Welfare Reform: It Works! It Works!

Ten years ago this month, President Clinton co-opted conservative Republican calls to reform America's overburned welfare system by signing a series of administration-backed bills that introduced the concept of welfare to work and included a stern warning for the four million U.S. adults on welfare:

Find a job or lose your benefits.

While I applauded the initiative in theory, I had serious doubts that it would succeed. These were borne out with interviews that I did with social workers and lawyers for the poor, state officials who seemed ill prepared to deal with the sea change and recipients themselves.

My doubts were allayed. Welfare reform has been a spectacular success and today only about half as many adults -- two million or so -- are on the dole than were a decade ago.

The success can be attributed to several things:

* The reforms had bipartisan support in Congress and state legislatures.

* The reforms combined incentives and sanctions.

Low-income families got some financial support, income earners with a child under year old got temporary exemptions, the Earned Income Tax Credit was liberalized and there was increased government funding for job training and child care. But recipients were told that they would not be allowed to receive welfare for more than five years.

* The economy has been creating jobs pretty much steadily over the last 10 years.

* Unfair aspects of the reforms were quickly corrected.

This included draconian cuts in food stamp allowance and provisions that discriminated against elderly legal immigrants.

Alas, there are storm clouds on the horizon. Notes Olivia Golden, who helped implement welfare reform, in a Mother Jones commentary:

[W]e haven't taken the next step: building on success to improve the lives of the next generation. Even though their parents are working more, children in low-income families are doing just about the same as they were before welfare reform. That means they fare worse on a whole range of measures, including physical health, emotional health, family stress and school engagement, than children in better-off families.

. . . We have yet to face up to the daily challenges these families encounter -- and to the fact that one-quarter of our children (more than 16 million kids) are growing up in families that work a lot yet live with low incomes, few benefits, fragile economic stability and built-in obstacles to caring for them safely. Balancing child-raising with work is a bind that all working parents understand, whatever their income. But parents in low-wage jobs face many more barriers to getting the balance right.