It was explicitly enacted in an attempt to keep poor women, and particularly poor Black women, from having more children. “What this does is give welfare recipients a choice,” Wayne R. Bryant, the former New Jersey Democratic Assembly majority leader who came up with the policy, said in 1992. “They either can have additional children and work to pay the added costs, or they can decide not to have any more children.” He later bragged that the policy had led to an “astounding” drop in the birthrate among women on welfare. In advocating for the family cap, he described “123 blocks where there are no legitimate males” in his city of Camden, by which he meant “men who can rightfully take their place in that community,” thanks to the fact that welfare has taught “all the wrong values.” The family cap, meanwhile, “reinforced the ideas of self-responsibility and investment in the future.”

It’s a “terribly racist and classist and misogynistic policy,” said Jessica Bartholow, policy advocate at the Western Center on Law & Poverty. “It’s a poor baby penalty.”

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But the policy quickly spread nationally after New Jersey enacted it. Republicans even included a pledge to “discourage illegitimacy and teen pregnancy by…denying increased [benefits] for additional children while on welfare” in their 1994 Contract for America, the precursor for welfare reform. The language never made it into the final version, but 22 states took the initiative to create family caps anyway.

As of September 30, New Jersey is no longer one of them.

“It’s huge. [New Jersey] is the mothership of the family cap rule,” Bartholow said. “It’s a beautiful day when the place that started it all can…reconcile what it’s done.” She noted that her state of California, which got rid of its cap in 2016, had originally followed New Jersey’s lead in creating one in the first place. “You have to wonder, what if [New Jersey] had never done it?” she said. “Would we have had it, would other states have had it?”

Despite Bryant’s early data, research in the decades since shows welfare family caps don’t work. There is no evidence that family caps influence how many children poor families have. It’s not even true that poor families receiving government benefits have huge families. In 1990, only 10 percent of households receiving cash benefits had more than three children. Today, they have an average of 1.8 children, the same as the average for the country as a whole. “The idea behind the law has been really debunked,” said Renee Koubiadis, executive director of the Anti-Poverty Network of New Jersey.

What family caps actually do is deprive families of the extra cash they need to cover expenses that aren’t covered by other programs, such as diapers, baby wipes, and car seats. This just increases their poverty. Koubiadis has heard stories, she said, of parents who only had one extra diaper for their baby for an entire day, and others who couldn’t go to work because they couldn’t afford the number of diapers required to send their children to daycare. Now a family of three that had a child excluded from extra benefits thanks to the cap stands to see an extra $134 a month, according to calculations by Brittany L. Holom, senior policy analyst at New Jersey Policy Perspective (NJPP).

The campaign to repeal the state’s cap launched in 2016 with a report from NJPP that found that more than 20,000 children had been denied assistance since the cap was enacted in 1992. “Those are 20,000 children who, in the eyes of the program, essentially didn’t exist,” Holom noted. Even in 2018, the cap lowered benefits for 1,235 families. It also disproportionately impacts families of color: About 80 percent of the state’s children on welfare are Black and Hispanic.

The 2016 analysis “really helped highlight those issues for legislators who hadn’t thought about this law…since it was enacted in 1992,” Koubiadis said.

The report was released just months before California repealed its family cap, and coincided with other state campaigns, such as in Massachusetts. As advocates in New Jersey fought to repeal their family cap, the movement gained support from religious groups who were concerned about the impact the policy has on children. Ron Haskins, a prominent Republican architect of welfare reform, has since said he would be “hesitant” to support a family cap today because it “creates hardships for families.”

But even with a growing movement, New Jersey’s repeal hit roadblock after roadblock. Legislation sailed through the state legislature, but Republican Governor Chris Christie vetoed it twice.

Then the state elected Democratic Governor Phil Murphy in 2018. In New Jersey’s last two budgets, the welfare cap was effectively eradicated when lawmakers included extra money to pay families the missing benefits for their additional children. Still, the cap itself remained on the books, meaning that lawmakers would have had to keep including that money each year to keep it from denying families money.

The coronavirus crisis, however, focused attention on the need to get rid of the cap once and for all. “There was a focus on other issues in the last couple of years, up until the pandemic,” Koubiadis said. But “with the exacerbation of these inequities, and certainly racial inequalities, legislators as a whole recognized that this was the moment to repeal this.” With the law no longer on the books, the extra assistance for poor families will be automatically included in each year’s budget.

