What was wrong with afdc

New York, NY: Pantheon. Kornbluh, F. The goals of the national Welfare Rights Movement: Why we need them thirty years later. Feminist Studies, 24 , Michaelman, F. Harvard Law Review, 83, 7. Mink, G. Reich, C. The new property. Yale Law Journal, 73 , West, G. The national Welfare Rights Movement: The social protest of poor women. New York, NY: Praeger. The legal history of the Aid to Dependent Children Program. Social Welfare History Project.

Is it possible to get copies of application for AIDC from ? You might begin your search in the town where the application was first made. Would he have been the one to apply? Or did you apply and put his name down on the application? This is not an answer to your question, but I am doing research here, too, and I am just curious about how many men have actually been able to obtain benefits for their children and how the laws have changed over time.

I received AFDC back in the s — one child, ex husband not paying court ordered child support. I am trying to find out what the average payment during that time was. I wonder if a Government Docs librarian might be best suited to help you with this research. Is your institution a repository?

In , for every families with children living in poverty, 68 received cash assistance. By , TANF reached just 23 of poor families. Texas is one of a dozen states that provide income assistance to less than one in ten poor families with children. Moreover, the value of TANF funding has fallen by more than one-third since because it was never adjusted for inflation.

We must therefore provide more, and change the incentives so that states are encouraged to assist more families—those who are able to transition to work, and those who need assistance because they are unable to work.

TANF was enacted 20 years ago on a bipartisan basis. Unfortunately, congressional Republicans continue to reject any genuine change, content to talk about reform but offering only kinder talk with less help. Indeed, Speaker Ryan would double-down on this broken system to make other types of assistance—such as housing and nutrition—even harder for struggling families to obtain.

We need to heed the lessons of the past two decades and create a new approach—one that will truly put good jobs within reach, while strengthening the safety net to keep families from falling into poverty when they are experiencing hard times. For the past 50 years the question of how to regulate coal ash, a byproduct of coal-fired power plants, has been left to the states.

In North Carolina, that meant utility companies were allowed to store hundreds of millions of tons of ash full of toxic metals in unlined pits, without any barriers to prevent them from leaking into the groundwater that feeds nearby rivers and wells. For two generations, our state governments have allowed ash to be warehoused in communities with little political influence—that is, low-income communities and communities of color.

These community members do not have the resources to get a meeting with their governor. On June 1, the governor and his staff, including his top environmental official, met privately with Duke Energy leadership—despite the fact that the state is in litigation with the company over coal ash contamination. In mid-June, the North Carolina state legislature passed a bill requiring coal ash sites to be excavated, and safe water be permanently provided to residents.

Governor Pat McCrory vetoed it. The new legislation was met with objections from neighbors around coal ash pits. The disparate impact on minority and low-income communities has caught the attention of the U. Commission on Civil Rights, which has been holding hearings in North Carolina and across the country to examine the impact of coal ash. Eventually, this effort could lead to recommendations to the EPA that would protect coal ash neighbors from lax state enforcement against powerful utilities.

But in the meantime, residents have few options. Compared to Duke Energy, we are all poor. Its territory stretches from Florida to Ohio, and regulators in many of these states are currently deciding how to handle coal ash. The house next door to mine had just gone up for sale. I had played with the children who lived next door for years, so my father asked me what the inside of the house was like.

He was confused—the house was in perfect condition on the outside, a cute little colonial-style two-story. Yes, it was built in , but it had an immaculately kept lawn and a big tree with a swing in the backyard. But the inside of the house looked nothing like the outside. The owners had started renovating the house years before, but stopped midway through when money got tight.

There were no walls in the kitchen and dining room, and no flooring. Old nob-and-tube wiring hung, exposed, from the studs. One planned bathroom had barely been started, it was just exposed pipes in the wall. The basement had a dirt floor that got muddy when it rained, and the washing machine was propped on plywood in the corner. As a result, states can be expected to come to Congress and ask for additional child support funding.

