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Welfare Reform: Employment
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Welfare reform ... contributed relatively more than the economy to the employment rates of the least advantaged. For example, reform accounts for an extraordinarily high 83% of the employment increase among single black mothers.
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Virtually all recent reform proposals assume that the best alternative to welfare is work. In Chapter 4, Robert Lerman observes that policymakers have relied on a combination of three tools to increase employment and earnings: financial incentives, job search and work requirements, and education and training.
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What reformers especially didn’t factor into their marriage visions was that PRWORA, like so much of American social welfare policy, had little to say to the prospective husbands. While experts sometimes overstate the shortage of marriageable men, it is true that employment levels for men with a high school education have been declining since the 1980s. The situation is especially dire for blacks. At the same time that poor black single mothers were setting off to work in record numbers, the employment rates of their would-be husbands barely budged, despite the boom economy of the late 1990s and despite their rising education levels. (These numbers don’t even take into account the 21 percent of non-college-educated young black men who are incarcerated.) By 2000, employment rates for black men were around 25 percent lower than for whites and Hispanics.
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