AS WELFARE GETS CUT OFF
Poor struggle to survive
By
Monica Moorehead
August 22 will be the third anniversary of the day President
Bill Clinton signed the so-called welfare reform law. This law
swept away the 60-year-old federally funded welfare program
that provided a guaranteed income and important benefits,
mostly for single mothers and their children.
The 1996 law stipulated that the federal government would
provide $16.4 billion in block grants annually to the
individual states. The states were empowered to create their
own requirements and restrictions for providing the welfare
funds.
Even though poverty has deepened since the passing of this
bill, much of the block-grant money has gone unspent. At the
same time, the welfare rolls have plummeted by close to 50
percent since 1994.
On the eve of this anniversary, Clinton used the occasion to
create another national Kodak moment by addressing a "Welfare
to Work" conference in Chicago in early August. The conference
was held to give corporations the opportunity to seek out
welfare recipients as cheap labor for potential jobs.
Clinton's intervention at this conference was a shameful
cover-up of his economic assault upon the poor--especially
those of color. The stark reality is that the vast majority of
former welfare recipients have gone from being extremely poor
to the next step up from the bottom rung of the social ladder:
working poor.
The big-business media like to brag about how being forced
off of welfare and into a job is a dream come true. But is
it?
Slave wages, uncertain future
Those who have been lucky enough to find jobs have had to
sacrifice any health care and child care benefits that were
guaranteed with their welfare or public assistance check. Their
food stamps have been scaled back significantly, resulting in
an increase in malnutrition.
Many of the jobs are part-time and are not permanent--so
they make what amount to slave wages and have an uncertain
future.
To date, six million people have lost their benefits.
Another eight million are expected to lose all of their
benefits by the year 2001.
A recent study--carried out by the Rockefeller Institute at
the State University of New York for the Office of Temporary
and Disability Assistance--examined the impact on the lives of
9,000 single mothers who lost their welfare benefits in New
York state from 1997 to 1998.
The study showed that while 66 percent of the 9,000 found
jobs within the first year they were forced off of welfare,
only 53 percent kept those jobs by the end of the first year.
Most of the jobs were low paying or without benefits.
As a result, 20 percent of the 9,000 returned to the welfare
rolls.
The studies that many states have done on their
welfare-to-work programs are riddled with discrepancies in
order to paint a rosier picture.
For instance, the studies do not factor in those recipients
who left their jobs after a certain number of months to return
to welfare. Farm owners were not required to provide any record
of wages paid to former welfare recipients. The most minimal
employment was counted as a job.
The New York study counted $100 per three-month period as
income. The study also showed that for people who left the
welfare rolls, wages were so low that 29 percent were still
eligible for food stamps and 48 percent were receiving
Medicaid.
There was no attempt to report on the fate of those single
adults who receive state-financed Home Relief benefits. Close
to 230,000 people have lost these benefits since 1995. Many of
them are considered disabled and therefore unemployable because
of substance-abuse problems.
Clinton announced on Aug. 7 that he will send federal
investigators to all the states to look into poor children
being denied health-care insurance.
If Clinton had not signed the 1996 bill, maybe such a
scandal would not have happened. An estimated 11 million
children are now without health care.
Clinton created the Children's Health Insurance Program in
1997. This program is to provide the states with $39 billion
over the next 10 years to provide health coverage for the
poorest children.
If this money is not spent within the allotted time, it can
be revoked by the federal government. An estimated 1.3 million
children have been enrolled so far.
Tens of thousands of welfare recipients have filed
class-action lawsuits against a number of states, like Florida
and New York, which illegally removed them from the Medicaid
rolls. In Pennsylvania, 32,000 former welfare recipients were
reinstated on Medicaid.
Once again, the states are not obligated to answer to a
higher authority on how lump sums of federal money should be
spent to raise the living standard of the poor and the working
poor.
This article is copyright under a Creative Commons License.
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