The strong backing for distributing more collections to mothers on welfare will aggravate this problem, thereby making the issue even more important during the reauthorization debate. There are three issues in this area that are likely to receive attention during the reauthorization debate.

First, during the original debate on welfare reform, Democrats expressed great concern that the law did not place greater emphasis on education and training. At a minimum, there will almost surely be amendments to expand the number of hours of education that can count toward fulfilling the work requirement. Republicans may oppose these amendments on grounds that welfare mothers can combine work and education now, and that states already have enough flexibility to increase education even if it does not count toward the work requirement.

Moreover, because of the rapid decline in the welfare rolls, states have much more money available for education than they had before welfare reform. A second issue is that research shows clearly that mothers who leave welfare for work often lose their jobs in a few weeks or months.

Some of the job terminations are voluntary and even those that are not may be caused by factors over which mothers have some control, such as missed work, lateness, or conflicts with peers or supervisors.

Program operators and researchers believe that programs are needed that help mothers retain their jobs longer or find new ones quickly. A number of studies of model programs that attempt to help mothers adjust to the workplace and retain their jobs are now underway. Again, Congress is likely to search for ways to require or encourage states to launch such job retention programs. Beyond helping mothers simply keep their jobs, a third important issue involves steps that states can take to help mothers achieve career advancement.

Previous programs aimed at helping low-income adults train for and then obtain jobs that involve moderate to high levels of skill have not been very successful. But now that two million or so additional low-income mothers are working, the debate is likely to intensify about how to help them get the education and training they need for better jobs.

A related issue is how to improve cooperation at the local level between TANF and the other federal and state programs designed to promote work.

Congress may also debate measures allowing states to experiment with granting former TANF recipients who lose jobs greater access to unemployment insurance. As in , there is bound to be extensive discussion of what will happen to mothers who leave welfare for jobs when the next recession hits. Many advocates fear that layoffs will disproportionately affect former welfare mothers because of their limited skills and experience.

Moreover, most of the mothers who lose jobs do not qualify for unemployment insurance because they have not worked enough hours to qualify or because they left their job voluntarily.

During the welfare reform debate, most members of Congress wanted to ensure that states would have enough money so that unemployed mothers could return to welfare. Thus, the legislation contained a fund from which states could borrow money and a contingency fund that provided modest sums of money to states that suffered high unemployment or similar signs of economic distress. These two measures, both modest, are widely perceived as inadequate to ensure that states will have enough money to pay benefits during recessions.

Critics also point out that the old AFDC program automatically adjusted during recessions because increased federal funding flowed to states as they added new cases to the welfare rolls. This issue will be especially intense if the nation faces an economic slowdown during the reauthorization debate.

But several factors make changes as dramatic as those that were enacted in unlikely. The political impetus for dramatic reform has been tempered both by the law, which abolished the extremely unpopular AFDC program, and by dramatic declines in caseloads since the early s.

And the very tight margins of control in Congress mean that neither conservatives nor liberals will have strong leverage for enacting their preferred reforms. The general satisfaction of the states with the status quo also weakens the impetus for reform. Substantial uncertainties remain, however. The biggest unknown is the state of the economy during , when Congress is most likely to be considering reauthorization legislation in detail.

If the U. The other significant unknown is the content of the flood of research findings that will emerge over the next year. Research that shows deterioration in the welfare of children in the poorest families would certainly increase attention to problems of those families. What is critical over the next eighteen months is that policymakers have access to high quality, reputable and user-friendly interpretations of emerging research.

Making that research available is the objective of this series of policy briefs. Executive Summary Although the welfare reform legislation has produced a number of positive outcomes, there are serious issues facing the th Congress as it prepares to reauthorize the legislation by October 1, Related Books.

Global Cities By , and. Asia in Washington By Kent E. Related Topics Poverty U. Metro Areas. It built on the Mothers' Pension system by providing funding for states to pursue their own programs, with states setting benefit levels and many of the rules. Gradually, federal oversight increased, first with a push in the s and '50s by federal authorities to end racial discrimination.