“The tide certainly has been turning, especially in the last five to ten years,” Koubiadis said. “Other states certainly should take a look at repealing this law as well.” Holom noted this is particularly true for other nearby states, such as Connecticut, that still have a cap now that New Jersey and Massachusetts have done away with theirs.

The fact that “it has been undone in the place where it began will spread across the country and inspire the remaining states,” Bartholow said, “to finally end their use of this very flawed intervention.” She’s heard from people who are interested in doing the same in Tennessee and Virginia.

Perhaps, she suggested, Congress could even consider legislating it out of existence, barring states from having this policy at all. Congress might even go so far as to reconsider the other parts of the current welfare program that similarly punish poor people who need assistance, such as time limits that kick them off after a certain number of years, work requirements that deny benefits unless someone completes frequent paperwork proving they are either working or looking for a job, and pursuing children’s parents for child support money to pay back the benefits.

“These are really disgusting ways to think about a safety net,” Bartholow said. “I hope it can also inspire people to think about what else we have [done] wrong.”

“We’re just trying to make sure our constituents have the safe water and essential products in their homes that are needed for the health and safety of their families,” said Gary Goosman, Mayor of the village of Amesville, population 180, and president of the Mayors’ Partnership for Progress. “The state has more than enough resources to get this done.”

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Since 2011, TANF caseloads in Ohio have been cut nearly in half, from 99,000 to 53,000 households. The drop isn’t because people are faring better, but largely due to the program’s inflexible work requirement that many struggle to meet when they can’t work, lack needed transportation to get to a job, or can’t get enough hours at the jobs they do have.

As a result, for every 100 families with children in poverty in the state, only about 22 now receive cash assistance—down from 29 in 2013, and 89 prior to bipartisan “welfare reform” in 1996. There are now many more children in Ohio living in households with zero cash income than there are children in families receiving cash assistance. (The Ohio Department of Jobs and Family Services declined to provide an exact figure.) This is a problem nationwide, as evident in the rise in the number of households living on less than $2 per person, per day: from 636,000 in 1996 to nearly 1.5 million in 2011. Over the same period, the number of children in the United States living in $2-a-day poverty also doubled, from 1.4 million to 2.8 million.

Goosman said that this drain in assistance is having a significant effect on the local economies of many rural communities in Ohio. In the mayors’ region alone, there is now at least $50 million less annually in cash assistance and SNAP (formerly known as food stamps) benefits compared with 2011. The average SNAP benefit is just $1.40 per person, per meal—and, like TANF, the program has strict work requirements for certain recipients.

“An entire town can be impacted by the amount of money residents have to spend on groceries, or medications, or transportation. People are living closer to the edge,” said Goosman.

And yet, seven months after the mayors’ request, the Ohio Department of Jobs and Family Services (JFS) would only tell the coalition repeatedly that its proposal remained under consideration.

Finally, on May 4, JFS notified the mayors via email: In September—one year after its initial request—the coalition will receive $500,000 from the Community Services Block Grant (CSBG) toward water bill assistance. In all, the grant will provide 2,450 households with a one-time payment of $200 “to ensure service will be maintained for a minimum of 30 days.” This seems a drop in the bucket in a state where 22 percent of neighborhoods have residents who are currently unable to cover their monthly water bill. The average water-sewer rate in Ohio in 2016 was $1,289 annually, which helps explain why the mayors were looking for individual payments of $500 to qualifying families living below 150 percent of the federal poverty line and a total of $8 million toward assistance. There was also no mention of the mayors’ $4 million funding request in support of the purchase of essential household items for cash-poor families.

JFS provided the bipartisan mayors group with no explanation as to how it reached its figure, or why the funds would be drawn from those already earmarked for cash-strapped community action agencies that provide local services like housing assistance, job training, energy assistance, child care, transportation, and more.

“It was a surprise,” said Goosman. “While we appreciate this funding and it will help us get a pilot program going, we weren’t asking for $500,000 from CSBG, we were asking for $12 million out of $570 million in unspent TANF funds.”

A spokesperson for JFS confirmed that there are indeed now $570.7 million in unused TANF funds. However, he said that those monies are committed to increased funding for child care facilities that are able to meet the state’s new quality standards in the future. But the mayors’ towns might not benefit from those funds either.

