LYCOS RETRIEVER 
Welfare Reform: Welfare Reform Bill
built 132 days ago
The 1996 Welfare reform act was an unqualified success. The number of people languishing on the welfare rolls has dropped by more than 50 percent. As a result of the 1996 bill, there are 2.9 million fewer children living in poverty today—the national child poverty rate fell by 20 percent overall. The African-American child poverty rate is at the lowest point on record, and since 1996 the Hispanic child poverty rate has seen the largest 5-year drop ever. This is in stark contrast to the dire predictions of the liberals in 1996, when groups like the Urban Institute claimed that the new law would force 1.1 million children into poverty. Quite the opposite!
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The consequences of welfare reform have been dramatic. As expected, welfare rolls (the number of people receiving payments) dropped significantly (57%) in the years since passage of the bill. Substantially larger declines in welfare rolls were posted by many states, and even big city-dominated Illinois achieved an 86% reduction in welfare recipients. [MacDougal 2005] Child poverty rates for African American families have dropped the sharpest since statistics began to be tallied in the 1960s; although critics argue that this is due more to overall economic improvement than to welfare reform, and that in any case the rate of child poverty in the United States is still far higher than in nations with greater welfare protections. Some would counter that this apparent disparity is due to misleading statistical analysis (measuring inequality rather than poverty) and that welfare rolls in the United States historically are much more closely correlated with government spending rather than economic fluctuations. The original bill was set to expire in September of 2002; Congress passed numerous reauthorizations as debate continued over Republican attempts to increase the amount of hours that recipients should be required to work.
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After the election, welfare reform went on a remarkable political journey. It's not just that Republican proposals replaced Democratic bills on the congressional agenda. Few people realize how radically the Republican welfare plans have changed. The bill that emerged from Congress late last year bore only a passing resemblance to the original Contract with America. Far from being a coherent expression of a more conservative philosophy, the legislation was an uneasy compromise between competing positions advanced by various factions in the Republican Party.
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Two weeks ago, disagreement among Republicans threatened to delay Senate action and force welfare reform into the budget reconciliation bill in the fall. Late last week, action on welfare reform resumed with the introduction of Senator Bob Dole's (R-KS) Republican compromise bill (S. 1120) and the Democratic bill drafted by Minority leader Tom Daschle (D-SD). The Democratic and Republican plans borrow heavily from the bill already passed by the House (H.R. 4), and differ only marginally from each other. Both plans block grant AFDC, impose a five year lifetime limit for benefits, shift responsibility for determining eligibility to states, and require beneficiaries to establish paternity.
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One million children [P]ushed into poverty: That was the prediction of a widely cited study on the likely effect of welfare reform, released just before Congress passed the landmark legislation in August 1996. The "Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act" gave states unprecedented discretion in setting eligibility standards, established more stringent work requirements for those receiving federally funded benefits, and imposed a five-year lifetime limit on federal benefits for most recipients. When President Clinton signed the bill into law, in the middle of the presidential campaign, several members of his administration resigned in protest. Liberals, advocates for the poor, and poverty researchers were nearly unanimous in their opposition. Even most conservatives, with their talk of group homes and private charities, implicitly conceded that the benefits of welfare reform lay in the long-run behavioral changes that they expected it to produce. In the short run, all agreed, things would have to get worse before they got better.
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Since it would be difficult to require all welfare recipients to work immediately, the reform bills passed in the House and Senate urge states to impose work requirements on the most employable recipients first. Specifically, the bills urge states to focus work requirements on fathers in two-parent families and single mothers without pre-school children before requiring work of single mothers with pre-school children. (Roughly half of AFDC families have no children under age five in the household.) The public agrees overwhelmingly with these work priorities. Eighty-eight percent of the public feels that work should be required of fathers and mothers of school-age children before it is required of mothers caring for pre-school children.
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Welfare Reform Bill