The purpose of these programs, from the beginning, was to deter women from work. After all, it was originally designed for white widows, a population deemed deserving of aid and one expected to stay home and raise children rather than enter the workforce. But work by black mothers was more common, and more expected, especially in Southern states that relied on black women's labor as maids, nannies, and agricultural workers. That fed an expectation that black women should be working even if they had children, which in turn fed an anti-welfare backlash.

The backlash was worsened by rapid increases in the rolls, beginning as racial discrimination eased in the s. It was also aided by the rise of the "welfare rights movement" in the s, which organized to enroll poor people then cut off from the program and won important legal victories like King v.

Smith , which established AFDC as an entitlement that all eligible people must be allowed to receive:. The two most vocal leaders of the welfare rights movement — sociologists Frances Fox Piven and Richard Cloward — described their goal as overwhelming the system until the government was forced to enact a guaranteed income , a policy that then gaining traction both with economists and with activists like Martin Luther King Jr.

They almost got their wish: Richard Nixon proposed a welfare reform package called the Family Assistance Plan that would have included a guaranteed income — albeit one that recipients would have to meet work requirements to get. The bill passed the House before dying due to both liberal opposition because it was too stingy and conservative opposition because it was a guaranteed income.

Contrary to popular belief, Lyndon B. Johnson hated the idea of poverty reduction through handouts rather than work, and resisted calls from his adviser Sargent Shriver to implement a guaranteed income. Thomas J. The anti-welfare, pro—work requirement movement really came into its own in the s.

Ronald Reagan had campaigned against the program, railing against "welfare queens" living large and driving Cadillacs, and slashed AFDC by about a sixth upon taking office. He was buffeted by a growing community of conservative think tanks, and most influentially by political scientist Charles Murray, who first made his name with his book Losing Ground , which argued that abolishing welfare entirely would actually reduce poverty.

Reputable social scientists dismissed the book , but its racially charged conclusions struck a chord. In his book proposal for Losing Ground , Murray wrote , "Why can a publisher sell it?

Because a huge number of well-meaning whites fear that they are closet racists, and this book tells them they are not. It's going to make them feel better about things they already think but do not know how to say. With enemies like that, many on the left were understandably suspicious of attacks on welfare. But the program really did have deep problems. The three most common criticisms made of AFDC were:. The first of these claims was definitely true, the second was kind of true, and the last might have been true but the effect was very, very small.

Very few social policy analysts would contest that AFDC discouraged work. For one thing, it often featured a percent phaseout rate: Each dollar you earned meant one less dollar in benefits. Ironically, one thing Reagan did upon taking office was increase the phaseout rate, therefore making AFDC an even worse work deterrent than it had been before.

Ethnographic work by Kathryn Edin now at Johns Hopkins and Laura Lein now at University of Michigan in the early s suggested that AFDC both provided inadequate benefits for the poor, leaving them mired in poverty, and provided significant work disincentives. The phaseout rate, they concluded, was a major deterrent. The families they spoke with concluded that low-wage jobs would at best leave them no better off than they were with welfare, that it might leave them worse off if they lost their job and were forced to reapply for welfare, and that the jobs they could realistically get would not prepare them for better, higher-paying work in the future.

But because of the stinginess of AFDC, Edin and Lein found that welfare mothers still needed to find other sources of income. Only about 64 percent of their income came from AFDC, food stamps, and other safety net programs. Twelve percent came from off-the-books work which wouldn't reduce welfare benefits and underground work selling sex, drugs, etc.

Only 2 percent came from formal work. Some economists I talked to were more skeptical that the phaseout rates were the major problem — but still agreed that AFDC discouraged work. The bigger work disincentive, he says, was the mere fact that people were getting money with no strings attached.

