme poverty in 1998 than in 1996. The researchers used a disposable income measure including wages, government benefits and costs such as childcare.
A family of three is considered extremely poor when its income falls below $7,135 (in 2001 dollars) or one-half the official poverty level. Researchers acknowledged this threshold was probably too low because they did not factor in increased out-of-pocket costs for medical care borne by parents in low-paying jobs without health insurance.
July’s issue of the Archives of Pediatric and Adolescent Medicine reported on a survey compiled by emergency room doctors and others in several cities across the country. It showed increasing numbers of younger children unable to get enough nutritious food to stay healthy, and pointed to the effects of full and partial sanctions imposed on families by the 1996 legislation. The new law uses sanctions to terminate or reduce benefits for infractions of rules including those related to welfare-to-work. It also decreases benefits when changes in income or expenses occur.
Children three years old or younger in families whose welfare benefits had been terminated or reduced were found to have a 50 percent higher risk of being food insecure than those in families whose benefits had not been decreased. They also had a 30 percent higher risk of having past hospitalizations and a 90 percent higher risk of being hospitalized at the time of an emergency room visit.
In families where welfare benefits had been reduced but not eliminated, young children were still almost three times more likely to be admitted to the hospital at an emergency room visit. These findings were true even though 80 percent of the children were receiving supplemental food under the Women’s, Infants and Children’s (WIC) program and nearly all—94 percent—still qualified for government-subsidized medical care.
(NOTE:
FEB 2006, Gov (SSI/SSA) stopped all funding or cash allotments for baby formula
in USA. Thanks to Iraq War.)
In Boston and Minneapolis researchers compared all US-born families, including both those that had or never used welfare. There was a 40 percent higher risk of being food insecure, a 30 percent higher risk of being underweight, and a 50 percent higher risk of being hospitalized during an ER visit in 2001 than there had been two years earlier.
The authors note that food stamps failed to mitigate the effects of sanctions or of reductions in benefits even when the reduction resulted from increases in earned income. Recession and unemployment add to family stresses
As alarming as they seem, the previous reports reflect conditions before the recession began in early 2001, i.e., while the economy was still experiencing its longest expansion in postwar history. A report from the Children’s Defense Fund, a liberal child advocacy group, indicates the situation has worsened considerably in the past 15 months.
There were high levels of unemployment among families with children by the end of 2001. From late 2000 to late 2001 the number of children with one or more unemployed parents rose by 1.2million, or 41 percent. The one-year surge in children with an unemployed parent wiped outmost of the reduction in children with a jobless parent that occurred during the previous five years of economic growth.
The percentage of single mothers employed had increased from 63 percent in late 1995 to 74 percent in late 2000, and had accounted for more than half the increase in working parents between 1995 and 2000. But between 2000 and late 2001 the number of unemployed single mothers rose by 25 percent, or 171,000 persons. Thus former welfare recipients who were exploited as low-wage labor during the boom were among the first to be thrown out of work once the economic downturn began.
Despite
the increase in need resulting from the effects of the recession, states
actually spent $546 million dollars less on cash assistance for low-income
families with children in 2001 than they did the year before. By 2001 all but
one state had families who had exceeded their time limits for TANF benefits and
were eligible to be barred from any assistance for the rest of their lives.
It’s a
known fact that Welfare mothers don’t picket. They can’t afford the bus ride to
the Federal building or the babysitters to care for children. Besides which,
they’re all tuckered out. But more and more Single mommies are coming online.
So let’s all read up on ACTIVISM. How to be a vociferous, noisy, useful
activist.