“In our region, a lot of our child care facilities won’t even be able to afford the quality improvements the state is mandating, so they will shut down,” said Jack Frech, an Americorps VISTA volunteer with the coalition who retired after 33 years as director of the Athens County Department of Jobs and Family Services. “So the TANF money intended for our poor and working-class families will instead go to facilities primarily serving wealthier kids.” (JFS declined to comment.)

It is also notable that a recent Congressional appropriation included an 80 percent increase in discretionary child care funding—enough that one might think the state need not force its mayors to choose between water now and child care in the future.

The bipartisan group of mayors met last week to discuss next steps. “We voted unanimously: We’re happy to have the $500,000 but we’re still requesting the $12 million from the state,” said Goosman.

Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) goes by many names depending on the state where you’re applying for services, but the basics are the same: Recipients are assigned caseworkers and they report their progress—as often as weekly—to show that they are participating in approved work-related activities for the required number of hours. TANF means constant check-ins and a complete loss of autonomy in any chosen career path for little in return. Cash assistance amounts are detrimentally low—sometimes less than $200 a month.

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In the new Farm Bill proposed by Rep. Mike Conaway (R-TX), Chairman of the House Committee on Agriculture, Conaway’s mission is to change the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP, more commonly known as food stamps) to mirror the TANF program. Congressional Democrats adamantly argued against making such changes, which would reduce the number of people who can get the food assistance they need.

Conaway’s Farm Bill would make SNAP’s current work requirements even harsher. Nearly any non-disabled adult under age 60 who isn’t able to work 20 hours every week would only receive benefits for three months every three years. If they’re raising a child age 6 or older, they would still be subject to the new rules. If they’re unemployed or working a job that isn’t assigning them enough hours, tough luck. Much like TANF, people would need to check in monthly or risk losing their food benefits for 12 months for their first “failure to comply,” and 36 months for their second. Rep. Sean Maloney (D-NY) says that that this policy is simply “a backdoor way to kick people off the program.”

Agriculture Committee Ranking Member Collin Peterson (D-MN) argued against the changes several times in the committee’s nearly six-hour meeting on the bill. “You need to understand what you’re doing,” he pleaded. “When we put the work requirements into TANF and SNAP, one of the biggest problems is lack of flexibility.”

When I applied for TANF in 2007, I had to attend work preparation classes that were several hours long. Even though I’d worked full-time for more than 10 years, I had to learn how to write a resume, how to go online and look for jobs, and I was told I should consider a career as a secretary or a baker. I had to mark these career paths on a sheet, and tell my caseworker my plan to pursue those fields, even though that wasn’t my interest. Higher education, even at the local community college, wasn’t an option. All of this seemed for show, and a waste of everyone’s time, since I was a month away from giving birth to my first child and determined to be a writer.

Seven years later, as a possible TANF applicant again, I now had a bachelor’s degree. I’d still have to attend those same classes, but with the added stress of finding a child care facility that would accept TANF’s payments for my daughter to attend. Midway through reading the thick packet of paperwork my caseworker had mailed me to apply, I called to ask how much money I’d receive each month as a family of three. “Probably about 80 dollars more than your child support,” she said with a sigh. “It’s probably not even worth it for you to apply.” (If a custodial parent is already receiving a monthly amount in child support, the state reroutes the payments to the agency, and pays the participant directly instead.)

“Okay,” I told my caseworker, tucking the papers back into the manila envelope before I tossed it into the trash. I was not only a qualified applicant, but one the program was supposed to help. Yet TANF’s maze of paperwork is so incredibly difficult to work through that many people, like me, are discouraged before they even begin.

House Democrats voiced their concerns that Conaway’s Farm Bill would similarly overburden SNAP recipients and program administrators if it switched to running as a work program instead of a food program. The amount of paperwork that people would be required to file on a monthly basis—and that caseworkers would need to process—would require new systems, new employees, and training. While House Democrats argued that more than 2 million people would be kicked off SNAP or have their benefits reduced, and 265,000 kids would consequently lose automatic access to free meals at school, that wouldn’t be the end of the suffering—the travesty would continue as more people would lose benefits due to misplaced paperwork or being unable to meet a new work requirement due to a lack of transportation, or child care, or caring for a family member, or any number of reasons.