Even though few welfare recipients were formally working, research indicated they actually wanted to be working. What about the claim that AFDC caused dependency? They found that while most people who entered AFDC left fairly quickly, a minority stayed for long periods , averaging eight years. Though a minority of those entering, because of its longer duration this group made up the majority of the AFDC caseload at any given time. Moreover, plenty of research has documented that there was a correlation between mothers receiving AFDC and their daughters receiving it later; the literature is split on whether this was causal the mom getting welfare actually made the daughter more likely to take it up or whether it was wholly explained by the fact that children of poor parents tend to be poor too.

Reasonable people can disagree about how bad it was that a majority of AFDC recipients at any given time were in the midst of a years-long spell. As for the claim that welfare discouraged traditional families, the evidence there is shakiest. Christopher Jencks, a professor of social policy at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, tells me the argument that welfare discouraged marriage "was probably a little true, but not very.

And the phenomenon seemed to be largely about women preferring to rely on their welfare checks than on the earnings of their male partner — it was about independence as much as anything. As the welfare backlash grew in the s, the federal government was beginning to issue waivers to states to allow them to experiment with various welfare-to-work approaches.

A number of governors, notably Gov. Tommy Thompson R-WI , seized the opportunity, experimenting with work supports, time limits, work requirements, and other approaches that would inspire the latter federal reforms. The waiver programs were often run as actual experiments, and the results were encouraging.

For example, the organization MDRC produced a hugely influential study in of a welfare-to-work program in Riverside County, California, which found that the Riverside approach which emphasized getting a job above all else, including education and training raised earnings more than 50 percent. That fueled a burgeoning consensus that liberals should accede to work requirements and accept some form of "workfare.

Subsequent research suggested the Riverside finding was a fluke , the product of an already stronger local economy rather than any reforms. The liberal pro-reform line was that assisting the poor was worthwhile but that AFDC had unacceptable work disincentives, and that a public jobs program would be superior.

Mickey Kaus at the New Republic was the most vocal journalistic exponent of this view, while Ellwood's book Poor Support laid out the most sophisticated, detailed plan for achieving a liberal version of reform, including greatly expanded health benefits, child care, and guaranteed jobs, alongside time limits on receipt of actual cash welfare.

Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton was strongly associated with this approach, putting together "the Clinton plan" through his role as chair of the welfare task force at the National Governors Association. Every governor in the country save one endorsed it. The plan eventually morphed into the Family Support Act, which provided additional matching funds in exchange for sending a certain fraction of the recipients to work programs. Reagan signed it into law in , but it didn't stop the welfare rolls from continuing to grow.

In a Clinton administration, we're going to put an end to welfare as we know it ," said then-Gov. Clinton in October From the get-go, he was passionate about expanding time limits and work requirements and trying to dramatically reduce the welfare rolls. Still, a number of liberal welfare experts who joined his administration, including Georgetown law professor Peter Edelman, the Kennedy School's Bane, and Ellwood, would be tasked with developing the Clinton welfare plan, alongside the more vociferously anti-welfare aide and speechwriter Bruce Reed.

Almost immediately, it became clear that the idealized grand bargain, in which every welfare recipient would get a subsidized job if needed, along with child care and transportation assistance and everything else they might need to thrive in the workforce, wasn't going to fly.

The costs were too much for Congress to stomach, even more so after Republicans regained power in Nothing like that seemed remotely possible. Congressional Republicans began putting together proposals that took the time limits that Ellwood had wanted to pair with very generous government support, and just imposed them without any of that help on the side.

In the official House GOP plan, states could totally cut off recipients after three years in a work program. Under a conservative alternative known as the Real Welfare Reform Act , women under 26 with children out of marriage would be stripped of all AFDC, food stamps, and housing assistance.

Just like that. And, DeParle reports, the Clinton administration task force charged with building out a plan was growing more supportive of hard time limits, much to Ellwood's concern. An idea he saw as part of a comprehensive expansion of the safety net was being transformed beyond recognition. Eventually, Clinton's team put out a plan in June