Work Works:
States of success.
By Michael J. New

As NRO readers know, this week marks the tenth anniversary of the passage of welfare reform, which remains one of the best public-policy success stories of the past decade. However, the drumbeat of revisionist history has begun.
Many critics of welfare reform, including columnist Clarence Page, are giving the economy credit for the impressive welfare caseload declines. However, their reasoning is faulty. History indicates the strength of the economy has only a limited effect on welfare caseloads. More importantly, recent data clearly indicate that state policies, made possible due to welfare reform, are largely responsible for the substantial reduction in the welfare rolls.
When the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PROWRA) was signed in 1996, it ended the entitlement status of Aid to Families with Dependant Children (AFDC) and converted federal welfare funding into a block grant. The federal law also required states to reduce their caseloads and imposed work standards on state governments, insisting that they require a certain portion of their welfare caseloads to work or prepare for work. However, states were given considerable latitude on how to implement these standards.
It should come as no surprise that some states have enjoyed more success than others in moving people from welfare to work. Between August 1996 and August 2002, welfare caseloads declined by about 54 percent nationally. However, Wyoming was able to reduce its welfare caseloads by over 90 percent while Indiana actually saw its caseload levels increase by 1 percent over the same time-span.
Now, it is true the economy has performed well since the mid 1990s and many have argued that the economic boom is responsible for the welfare caseload declines. However, a recent study by the Heritage Foundation refutes that notion. The study examines the magnitude of welfare caseload declines in all 50 states between 1996 and 2002. It finds that the strength of the economy has had only a marginal impact on the number of individuals receiving welfare. In fact, the regression model predicts that the decline in welfare caseloads would only be 1 percentage point greater in a state with above-average economic growth than in a state with a below-average growth.
Additionally, historical evidence shows that the economy has had only a limited impact on the number of people receiving welfare. For instance, between 1983 and 1989 the economy grew at a brisk rate. However, the number of AFDC recipients actually increased during that time. Likewise, the economy boomed during the 1960s, but welfare caseloads soared largely because benefits became more generous.
If the strong economy isn’t responsible for the decline in welfare caseloads during the past ten years, what is? The Heritage study provides some insights. The strength of state-sanctioning policies, for example, substantially affects the size of state-caseload declines. PRWORA gave states the flexibility to sanction welfare recipients who didn’t comply with mandatory work activities. Some states proceeded to adopt tough sanctions that made welfare recipients ineligible for benefits at the first instance of noncompliance. Conversely, other states imposed weak sanctions that allowed welfare recipients to keep a substantial portion of their welfare benefits regardless of their conduct.
The results of the Heritage study indicate that these sanctioning policies played a major role in explaining state caseload declines. Holding other factors constant, a state that adopted a strict sanctioning policy for six years would experience a welfare caseload decline more than 18 percentage points greater than a state that implemented a weak sanction for six years.
Overall, evidence from both before and after 1996 proves the critics of welfare reform wrong. The strength of the economy has only a limited impact on the number of people receiving welfare. Indeed, the success of welfare reform is neatly demonstrated by the experiences of the different states. Many states used their newfound freedom to implement innovative reforms to move people away from welfare and toward self sufficiency. As such, while future debates in Congress over the reauthorization of welfare reform will merit close scrutiny, upcoming debates in state legislatures may carry even greater importance.
— Michael J. New is a visiting fellow at the Heritage Foundation and an assistant professor at the University of Alabama.

Questions

1. What does the author believe concerning the issue returning more power to the states in the area of welfare reform?

2. What information/statistics does he give to support his ideas?

3. Do you agree or disagree with the author? Why or why not?

The Welfare-Reform Miracle
On the 10th anniversary of reform, there is great cause for celebration.
By Rich Lowry (article from 2006)

What is the American Public Human Services Association? It is the association of state, federal, and local welfare directors formerly known as the American Public Welfare Association, from the days back before “welfare” had a bad name.
This month marks the 10th anniversary of the most extraordinary cultural and policy shift in recent American life —the revolution wrought by President Clinton’s signing of a welfare-reform bill in August 1996. Pro-work reforms of welfare had been bubbling up from the states since the early 1990s, but the federal legislation completed a change in philosophy that rippled into the lives of single mothers, changing them dramatically for the better.
If the kind of social progress brought about by welfare reform had been caused by a liberal policy, its architects would be enjoying KennedySchool sinecures and lionizing portrayals in a major motion picture. But the rebels who changed the welfare status quo were conservative intellectuals and officeholders. The only tribute to them is the facts, recounted in congressional testimony by the Heritage Foundation’s Robert Rector, the intellectual godfather of reform, and in Work Over Welfare, a new book by Ron Haskins, a former staffer on a key congressional committee.
Welfare caseloads have dropped 60 percent since the passage of welfare reform. Was that just the result of a strong economy? No. Caseloads didn’t decline significantly in any of the eight periods of economic expansion from the 1950s to the mid-1990s. From 1953 to 1994, the number of families on welfare dropped in only five of those years, and dropped two years in a row only once. By 2005, welfare caseloads had been declining for a stunning 11 straight years.
Work requirements, and the message sent by reform that dependence is unacceptable, got former recipients into the work force. “From 1993 to 2000 the portion of single mothers who were employed grew from 58 percent to nearly 75 percent,” Haskins writes. Among never-married mothers, the most disadvantaged group, employment grew by 50 percent. “Employment changes of this magnitude over such a short period for an entire demographic group are unprecedented in Census Bureau records,” he adds.
If a mother is on welfare, it basically guarantees that she will be poor. If she has a job, she will probably have more income, and her children will be better off. So, child poverty dropped every year between 1994 and 2000. In 1995, the black-child-poverty rate was a little higher (41.5 percent) than it had been in 1971 (40.4 percent). Welfare reform sent it plummeting to 30 percent by 2001, when “the poverty rate for black children was at the lowest point in national history,” Rector writes.
Welfare reform also had a small positive effect on the illegitimacy rate. In the debate over reform, politicians spoke out against out-of-wedlock childbearing, and the reforms themselves marginally decreased the disincentives for mothers to marry. The out-of-wedlock birthrate had skyrocketed from roughly 8 percent in 1965 to more than 32 percent in 1995. This rate of increase slowed, and among blacks the rate declined very slightly, from 69.9 percent in 1995 to 68.2 percent in 2003.
Welfare reform, then, has affected the lives of millions of people. If the 1999 poverty rate had still been at 1990 levels, there would have been another 4.2 million poor mothers and children. If the illegitimacy rate had continued at its pre-reform pace, another 1.4 million children would have been born out of wedlock. Some of the gains of welfare reform were lost in the 2001 recession, but reform has created a fundamentally different and better dynamic in the nation’s anti-poverty policy.
More worrisome is that the success of the 1996 law has relieved pressure on policymakers to keep states from backsliding on enforcing work requirements. And the ultimate reform in poverty policy won’t come until government encourages marriage among the women who now become single mothers. If that seems a hopelessly ambitious cause, a little more than a decade ago people said the same about reforming welfare.
© 2006 by King Features Syndicate

Questions (Answers should total about one hand-written page)

1. What requirement of the welfare reform act (which returned more control of the welfare programs to the states) does the author overwhelmingly credit with its success?

2. Explain the different ways the author says the welfare reform of 1996 has benefited American society.What information/statistics does he give to support his ideas?

3. Do you agree or disagree with the author? Why or why not?