Who Could Have Imagined?

The law of unintended consequences is a bitch, especially these days. During the Clinton administration, Welfare Reform was all the rage (and I do mean rage) and hundreds of thousands of people, many of them single mothers, were shoved off the welfare rolls into minimum wage jobs with no benefits and very little by way of backup from state governments. A dozen years later, in the early stages of a recession, states are now facing the impossible task of trying to cope with a surge of newly unemployed people who are without any kind of safety net, including access to health care.

An editorial in today's Boston Globe pointed to some of the difficulties and the sad statistics which point to the problems about to turn tragic.

THE GOAL of welfare reform wasn't to slash social spending to the bone, but to equip poor families to become self-sufficient. The rolls would shrink, the idea went, as recipients of cash assistance joined the labor force. States would then reinvest the savings in the toughest cases - such as those parents who needed extensive training and child care help to succeed at work. So what happened to all the money?

In Massachusetts, welfare caseloads plunged, from 103,000 in 1995 to 45,000 in February. But there hasn't been a dramatic reinvestment. Instead, from 1995 to 2007, total spending on low-income families fell by $588 million in real dollars to about $1.4 billion, according to a report released Tuesday by the Massachusetts Budget and Policy Center and the Home for Little Wanderers, a nonprofit human service agency in Boston.

Sadly, the spending decline isn't the result of upward mobility among former welfare families. Massachusetts instituted welfare reform in 1995. Federal reform followed in 1996. Nationwide, the percentage of people living below the poverty line fell from 14.5 percent in 1994 to 12.3 percent in 2006. But the new report says that the Massachusetts rate has held steady at about 10 percent.

And even when families climb above the federal poverty rate, a paltry $17,600 for a family of three, they don't get very far. In Massachusetts, the rate of individuals living at or below 200 percent of poverty has "hovered around 25 percent between 1995 and 2007," according to the report.

While some of the statistics are reflective of problems specific to Massachusetts (home heating and housing costs), the overall problems are testing the will and the patience of all the states. If they are not confronted soon, the tragedies will grow and might very well consume an entire generation. The problem is that the states aren't getting any help from the federal government, and haven't for the past twelve years of Republican and DLC ascendancy.

There are answers to some of these problems, but those answers involve hard choices and risky political moves. The editorial offered a couple of suggestions that are right on the mark:

Universal healthcare is one good step. And the state can make long-term plans and short-term investments in child care and training. The state's Department of Early Education and Care has invested in full-day preschool programs that support working families year-round. Massachusetts must also help more adults gain advanced skills needed for jobs in healthcare, information technology, and other industries.

Cutting welfare caseloads isn't enough. A state investment in families who are stuck earning minimal wages could help the entire economy prosper.

That state investment can only happen in partnership with the federal government. While that won't happen under the current administration, perhaps the next (with a revamped Congress) might be persuaded to act. One of the first of those acts will hopefully involve revisiting SCHIP.

As a very wise man once said, "We all do better when we all do better."