“States will be unable to provide the services expected of them. And rather than take on the cost of serving their clients … it’s very likely states will take the steps to cut them off all together,” says Rep. Marcia Fudge (D-OH).

Despite reports that more than half of households receiving SNAP are working households—a number that jumps to 80 percent in the years before and after qualifying for food benefits— Conaway wants to force recipients to provide proof that they are worthy of getting help with food. That they are, essentially, “legitimately poor.”

Fudge argued that a better approach would be to raise the minimum wage, noting that cafeteria employees in the building where the committee met that day made less than $2,000 a month, and therefore qualified for SNAP. “In fact,” she added, “raising the minimum wage to just $12 an hour would save about $53 billion in SNAP over 10 years.”

House Republicans on the committee didn’t seem to want to hear that side of the argument, though. Instead, by turning SNAP into a program like TANF, the amount of people able to get food assistance would dwindle. One can only assume that perhaps that’s the whole point.

Ryan’s 2016 agenda—which he says is still his template for benefit cuts—uses Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF or “temporary assistance,” which replaced Aid to Families with Dependent Children in 1996) as a success story and model for future cuts. But evidence is mounting that a growing number of states are outright failures when it comes to meeting the first purpose of temporary assistance: providing assistance to families so that children “can be cared for in their own homes” instead of in foster care or institutions.

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The number of children in foster care now exceeds the number of children being cared for at home with the support of temporary assistance in at least seven states: Arizona, Arkansas, Indiana, Kansas, North Dakota, and Wyoming.

As the map below shows, in 2016, the ratio of children in foster care to children receiving temporary assistance varied from .07 in California to 2.77 in Wyoming.* In 21 states, this ratio is greater than .5, meaning that for every two children receiving TANF while living at home, there is one or more children living in foster care. In seven states, the ratio is 1:1 or more, and in two states (Wyoming and Indiana) there are roughly two or more children in foster care for every one receiving TANF while living at home.

The ratio of children in foster care to parents and other relative caregivers receiving TANF varies even more: from .11 in Maine to 41.56 in Idaho. The ratio is greater than 1 in 34 states, meaning that for every one parent receiving temporary assistance while caring for children in these states, there is one or more children living in foster care.

Let’s take a closer look at one of these failed TANF states: Kansas. Starting in 2011 under Gov. Sam Brownback, Kansas began implementing a series of cuts that have made it much harder for working-class parents and children to receive temporary assistance, regardless of their financial situation.

As the cuts were imposed, the number of Kansas children and parents receiving temporary  assistance plummeted. At the same time, the number of children in the child welfare system, including the number being cared for in foster homes, increased. By 2016, nearly 11,000 Kansas children were spending time in foster care. That same year, only about 9,200 Kansas children were receiving temporary assistance while being cared for in their own homes. Moreover, a significant number of these children were being cared for in the homes of grandparents or other relatives rather than parents. Less than 3,000 actual parents were receiving temporary assistance themselves in 2016.

To put these numbers in context, nearly 3 million people live in Kansas. Nearly 1 in 3 Kansas workers are paid under $12 an hour, and 1 in 7 Kansans are food insecure. Some 100,000 Kansas children live in families with incomes below the poverty line, and roughly 20,000 Kansas children live apart from both their parents.

Kansas officials claim the rise in children living in foster care is not due to the temporary assistance cuts. Research funded by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention strongly suggests otherwise. In their preliminary research, economist Donna Ginther and social work professor Michelle Johnson-Motoyama, both at Kansas University, have found that the number of children in the child welfare system, including foster care, increased in Kansas and other states that implemented more restrictive TANF policies. In recent testimony before the Children and Seniors Committee of the Kansas House of Representatives, Johnson-Motoyama said that “restrictions on access to [temporary assistance] appear to have unintended consequences with regard to human costs and costs to Kansas taxpayers.”

Most children end up in the child welfare system not because of abuse, but because officials decide parents aren’t adequately meeting their children’s basic needs. Recent research suggests that when low-income parents receive even modest amounts of additional income each month, their children’s risk of involvement in the child welfare system goes down.

As a practical matter, it will be difficult to definitively prove that cuts in temporary assistance are pushing more children into the child welfare system. But debates about causality shouldn’t distract from the fundamental problem. If a state has more children in foster care than children receiving temporary assistance in their own homes, this should raise searching questions about whether the state is meeting the first purpose of temporary assistance.

