Requiem for Welfare

...Welfare cushioned the layoffs, turnover, and contingencies that go with the territory...

...As an issue, welfare ranked among the top five items of interest to the public in 1995 and 1996...

...For the national Democratic Party, the politics of poverty fit an electoral strategy aimed at mobilizing urban and minority voters...

...Can the families of lower wage workers live without access to welfare and other government supports...

...Clinton vetoed them...

...States that reduced their caseloads (whether those losing welfare found work or not) received credit against officially mandated quotas...

...But food stamp use fell off 40 percent after 1994, although fewer families were receiving welfare and more had joined the ranks of the working poor...

...Without the foundation of a politics of poverty to build on, such laudable ideas seem strangely irrelevant, even to the Democrats' agenda...

...Welfare policy neither created, nor could prevent, these developments...

...The General Accounting Office suggests that there is a fair amount of "supplantation" of services previously funded from other budget lines but now paid for by TAN F. Beyond the Caseload Count The picture becomes still more complicated when one attempts to peer behind the head count in order to assess what actually happened in the purge of welfare caseloads...

...To many politicians and the public, anything seemed preferable to the widely discredited program known as Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC...

...Creating Barriers to Access: A third way to reduce welfare caseloads is by reducing access— making benefits harder to acquire and keep...

...Child-care and transportation subsidies make a difference for those workers...

...Even the much-touted crisis of dependency ("dependent" being a term loosely applied to anyone receiving welfare) was not reflected in the evidence...

...Their specific fate is unknown, but most big cities have been reporting worrisome increases in homelessness and hunger...

...She writes widely on poverty and politics...

...Although the "work" side of TANF was clearly pre-eminent, there were some modest provisions on the "opportunity" side, with Congress providing $2.3 billion to help subsidize child care for working mothers and $3 billion in a block grant for welfare-to-work programs...

...Some of these changes can evoke nostalgia for the bad old days of welfare unreformed...

...There are the hours of waiting in rows of plastic chairs, the repeated requests for paperwork, the ritualized weekly job club lectures about how to smile, shake hands, and show a good attitude to employers...

...It rewarded states for cutting welfare caseloads, largely without regard to how they did it...

...Clinton became the first elected Democratic President since Franklin Roosevelt to win a second term...

...For one thing, the new welfare changed a national program of income assistance to an array of state programs, each with its own assortment of benefits, services, restrictions, and requirements...

...After all, America's growing economic inequality is fundamentally at odds with its commitment to political equality...

...Although the hue and cry over a supposed welfare crisis was greatly overblown, Bill Clinton clearly appreciated welfare's potent political symbolism...

...But the block grant expired leaving little evidence that states were able to build 32 n DISSENT / Winter 2003 new systems for supporting work over the long term...

...However, the picture from the states is anything but consistent or uniformly punitive...

...Families would face harsh new penalties, simply for running afoul of administrative rules...

...In the midst of an unprecedented economic boom, that didn't happen...

...Congress has not rushed to offer extensive new work supports...

...It would also ease the path for state cuts in social programs beyond all previous experience...

...But what to make of the changes that have occurred in the name of reform...

...The discussion in this section draws, in part, on research conducted for the Project on the Public Economy of Work at the University of Chicago, supported by the Ford Foundation, the National Science Foundation, and the Open Society Institute...

...Is this because the new welfare yielded the benefits that liberals had hoped for, removing a contentious issue from the table and conferring legitimation on the poor, not as recipients, but as workers...

...In contrast to the United States, the policies of Western European countries suggest that there need not be an absolute conflict between the welfare state and the market...

...This makes entire families vulnerable to losing aid if a parent misses a couple of appointments or gets tangled in demands to supply documents verifying eligibility, just the type of problem that crops up routinely in states with complicated rules and outdated recordkeeping systems...

...Beyond these prominent features, the new welfare also packed some hidden punches...

...If the poor have benefited from a new legitimacy, it is hard to see the rewards...

...Indeed, employers seeking to fill these undesirable "high-velocity" jobs, where there is continuous churning of the workforce, are all too eager to use welfare agencies as a hiring hall...

...Mistrusting the states' willingness to be tough enough on work, Congress incorporated detailed and coercive provisions...

...Out with the "Old" Welfare Reforming welfare assumed new urgency in the 1990s, an urgency grounded less in policy realities than in electoral politics...

...Slouching Toward Reauthorization "We have to remember that the goal of the reform program was not to get people out of poverty, but to achieve financial independence, to get off welfare...

