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1. Deferred Dreams, Broken Families, and Hardship The Impact of Welfare Reform Welfare reform is supposed to help people, but instead it is causing me hardship. . . . Welfare reform is nothing more than reducing caseloads, cutting people off [of] welfare, pushing us into greater poverty. anonymous welfare mother [Welfare reform] was portrayed initially as a program that would result in people moving out of poverty . . . Let’s just say what it actually is, which is a program that puts people to work and stops public assistance, and it doesn’t matter what the work is. activist from 9to5, an organization for working women A lot of people are not able to attain their dreams and goals because they’ve had to cut everything short to get a minimum wage job at Wendy’s or McDonald’s. Working in those places, no one is going to be able to become independent and support a family. anonymous welfare mother struggling to stay in college 3 Getting Past the Dogma In 1996, following mounting attacks on Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC), Congress passed the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act, which significantly restricted poor families’ rights to income and social services. It ended their federal entitlements to welfare, froze welfare expenditures, and replaced AFDC with a more decentralized and selective program called Temporary Aid to Needy Families (TANF).A central aim of the new welfare law was to promote self-sufficiency,through work and marriage, among low-income mothers, who make up about 90 percent of adult TANF recipients.1 To do so, it imposed two-year consecutive and fiveyear lifetime limits on receiving welfare, significantly expanded welfare-towork programs, and provided funds for programs promoting marriage and sexual abstinence. PRWORA targeted legal immigrants for the most drastic cuts,denying most of them access to federal public assistance during their first five years in the country. Encouraged to experiment with new rules and regulations , many states further restricted welfare.Twenty states adopted time limits shorter than the federal government’s lifetime limits,2 and twentythree adopted a “family cap” or “child exclusion” policy that denies additional benefits for children conceived during welfare receipt.3 After PRWORA’s passage, congressional politicians continued to attack poor mothers’ welfare rights. They are now poised to impose even tougher work requirements on welfare mothers and expand schemes to promote marriage and sexual abstinence. Welfare for low-income families, already far more restrictive in the United States than in other Western industrialized countries , is likely to become even more so. Supporters of welfare reform policies claim that tough rules and regulations are necessary for disciplining the poor and encouraging self-sufficiency. Praising the success of welfare reform, politicians tell “success stories” about individual recipients who managed to make the transition from welfare to work,4 and note the dramatic decline in welfare cases, from 4.5 million families in 1996 to 2.1 million families in 2002.5 They also highlight research showing that in the late 1990s, between one-half and two-thirds of former recipients were employed one or two years after leaving welfare,6 while employment rates among adult TANF recipients rose from 8 to 28 percent between 1994 and 1999.7 Caseload reductions and rising labor force participation rates, however, are problematic indicators of welfare reform’s success. First, some researchers contend that they are just as much, if not more, the product of the employment boom of the 1990s, than of welfare reform.8 Indeed, the employment rate among current and former welfare recipients began to rise before federal reforms were implemented, increasing from 20 to 27 percent between 1992 and 1996. Likewise, the number of families receiving welfare began declining in 1994, from 5 million to 4.4 million in 1996.9 Moreover, when labor market conditions worsened after 1999, welfare caseloads in many states began to rise, while current and former recipients’ employment rates declined.10 Second, caseload reductions are not always something to celebrate. Not all women who leave welfare do so voluntarily or because they have found a job. National studies of mothers who left welfare between 1995 and 1999 found that between 40 and 50 percent of these women were not working, and 12 to 20 percent had no apparent source of income.11 Nationally, more than five hundred thousand families were sanctioned off welfare for not complying with regulations between 1997 and 1999, and many others were discouraged from applying for welfare.12 By 2000...

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