Beyond this, temporary assistance in the vast majority of states needs to do more to support parents’ role as caregivers and homemakers. There are no provisions built into the program to make sure it is doing enough to meet families’ needs. The only real accountability provisions for states in TANF direct them to not provide assistance to families, typically because parents aren’t working enough each week. States and the federal government have paid little heed to parents’ more fundamental role—for their children—as caregivers and homemakers.

* The most recent state-level foster care data available from the Department of Health and Human Services are for 2016. Even fewer children are receiving TANF today, so this ratio will have grown in most states.

This week marks the 20^th anniversary of welfare reform, which created work requirements and other barriers for families who need the most basic cash assistance.  The legislation was aimed at getting people to become self-sufficient.  As then-President Bill Clinton put it, “No one who can work should be able to stay on welfare forever.”

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Twenty years later, it’s clear that welfare reform has left more families with fewer resources. There has been a 75% drop in the number of Americans receiving cash assistance since 1996, and a sharp rise in the number of households with children with incomes of less than $2 per day.  There are 3 million American children who now live on no money for at least three months out of the year.

Now Republican House Speaker Paul Ryan wants to build on that disastrous legacy.

With his recently released poverty plan, the Speaker called for ending 11 antipoverty programs—including housing assistance, food assistance, and child care—and combining them into a single block grant (the preferred approach under welfare reform).

Ryan claims he is focused on moving people into full-time work—the surest way to get people out of poverty, he says. And it’s true—full-time jobs that pay well and provide benefits are indeed the best path to get out of poverty.

But that’s not what Ryan is promoting, and his solution—like welfare reform before it—would not have helped me. (Nor would his votes—at least 10 times—against raising the minimum wage.)

In my years of receiving government assistance, I worked full-time and went to school full-time. I still needed help to pay for child care, food, utilities, and school. And that’s the problem with both welfare reform and Ryan’s poverty plan: they ignore the fact that people in poverty do work, but they face challenges that people with means do not. When you don’t have money, you can’t pay for car repairs, quality daycare, or work-appropriate attire. It’s harder to overcome criminal records or inadequate educations.

When my college classes began to interfere with my work as a housecleaner, where I barely made $9 an hour, I had to go to part-time.  But because of the work requirements added during the 1996 welfare reform, my part-time work status meant I received fewer benefits. My child care grant only covered the hours I was physically in class, so I ended up paying for child care myself. To make ends meet, I took the maximum allowed in student loans, $10,000 a year, and maxed out my credit cards. By the time I graduated, I was $70,000 in debt.

I am considered a success story because I was able to use my degree to support my family through freelance writing, without government assistance. But if I hadn’t fought for years to get a better education, I would still be working full-time for less than $10 an hour, receiving several forms of government assistance to make ends meet.

Politicians like the phrase “welfare to work.” Maybe they think it’s easy to find a job because they’ve never had to pound the pavement with a dozen resumes, spending days filling out applications, waiting for call backs, then interviews, only to find they start at just four hours a week—at $7.50 an hour.

Do all of that while you’re hungry, sleep-deprived, and experiencing stress of a level that has you in “survival mode.” Do that while you have children clinging to you during a phone interview. Then go out and try to find a daycare with openings that will take your government voucher—while stressing over feeding your children and yourself and caring for the housing you’re scared you might lose.

Then. Then reform welfare, Mr. Ryan.

As a result, we sacrificed the opportunity to define our own agenda—one based on the ideals of personal autonomy and equality under the law, and that stands up for communities marginalized by discriminatory laws and institutions.

In short, libertarians need to rethink their approach to poverty and welfare as they know it.

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The current law has unintended consequences

To give credit where it is due, libertarians have begun to take issues of privilege seriously through causes like criminal justice and occupational licensing reform. But at the same time, libertarian and conservative groups have advocated for policies like drug testing benefit recipients and imposing stricter work and asset test requirements. This contradiction is more than a touch ironic—it’s difficult to argue that occupational licensing greatly reduces job availability for low-skill workers while pushing for stricter work requirements for jobs that don’t exist.