...Because high turnover is a feature of these jobs, at any given moment, many are apt to be available...

...After the Republicans took over Congress in 1994, and Clinton began his fateful descent into personal irresponsibility, the initiative shifted decidedly toward the right...

...Despite their allegiance to the latter, other nations continue to offer greater social protection to their citizens and worry about the democratic consequences of excluding the disadvantaged from the economy and the polity...

...As a presidential candidate, he famously pledged to "end welfare as we know it," a turn of phrase useful in demonstrating that he was a "new Democrat" unburdened by the liberalism of his predecessors...

...If Congress was worried about states' slacking off from its tough work demands, the law indicated no concern that they might go too far in restricting access to benefits or pushing people off the welfare rolls...

...Second, parents were required to work or participate in socalled work activities after a maximum of two years of welfare receipt...

...policymakers need to move past stale debates pitting work against welfare and the poor against the nonpoor, if they are to advance policies that promote both social inclusion and economic opportunity...

...In fact, no one knows exactly what all of this contracting produced, as state and local agencies kept limited records and conducted few careful evaluations...

...For example, although federal law required recipients to work within two years, most states require work within one year, some require immediate work, and others demand a month of job search before they even begin to process an application for assistance...

...What has happened to poor families that no longer have recourse to welfare...

...Benefits are also harder to keep, as caseworkers require recipients to attend frequent meetings either to discuss seemingly endless demands for documentation or to press them on issues involving work...

...Nor is it a foregone conclusion that government will shirk its social responsibilities...

...If there is any bottom line, it is that caseloads have been purged...

...This stealth provision would allow the Bush administration to override existing legislation by fiat...

...The new Calvinism advanced by welfare policy treats inequality as a natural consequence of personal behavior and attitude in an impartial marketplace...

...Maryland Representative Benjamin Cardin was chief sponsor of a bill suggesting that states should be held accountable, not only for caseload reduction, but for poverty reduction...

...Apparently, they can live, but not very well...

...The bill also created incentives for states to require work within a month of granting welfare benefits and continued to credit states for caseload reductions, regardless of whether families losing welfare had jobs that could sustain them...

...What kind of opportunities does the lower wage labor market really offer...

...Pushing welfare decision making to the state and local level has never been good for the poor...

...The only thing surprising about these figures is that the *The Hotline is a collaborative effort of the Legal Assistance Foundation of Chicago and community antipoverty advocates...

...That places a mother with two children a precarious $1,000 above the formal poverty line for the year 2000 and a two-parent family with two children nearly $3,000 below that line...

...The House-passed measure required states to impose full family sanctions if caseworkers find a recipient in violation of those rules for sixty days...

...Forty percent of respondents believed that welfare was one of the most expensive national programs, even larger than Social Security or defense...

...Reconsidering Welfare's Fate An immediate consequence of the new law was to defuse welfare as a hot political issue...

...If welfare is a bellwether of broader political developments, there's little mistaking which way the wind is blowing...

...The Clinton administration's plans also assumed the enactment of universal health insurance that would help underwrite the well-being of the working poor...

...Many state and local agencies have already cut back work preparation and placement programs funded under a $3 billion federal welfareto-work block grant...

...The law was designed to expire in 2002 unless reauthorized by Congress...

...In many states, poor families and their allies have little political influence...

...Not all lower wage jobs are bad, but many of those most readily available to former recipients undermine their best efforts to make it as working parents...

...In fact, government studies indicate that administrative hassles and misinformation discouraged low-income families from obtaining benefits...

...While the welfare debate highlighted the professed virtues of innovation, less obvious was the license it gave states to craft policies even tougher and more restrictive than those allowed by federal law...

...But that did not happen...

...One is by successfully moving recipients into good jobs with stable employment where they can earn enough to maintain their families above poverty (or, at least, above what they could get on welfare...

...What happens is that carefully constructed child care arrangements break down, lost pay days break the family budget, and the hours it takes to commute on public transportation become unmanageable...

...Is There a Bottom Line...

...The Public Benefits Hotline, a call-in center that provides both advice and intervention for Chicago residents, received some ten thousand calls in the four years after welfare reform, most of them involving hassles of this sort.* In other parts of the country, these types of problems show up in administrative hearing records and court cases, where judges have criticized welfare agencies for making "excessive" demands for verification documents, conducting "sham assessments" leading to inappropriate imposition of work requirements, and sanctioning clients for missing appointments when they should have helped them deal with child care or medical difficulties...

