Welfare Be Limited by Time

¶ … Welfare be Limited by Time Welfare at one time was almost becoming an epidemic. Families would be on welfare and their children would grow up and their families would get into welfare system. Some families would actually continue to have more children to get more money. Why work when you can get paid to stay at home and get paid? The system was full of people who had no plans on ever trying to work.

The imposing of welfare time limits was the incentive or motivation driving people in the late 1990's that got welfare reciprocates into school, a training program, or a job. The Federal government imposed 5-year term limits in the welfare system and mandated that the states could set lower limits.

"Time limits account for about 12% of the oft-noted, dramatic decline in welfare use and about 7% of the rise in employment among single moms since 1993," as quoted from National Bureau of Economic Research, Research Associate Jeffrey Grogger in the working paper titled, "The Effects of Time Limits and Other Policy Changes on Welfare Use, Work, and Income Among Female-Headed Families" (Francis, 2010, ¶2). This paper will examine whether or not there should be time limits on welfare benefits.

Literature Review Before the 1990's, families relied heavily on welfare as a source of income and living. Welfare was originally designed to be temporary assistance to families in need plus it was set up to help the elderly, disabled, widows, and orphans. It was not meant to permanently take care of able body people that did not want to work. Elder people that hear this topic seem to get riled up very quickly over this topic.

It was said that literally families would lie around the house producing more children to get more money and some would even say they did not have to work just have children. Able bodied men and women used the system as a way of life, not as temporary assistance during a rough time. The imposing of time limits made a significant impact in the number of homes on welfare. In the March 24, 1998 Washington Post article, "Cut Off Welfare by Time Limits, Most Found Jobs, Fla.

Study Finds," Barbara Vobejda states, "The first scientific look at welfare time limits, a controversial new policy that cuts off benefits for people after a set number of years, found that most recipients in the study were working six months after they lost their assistance. But the study released yesterday also found that the policy did not prompt families to leave the rolls any sooner than if they weren't facing a time limit" (Vobejda, 1998).

The study went on to show that half of the welfare families had gained employment and retained it and when benefits ran out half of those families found employment and the rest had to rely on the support of families and friends to survive. The other option for those on the program was to enroll in a college or vocational trade school, most of the welfare families had little educational background. In 1993, Wisconsin started to impose time limits on the drawing of welfare benefits.

Caroline Hanvelt, a mother of six, had been off and on the welfare system for over a decade, enrolled in school and is now employed full time working with the mentally challenged and does not need the assistance (O'Neill, 1996). Hanvelt was drawing as much as $600 dollars a month depending of the number of her children were deemed eligible for the welfare assistance. Though the amount does not sound like much these days, they cost of living was lower in the 90's and that was a decent living wage.

Why would you work if you could get paid to stay and home and not do anything? That is the flaw of most social assistance programs is the misuse of the system by some people and it causes hardship on the people who truly need the assistance.

A 1990's report that a New York-based firm, Manpower Demonstration Research Corporation, filed states, "is the first carefully controlled research on the effect of time limits, which represent a radical departure from welfare policies of the past six decades and were among the most bitterly disputed provisions when Congress rewrote the nation's welfare laws" (Vobejda, 1998). This is referring to the Florida study that is in the earlier section of this paper.

Studies show that when faced with limitations on assistance they are more active in pursuing other options or in this case, employment or school. Vobejda concludes that studies like the Florida study referred to as the Family Transition Program, promoted the idea of allowing families to retain the welfare payments and receive a majority of their work training earnings.

Of the 929 families tracked by the program that were set to lose their benefits by June of 1997, only 102 families reached the limit with only one family not getting their benefits cancelled (Vobejda, 1998). How many of these families would still be drawing benefits if they had not been forced to react? Another indication that the time limits had an impact comes from Michael Kharfen, spokesman for U.S.

Department of Health and Human Services said the number of people collecting AFDC has dropped from 14.1 million in January 1993 to 12.8 million in February 1996 partly as a result of a newfound urgency among states to "end welfare as we know it" (O'Neill, 1996) There is not much research that was found after the beginning of 2000. Most of the available research was from the middle to late 1990's, but all seen while researching this topic seem to indicate the same results as seen in the research used for this paper.

Francis concludes his report for the National Bureau of Economic Research by stating, "The recent boost in the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC), which provides a wage subsidy to the lowest-income workers, has been particularly important to the recent decrease in welfare use and the recent increase in employment, labor supply, and earnings.