Welfare System Changes: Early Outcomes the Issue

Welfare System Changes: Early Outcomes

The issue of welfare reform was the catch phrase, hot button topic for the majority of the two preceding decades in the United States. The questions that regional, state and federal government officials raised about the existing system and its exponential growth quickly developed from a snowball to an avalanche. The main concern expressed by the rhetoric was the alarming growth of the allocations being allotted to social service programs. The resulting rhetoric reflected through a prism that molded it into the idea that welfare had the wrong general purpose and needed to become less a way of life, as some people have seen it and more a transitional step toward self- sufficiency. Though the program's names have changed and many issues, both real and perceptual have been addressed by reform real changes have not been realized and the current economic downturn will prove just that.

The words of reform were even on the lips of non-policy makers as families and individuals; both frightened recipients and angry non-recipients discussed the implications of the future of welfare. Given the statistical rhetoric of years of stories of advantages that welfare recipients have gleaned from a seemingly unfairly unbalanced system, the tax paying public grew progressively more outraged.

Politicians could easily see that welfare was a lightning rod issue. With the mention of the words "welfare reform" one could stir up deep-seated anger from a variety of groups, many of whom were likely to vote. "Welfare reform" might be a code word for racial stereotyping, or for excessive government spending, or for bloated government bureaucracies, or for misguided liberal attempts to engineer society... Elected officials and people running for office added to the perception that there was a crisis in welfare by using it as a campaign issue. This is not to say that there were not real problems with welfare. Far from it. But much of the rhetoric about welfare reform in the 1990s (and historically) has served to highlight the problems and stir up resentment without outlining specific goals for reform. Thus, by the mid- 1990s, welfare was a problem awaiting a solution.

(Cammisa 71)

The resulting reforms addressed issues by attempting to further strengthen the ability of recipients to access job skills training and a limited level of education that might further their chances at better employment. They limited the number of years based on state decision making in a set of minimums and maximums, the minimum number of years an individual might receive cash assistance being two and the maximum being five.

A potential problem of this quantitative rather than qualitative deadline system is the limitation of the ability of n individual to make broad decisions about future employment, the new system would limit individuals to job training programs and trade school systems rather than higher education which might be a more long-term solution. In addition to this potential problem the issue of age become paramount when services are handed out. (Hopkins 25) If an individual has a lifetime cap on services then receiving benefits at a young age, say when a person is just starting out with an new family and unexpected economic demands, will and does become questionable. What if they need services when they are older and they have used up the services available to them? Young people have been denied services or choices based on this reality, at a time when a help up would benefit them most.

In making all of these reforms the federal government attempted to give the individual states more control over the funding as long as they met particular requirements laid out in an outline of proposed services. The catch phrase then became coordination or collaboration, so services offered by other agencies could be utilized without the duplications that are so often present in bureaucratic subsystems. All the goals were well thought and lofty.

Among these approaches are legislative and administrative mandates for agencies to consult with each other, link their programs, and jointly review their activities; interagency working groups which consider issues that cross agency lines; reorganization efforts aimed at eliminating overlap or duplication among programs; and the involvement of White House coordinating agencies and the president himself. These initiatives have made varying degrees of headway in streamlining and improving the coordination of public assistance programs. Yet, many serious problems remain.

Hopkins 25)

The early results of the system changes gave some people hope that the reforms were going to be a success, namely those who were responsible for the passing of the legislation,

On the first anniversary of his signing the welfare reform bill, President Clinton promulgated that "the debate is over. We now know that welfare reform works." 1 Based on the fact that national welfare caseloads have fallen 20% since 1993, the president and others apparently consider reform a success.

While any serious analyst would reject this rosy assessment as being premature, it does raise the important question of how to judge the success of welfare reform. (Bernstein 27)

Yet, a truly fair assessment of any largely bureaucratic social change could not have taken place until reforms were actually implemented and followed for a significant amount of time. Even today the mark of just over a decade may not truly express the long-term effects of welfare reform but early clues might give the system some idea of the measures of success or failure that mark the changes.

This chapter takes the view that the success of reform will largely depend on the extent to which former welfare recipients are successfully integrated into the labor market. Will they be able to find work that pays them enough to keep their already precarious living standards, along with those of other low-wage workers, from falling further? Once they find jobs, will they be able to keep them?

Bernstein 27)

Some preliminary concerns of the new deadline-based reforms, setting caps on the time that one individual or family can receive assistance were associated with the time an individual might need to become gainfully employed or even achieve subsistent employment.