...More recently, census figures have begun to show the effects of recession coupled with an eroded safety net...

...Research has only begun to illuminate these crucial questions, but the evidence is disheartening...

...In fact, the House bill contained $8 to $10 billion less for work supports than the Congressional Budget Office estimated would be needed...

...Even states with large, urban populations have cut caseloads by one-half to three-quarters...

...Under the new welfare, these workers face a hard landing because welfare is more difficult to get and offers little leeway to acquire either the time or skills that might yield a job with a future...

...Even in the last years of the economic boom, between 1996 and 1998, the Urban Institute found that three hundred thousand more individuals in single-parent families slipped into extreme poverty...

...Consequently, what you get (or whether you get anything at all) depends on where you live...

...While conservatives celebrated the caseload count, they also savored the opportunity to raise the ante with more onerous work requirements and marriage inducements, and even made a bid to eliminate other social protections through the superwaiver...

...The family-friendly workplace that more sought-after workers demand couldn't be farther from the hard reality of lower wage jobs...

...Some smaller states essentially cleared their caseloads, with Wyoming and Idaho proudly announcing reductions of 88.9 percent and 85.1 percent, respectively...

...Some congressional Democrats did take tentative steps against the tide, suggesting provisions that would fund new welfare-to-work services, provide additional job subsidies, increase the child care allotment, provide alternatives to work for recipients categorized as having work "barriers," and restore benefits to legal immigrants who were cut from welfare in 1996...

...With Congress unable to reach agreement before the 2002 election, welfare's reauthorization became one of the many measures to get a temporary extension and a handoff to the 108th Congress...

...A more visibly contentious feature of the House bill was a provision to spend $300 million dollars per year on programs to induce welfare recipients to marry...

...House Majority Leader Newt Gingrich seized the opportunity to turn Clinton's pledge against him, sending the president two welfare measures then thought to be so harsh that they almost begged for a veto...

...His proposals for reform emphasized neoliberal themes of work and individual responsibility, but coupled demands for work with provision of social services intended to improve individual employment prospects...

...Liberals set aside their misgivings, hoping that work would redeem the poor politically and open opportunities to advance economic equality...

...Third, TANF established escalating work quotas...

...Of Poverty, Democracy, and Welfare The demise of the old welfare marked more than an end to a policy that many believed had outlived its usefulness...

...But neither the market for lower wage workers nor the policies put into practice in the name of welfare reform have purged poverty from the lives of the poor...

...The new welfare has produced neither the immediate cataclysm its opponents threatened nor the economic and social redemption its proponents anticipated...

...One of the least mentioned but most dangerous features of the House bill was a "superwaiver" that would allow the executive branch to release states from social welfare obligations contained in more than a dozen federal poverty programs, including not only TANF, but also food stamps and Medicaid...

...This provision is one of the favorites of the religious right, along with the administration's funding for faith-based social services...

...In 1996, the median monthly benefit for a family of three was $366...

...There followed a few highly public resignations among indignant staff and a rebuke from the Congressional Black Caucus...

...The news about welfare has looked good—at least, superficially...

...It limited the use of education and vocational training as countable activities...

...This statement by a senior Connecticut welfare official quoted in the New York Times is more candid than most...

...The new welfare dramatically changed the terms of the relationship between disadvantaged citizens and their state...

...Other polls show that, among respondents who are aware of welfare reform, more than 60 percent think it's working well...

...It devolved choices about social protection from the State to the states, and it placed the value of work over the values of family wellbeing and social equity...

...But devolution spurred far greater policy inconsistency by allowing states, essentially, to make their own rules...

...Conservatives were sure that the new welfare would pull up the poor by their bootstraps and redeem them through the virtues of work...

...In fact, its demise was widely celebrated when congressional Republicans teamed up with a majority of their Democratic colleagues and thenpresident Bill Clinton to enact a new welfare law in 1996...

...Caseloads have plummeted since implementation of the new welfare, dropping 57 percent between 1997 and 2001...

...The $16 billion the federal government allocated to AFDC was dwarfed by spending on Social Security and defense, each costing more than $300 billion per year...

...These forays into the politics of personal piety fit a Republican electoral strategy aimed at mobilizing the religious right and bringing the white working class into the party fold...

...Some states explicitly try to divert applicants by imposing advance job-search requirements, demanding multiple trips to the welfare office in order to complete the application process, or informally advising applicants that it may not be worth the hassle...

...This may partially explain why more than a fifth of those leaving welfare for work return within a year or two...

