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Coonoor Behal

Welfare Reform and the Work Support System | Brookings Institution - 0 views

www.brookings.edu/...welfare-sawhill

welfarereform work EITC policy 1996 povertyprograms worksupport

shared by Coonoor Behal on 09 Jan 13 - No Cached
  • Among other provisions, the 1996 reforms required work of almost every adult that joined the welfare rolls. In addition, with some exceptions, a limit of five years was placed on the receipt of cash welfare by individual families.
  • Beginning roughly in the mid-1970s with the enactment of the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC), the federal government originated or expanded a series of programs that provide benefits to working families. Unlike welfare benefits, which are intended primarily for the destitute, these work support benefits are designed to provide cash and other benefits to working adults and their families. In addition to the EITC, the major benefits in the system include the child tax credit, the minimum wage, state income supplement programs, food stamps, health insurance, and child care.
  • This evolution toward a work-based system of support progressed further as a result of state responses to the 1996 welfare law.
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  • As a result, the typical one-parent family with children was far better off working than on welfare, and employment rates among this group increased dramatically, due to the strong economy of the 1990s, welfare reform, and the availability of these expanded work supports
  • The value of these new work support programs at both the federal and state level cannot be overemphasized. The EITC alone provides roughly $4,000 a year in extra benefits to a low-wage worker with two or more children, and the children remain eligible for Medicaid. The average woman leaving welfare earns about $7 an hour, or $13,000 in after-tax income. The combined value of food stamps and the EITC, then, brings her total income up to about $19,000—enough to boost a single parent family with three or fewer children above the federal poverty line
  • Polls show that the public is willing to do more for those who work.
  • Many of these policies respond to complaints that the 1996 welfare law placed too much emphasis on reducing caseloads and not enough on reducing poverty.
  • The work support system serves three primary goals. First, it provides incentives for work.
  • A second goal of the work support system is to help ensure that parents working at low-wage jobs have enough total income to provide an adequate standard of living.
  • The third goal of the work support system is to insure that those who lose their jobs or cannot find work will not be destitute.
  • The minimum wage is not very well-targeted. Only one quarter of minimum-wage earners live in poor families.
  • By 2000, the federal EITC was providing over $30 billion in cash supplements to working families, making it the biggest program other than Medicaid and Supplemental Security Income that provides benefits to low-income families. And unlike nearly every other program for low-income families, it provides benefits only to families that work. It is, in short, the quintessential work support program.
  • States have taken two major approaches to improving work incentives. First, since enactment of the 1996 reforms, nearly every state has allowed parents who find jobs to retain more of their welfare benefit. This policy enables many families to work and continue receiving earnings supplements from welfare.
  • under current federal rules, working families can exhaust their five-year limit on welfare while receiving just a small supplement to their earnings. For this reason, time limits may actually discourage work
  • A second approach states have followed is to create their own EITC programs.
  • nearly all the families leaving welfare are eligible for food stamps
  • less than half the families leaving welfare receive the food stamp benefits to which they are entitled.
Coonoor Behal

The poor in America: In need of help | The Economist - 0 views

www.economist.com/...election-campaign-they-deserve

povertyprograms systemic

shared by Coonoor Behal on 19 Nov 12 - No Cached
  • Mr Obama’s re-election and Democratic control of the Senate give federal anti-poverty programmes a level of security they would have lacked under a Romney administration. But America’s poor face systemic challenges beyond the aid of any single administration or programme.
  • Most counties exhibiting persistent poverty—meaning counties with poverty rates of 20% or higher, consistently, from 1990 to 2010—are indeed in rural America (see map).
  • For most, poverty will be a temporary condition; chronic poverty remains relatively rare. But it does seem to be growing more common.
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  • Another problem which got worse during the crisis, but was growing beforehand, is suburban poverty.
  • As of 2008 more than a third of America’s poor live in suburbs.
  • The number of poor people living in the suburbs grew 53% between 2000 and 2010
  • The eightfold growth in the prison population from 1970 to 2010 has turned ever more poor decisions into poor lives.
  • Most poor children live in single-parent homes, and most families that are poor lack married parents.
  • The amount the federal government spends on food stamps hit a record $75.7 billion in the 2011 fiscal year—more than double the level of 2008. Enrolment in Medicaid, through which federal and state governments provide health care to low-income Americans, has grown every year since 2008, though its 2012 growth was the slowest since the recession began, and its spending grew at a lower level than enrolment because of federal and state cost-control measures. In 2011 states disbursed $113.3 billion in unemployment benefits to 9.9m recipients, as well as roughly $16.6 billion received in block grants as part of a federal programme called Temporary Assistance for Needy Families.
  • America is unusually reluctant, compared with other rich countries, about giving cash transfers to the poor.
  • Its benefits skew overwhelmingly toward families: the most a single person can claim is around $500, while a married couple with three or more dependent children can receive $5,000 or more. In 2010 $55 billion was paid out through the EITC, and $23 billion for the child tax credit.
Vetan Kapoor