...One of the little appreciated virtues of the old welfare is that it served as a sort of unemployment insurance for these lower wage workers excluded from regular unemployment insurance by their irregular jobs...

...With TANF facing reauthorization in the fall of 2002, it was clear that reconsideration of welfare policy would take place on a new playing field...

...Access to welfare may also be constrained through a profoundly mundane array of administrative barriers that simply make benefits harder to keep...

...Lurid accounts in George Gilder's Wealth and Poverty and Mickey Kaus's The End of Equality portrayed welfare and the poor as enemies of the democratic marketplace...

...The politics of poverty that gave birth to the old welfare has been supplanted by the politics of personal piety that gave birth to the new...

...Recipients may find jobs on their own, which many do, or with connections facilitated by welfare agencies and service providers...

...But Clinton was no Roosevelt...

...The nation's poverty rate rose to 11.7 percent in 2001, up from 11.3 percent the prior year...

...As inspiration, caseworkers leading job club sessions often tell stories from their own lives of rising from poverty to become welfare workers (positions likely to be cut back as caseloads decline...

...Only caseload reductions counted...

...Beyond reauthorization, welfare merits a close look because battles over welfare policy have often been a bellwether of broader political developments...

...As bad as the old welfare may have been, there is reason to lament its demise after all...

...Although the five-year lifetime limit ostensibly targets sustained reliance on welfare, this limit could come back to bite those who cycle in and out of the lower wage labor force...

...With state budgets increasingly squeezed by recession, it is hard to predict how strong the state commitment to preserve these supports will be...

...Moreover, constitutional balanced-budget requirements make states structurally unsuited to the task of protecting vulnerable residents against economic slumps...

...Welfare, though small in scope, is large in relevance because it is a place where economic, social, and political issues converge...

...This shift does not favor a small state, but a different state, one capable of enforcing market demands on workers, responding to corporate demands for capital (through public subsidies, bailouts, and tax breaks), and, perhaps more symbolically, regulating morality...

...They distributed 76 percent of their AFDC funds in cash aid to the poor in 1996, but gave poor families only 41 percent of their TANF funds in 2000...

...However, on this point, it is irresistible to quote America's favorite president, the fictional President Josiah Bartlet of the television series West Wing, who quipped: "When did the government get into the yenta business...

...The old welfare acknowledged, in principle, a political commitment to relieve poverty and lessen inequality, even if, in practice, that commitment was limited, benefits were ungenerous, and access uneven...

...Two years from now, they'll be in even worse shape in the Senate elections...

...In fact, he redeemed his pledge to "end welfare" by presiding over the destrucWELFARE tion of a pillar of the New Deal welfare state...

...Alarms were sounded about a crisis of cost, although for three decades, spending on AFDC amounted to less than 2 percent of the federal budget...

...Taking Bad Jobs: A second way to lower welfare caseloads is to pressure recipients into taking bad jobs...

...Everyday life in an urban welfare office is difficult to describe and, for many, even harder to believe...

...Why reopen the welfare issue now...

...AFDC had provided an open-ended entitlement of federal funds to states based on the amount of benefits they distributed to poor families...

...More troubling still, inequality is growing and poverty is deepening...

...What's a supermarket clerk to do when her manager makes frequent schedule changes, periodically shortens her hours, or asks her to work in a store across town...

...And is it any wonder...

...Not this time...

...numbers weren't higher...

...DISSENT / Winter 2003 n 3 5 WELFARE In the aftermath of the November 2002 election, a conservative consolidation of power was in the air...

...The secret triumph of devolution lay, not in the opportunities for innovation, but in the opportunity for a quiet unraveling of the safety net...

...Proponents of the new welfare conveniently blame individual work behavior or attitudes for job churning, but ignore the role of employers who structure jobs in ways that make job loss inevitable...

...In part, the 1996 law itself spurred reassessment...

...The author and Susan Lambert are co-directors...

...The Unfolding Story of Welfare Transformed* What has happened since 1996...

...Financial supports provided by TANF have allowed some recipients to take jobs where they WELFARE earn too little to make ends meet on their own...

...It also marked the end of welfare politics as we knew it...

...That does not seem to be the case...

...The Republican-controlled House passed a TANF reauthorization bill (later deferred by the Senate) requiring recipients to work forty hours a week and demanding that states enforce these requirements for 70 percent of families receiving welfare by 2007...

...Absent external pressures, most states made no effort to assure access to food stamps for those losing welfare...

...When unemployment goes up and state tax revenue goes down, the downward pressure on social spending intensifies...

...Did it satisfy conservatives by clearing caseloads and demanding work...

...But it illustrates the kind of political rationale that policymakers use to inoculate themselves 34 n DISSENT / Winter 2003 WELFARE against factual evidence of the new welfare's failure to relieve poverty...

...Legislators have shown no appetite for restarting the welfare wars of prior years...

...The nominal justification for the superwaiver is that it would ease the path of state innovation and experimentation...

...Even when combined with food stamps, welfare lifted few poor families above the federal poverty line...

...Other states have imposed so-called family caps that preclude benefits for babies born to mothers already receiving welfare...

...Over the longer term, low-wage workers may find their access to welfare blocked by time limits...

...In the tepid debate over reauthorization in the fall of 2002, the bitter conflicts of earlier years over government's role in addressing poverty were replaced by half-hearted tinkering...

...These moral redemption provisions may be more important for what they signify to the Republican Party's conservative base than for what they do, as many states have resisted these types of things in the past...

...Under the banner of devolution, the law also gave states new authority to design their own welfare programs...

...In 2002, Congress couldn't even agree to extend unemployment insurance for those outside the welfare system who were felled by recession, corporate collapses, and the high-tech slide...

...Exactly how did states push those caseloads down...

...They also benefit from federally funded food stamps that stretch the grocery budget...

...The law ended the sixty-one-year old federal commitment to aid poor families and ushered in a commitment to lower welfare rolls and put recipients to work...

...States across the nation have taken advantage of devolution to impose restrictions tougher than those required by federal law...

...Government figures indicate that families leaving welfare for work often lose access to other benefits, which states do not automatically continue irrespective of eligibility...

...Tough work rules, time limits, and devolution were just the starting point...

...This notion had little traction in the 107th Congress and is likely to have even less in the next...

...But, even in the best of times, prospects were not auspicious for those leaving welfare...

...First, it set time limits for assistance, restricting federal aid to a lifetime maximum of sixty months...

...Others left or lost welfare, but did not find work, with one in seven adults losing welfare reporting no alternative means of support...

...EVELYN Z. BRODKIN is associate professor at the School of Social Service Administration and lecturer in the Law School of the University of Chicago...

...36 n DISSENT / Winter 2003...

...But on the eve of his renomination at the 1996 Democratic convention, Clinton signed a measure much like those he had vetoed...

...Significantly, the federal clock keeps ticking, and states adopting this strategy must use their own funds to support working families reaching the five-year lifetime limit...

...But Clinton's decision (advocated by strategist Dick Morris and running mate Al Gore, among others) effectively took the welfare issue away from the Republicans and highlighted Clinton's "new Democratic" appeal to critical swing suburban and blue-collar, crossover voters...

...But more than one-fifth of those leaving welfare for work didn't make it through the year—either because they lost their jobs, got sick, or just couldn't make ends meet...

...In California, often a harbinger of larger social trends, a startling two in three poor children now live in families where at least one adult is employed...

...There's little attention to it these days—apart from some five million parents and children who rely on welfare to alleviate their poverty (and the policy analysts who pore over mountains of data to calculate how it "works...

...In some welfare offices, caseworkers routinely encourage applicants to forgo cash aid and apply only for Medicaid and food stamps...

...Polls also indicated that much of the public believed welfare recipients had it too easy, although few knew what welfare really provided...

...In nineteen states, lifetime limits for welfare receipt are set below the federal maximum of sixty months...

...In fact, AFDC gave only meager support to poor families...

...A close look at contracting in Illinois, for example, revealed the creation of a diffuse array of short-term programs operating under contract requirements that left many agencies unable to build anything of lasting value...

...President Ronald Reagan picked up these themes and contributed his own colorful anecdotes about welfare cheats and fraud, as he pushed forward cuts in taxes and social welfare programs...

...Although they qualified for food stamps that might have stretched their resources a bit further, many did not get them...

...States that wanted to collect their full portion of federal dollars would have to show, by 2002, that 50 percent of adults heading single-parent households were working thirty hours per week...

...DISSENT / Winter 2003 n 31 WELFARE In addition, devolution set off a state "race to the bottom," not by reducing benefit levels as some had predicted, but by imposing new restrictions that limited access to benefits...

...If the Democrats want to stand up against welfare reform, let them...

...According to the Urban Institute, about half of those leaving welfare for work between 1997 and 1999 obtained jobs where they earned a median hourly wage of only $7.15...

...At this point, no one knows how this will play out...