Notes from "The Price of Civilization: Reawakening American Virtue and Prosperity" by J... - 0 views

Ch 3: The Free-Market Fallacy * 63% of Americans concur that "It is the responsibility of government to take care of people who can't take care of themselves. The sentiment that government should h...

started by Vetan Kapoor on 22 Mar 13 no follow-up yet
Vetan Kapoor

Notes from "Poverty in America" by John Iceland (2012) - 0 views

Poverty in America: A Handbook (John Iceland, 2012) Chapter 4: Characteristics of the Poverty Population * 22.4% of Americans were poor in 1959, 11.1% in 1973, and 12.5% in 2003 * 70% of impoveri...

notes povertytraits books stats

started by Vetan Kapoor on 22 Mar 13 no follow-up yet
Coonoor Behal

Casey B. Mulligan: A Tale of Two Welfare States - NYTimes.com - 0 views

economix.blogs.nytimes.com/...a-tale-of-two-welfare-states

Britain ACA taxrates incentives

shared by Coonoor Behal on 19 Dec 12 - No Cached
  • Beginning next month, Britain will strive to put its welfare system on a different path by unifying many programs under a single “universal credit” system, what the department describes as an “integrated working-age credit that will provide a basic allowance with additional elements for children, disability, housing and caring.” The department forecasts that its “universal credit will improve financial work incentives by ensuring that support is reduced at a consistent and managed rate as people return to work and increase their working hours and earnings.”
  • The Congressional Budget Office estimates that the Affordable Care Act’s means-tested subsidies and cost-sharing will implicitly add more than 20 percentage points to marginal tax rates on incomes below 400 percent (see Page 27 of the C.B.O. report) of the poverty line (a majority of families fit in this category) by phasing out the assistance as family incomes increase, although a number of families will not receive the subsidies because they already get health insurance from their employer.
  • In summary, the United States intends to move in the direction of more assistance programs and higher marginal tax rates, while Britain intends to move in the direction of fewer programs and lower marginal tax rates.
Coonoor Behal

Involvement of TANF Applicants with Child Protective Services (July 2001) - 0 views

www.irp.wisc.edu/...dp122901.pdf

behaviors policy TANF children overlap data

shared by Coonoor Behal on 15 Feb 13 - No Cached
  • Coonoor Behal on 15 Feb 13
     
    This paper presents findings from an exploratory study of Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) applicants in Milwaukee County, Wisconsin. We examine the level of involvement of TANF applicants with the child welfare system both before and after their application for TANF assistance and inclusion in our study. We also present preliminary multivariate models of the hazard of our sample's CPS involvement with child protective services subsequent to their application for TANF. We find a high level of overlap between TANF and child welfare populations. We also find a set of correlates of CPS involvement after TANF application that are robust to a variety of model specifications. Although our findings are preliminary and further analyses based on longer-term follow-up of our sample will no doubt provide greater clarity, we believe that our findings to date provide food for thought for the designers and administrators of both TANF and child welfare programs.
Coonoor Behal

In the Fight Against Poverty, Time for a Revolution - NYTimes.com - 0 views

opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/...erty-its-time-for-a-revolution

povertyprograms povertyassessment methods

shared by Coonoor Behal on 19 Nov 12 - No Cached
  • United States Census bureau has produced what may become another landmark reference. Based on an updated method for assessing poverty, the bureau has found that far more Americans are scraping by than was previously known: 100 million Americans — one in three — are “deep poor,” “poor,” or “near poor.”
  • As Harrington observed, poverty is more than lacking minimum standards of health care, housing, food and education. “Poverty,” he wrote, “should be defined psychologically in terms of those whose place in the society is such that they are internal exiles who, almost inevitably, develop attitudes of defeat and pessimism and who are therefore excluded from taking advantage of new opportunities.”
  • Researchers in the United Kingdom have developed tools to measure “well-being,” looking at such things as material goods, relationships and self-beliefs.
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  • But there is a problem: the system of social services that has been built up over past generations isn’t designed to increase poor people’s “capacity to aspire” and pursue their goals. Social services aren’t treated as part of an integrated process of human development. Just the opposite. Services are fragmented and clients are regularly shunted from agency to agency. Caseworkers serving people who are applying for public benefits don’t have the time, or the discretion, to get to know their clients, let alone brainstorm with them about problem solving.
  • Many Americans struggling in poverty today need more than financial assistance; they need help figuring out how to plug into a changing economy.
  • LIFT’s approach is grounded in the principle that change happens through relationships.
  • LIFT has spent more than a decade systematizing what amounts to a social technology.
  • They have looked closely at the human qualities required to address poverty. Above all, LIFT looks for volunteers who have demonstrated empathy.
  • Advocates are trained to treat clients with courtesy, to value their time, and to listen to their stories (while maintaining clear boundaries).
  • “Being treated politely is for many people a new experience.”
  • In fact, LIFT is seeing more people in the “near poor” or “newly poor” category.
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