...If federal policymakers secretly hoped that states would do part of the dirty work of cutting welfare for them, they must be pleased with these results...

...Twenty-two states try to keep low-wage workers afloat by using welfare benefits to supplement their incomes, "stopping the clock" on time limits for working parents...

...No longer required to exempt mothers with children under three years old from work requirements, most states permit an exemption only for mothers with babies under one year old, and some have eliminated exemptions altogether...

...Those funds spurred a short-term boom in contracting to private agencies...

...Attacks on welfare marked the beginning of a conservative mobilization against the welfare state in the late 1970s...

...There has always been wide variation in the amount of cash aid states provided, and federal waivers allowed states to deviate from some national rules...

...In a televised interview with Jim Lehrer, Republican spokesman Grover Norquist dared Democrats to take on the welfare issue...

...Substantial portions of the TANF budget were consumed by child care costs, although it is difficult to say exactly how all the TANF funds were used...

...A missed appointment, misDISSENT / Winter 2003 n 33 WELFARE placed documents (often lost by the agency), delayed entry of personal data—these common and otherwise trivial mishaps can result in a loss of benefits for "non-cooperation...

...Opponents had warned that welfare reform would plunge one million children into poverty...

...Finding Good Jobs: There are three ways to lower welfare caseloads...

...The share of families receiving welfare for extended periods de30 n DISSENT / Winter 2003 dined between 1970 and 1985 and leveled off after that...

...Often, laws produce more smoke than fire, intimating big change, but producing little...

...More than six years later, the demise of the old welfare remains largely unlamented...

...But in recent years, it has almost dropped off the Gallup charts...

...The measures ended the federal guarantee of income support, imposed strict work rules, and set time limits on the provision of benefits...

...It has a decidedly Dickensian chill...

...These jobs are characterized by unstable schedules, limited access to health insurance or pensions, no sick leave, and job insecurity...

...Enter the "New" Welfare The Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996 replaced AFDC with a program aptly named Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF...

...It is consistent with a shift in the role of the state from defender of the vulnerable and buffer against the market to one of protector-in-chief of both market and morals...

...This reflects a convergence between a neoliberal agenda of market dominance and a neoconservative agenda of middle-class moralism...

...Meanwhile, the nation has moved on to other concerns: terrorism, Iraq, the economy...

...Public opinion polls, however, indicated a different perception...

...In this reconfigured politics, personal responsibility is code for enforcement of the market...

...When clients tell their own tales of cycling from bad jobs to worse and ask for help getting a good job, caseworkers are apt to admonish them for indulging in a "pity party...

...In 2001, the "poverty gap," the gap between the official poverty line and the income of poor individuals, reached its highest level since measurements were first taken in 1979...

...Families that received welfare for more than six years constituted only a small minority of the welfare caseload at any point in time...

...If states wanted to exceed those limits, they would have to pay for most of it themselves...

...In ways both apparent and not fully appreciated, welfare reform has reconfigured both the policy and political landscape...

...Welfare policy was near the forefront of sixties social activism, one of the banners under which the urban poor, minorities, and other disaffected groups successfully pressed for greater government intervention on behalf of social and economic equality...

...If the jobs offered a steady forty hours of work a week (which lower wage jobs usually don't), that would provide a gross annual income of $14,872...

...Although the exDISSENT / Winter 2003 n 29 WELFARE pansion of welfare proved to be temporary and limited, the politics of poverty produced federal initiatives that had broad and lasting impact, among them Medicaid, food stamps, earned income tax credits, and programs to aid schools in poor communities...

...The Bush administration advanced a reauthorization plan that increased work requirements, cut opportunities for education and training, added new doses of moralism, and extended devolution...

...Many help those recipients accepting low-wage jobs by subsidizing the costs of transportation, child care, and medical insurance (although often only for one year...

...Even provisions with the potential to induce hand-tohand combat—such as those on marriage or the superwaiver—elicited relatively low-intensity challenges...

...There is another strange twist to the convoluted welfare story: in their zest for services over support, states actually shifted government funds from the pockets of poor families to the pockets of private service providers...

...TANF ended that entitlement, establishing a five-year block grant fixed at $ I 6.5 billion annually (based on the amount allocated to AFDC in its last year) that states could draw down to subsidize welfare and related expenditures...

...Fourth, it meticulously specified those work "activities" that would enable states to meet their quotas, among them paid work, job search, and unpaid workfare (in which recipients "worked off" their welfare benefits at minimum wage or provided child care for other welfare recipients...