Supporters of work requirements would do themselves a favor by studying how they actually work in practice. Rather than being a tool to help families climb out of poverty, they often force recipients to take jobs with little opportunity for advancement to maintain their eligibility for assistance. Under TANF, for example, many parents are barred from counting attendance in a GED program toward their 20 hours of average weekly work. This actively discourages building skills for long-term career advancement, which might explain why conservative scholars who originally supported of the 1996 reform—from Christopher Jencks to Peter Germanis—have had quite public changes of heart.

As a block grant, TANF was conceived to embody the libertarian virtue of federalism by giving states broad discretion in how money is spent. However, its structure was easily gamed and turned into a slush fund for state discretionary spending. This often includes things having little to do with welfare, like marriage counseling and scholarship money for upper middle class families.

Asset tests have also not worked as intended. When the economist Lyman Stone dug into why coal workers in declining regions of Appalachia haven’t moved to find work, he realized Kentucky coal country contained 27 of the 71 counties where cash benefits exceed 40% of individual income. And, as he notes, TANF is not built to support mobility:

“Programs that discourage saving by stringently asset-testing benefits or by prohibiting hoarding (such as TANF or SNAP) trap beneficiaries in place, because migration has steep fixed costs in the form of transportation costs, lease deposits, and income to cover time spent looking for work.”

In other words, streamlining programs and liberalizing asset tests could actually make markets adjust better by reducing residency requirements and letting households save up for big life changes. Isn’t this the “opportunity and upward mobility” that House Speaker Paul Ryan’s poverty task force claims to desire?

Libertarians are typically skilled at identifying the unintended consequences of paternalistic government regulation. However, they have mostly signed off on—or at least not objected to— the House Republican plan to copy TANF’s broken design and paste it onto Medicaid, nutrition, and housing programs.

It’s time for a new approach

The absence of a positive libertarian agenda on poverty and welfare (besides the calls to abolish the welfare state entirely and leave charity to pick up the slack) dates back to the Reagan-era coalition that brought free market liberals and social conservatives under one tent. Conservative-Libertarian “fusionism,” as it became known, has been with us ever since. As a result, a typical proposal from a libertarian economist is to suggest creating a $20,000 tax exemption for high earners to redirect their income tax into charitable nonprofits—in essence, a massive subsidy to religious organizations disguised as a tax break.

Nonetheless, the alliance is due to break down. Libertarians’ aversion to paternalism and love for the rule of law should extend beyond opposition to trifles like soda taxes. It should include opposition to policies like drug testing for welfare recipients and the denial of nutrition assistance to people with criminal records, as well as support for direct cash assistance that allows individual sovereignty over one’s own spending decisions.

More generally, it’s time to abandon the idea that safety net programs inevitably create dependency and damage markets. Whether through a basic income guarantee or a universal child allowance, the best evidence shows that robust safety nets can cut poverty while encouraging the kinds of risk taking and entrepreneurship that lead to innovation, investment in human capital, and growth.

Poverty is not only a matter of material deprivation. It is also an affront to personal autonomy and equal dignity. No matter what your ideology, twenty years after the signing of the 1996 welfare law, the evidence is clear: TANF is no model.

What’s TANF?
What’s a Block Grant?
Isn’t State and Local Control More Effective?
Does It at Least Help People Prepare for Work?
Why Does All This Matter?
So Where Do We Go From Here?

What’s TANF?

In 1996, Congress replaced the New Deal-era Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) with a new program called Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), under the guise of “ending welfare as we know it.”

The new law built on decades of anti-welfare sentiment, which Ronald Reagan popularized in 1976 with the racially-loaded myth of the “welfare queen.” In the two decades that followed, progressives and conservatives alike put forward reform proposals aimed at boosting work and reducing welfare receipt. Progressive proposals included expanded childcare assistance, paid leave, and tax credits for working families. Conservatives, on the other hand, tended to favor punitive work requirements—without any of the corresponding investments to address barriers to employment.

In 1996, after vetoing two Republican proposals that drastically cut the program’s funding, President Bill Clinton signed the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act into law. The new legislation converted AFDC into a flat-funded block grant—TANF—and sent it to the states to administer.

The law’s stated purpose was to move families from “welfare to work.” By that measure, supporters initially heralded TANF as a success during the strong, full-employment economy of the late 1990s. But too often, the narrative stops there, ignoring significant failings in the program that surfaced after the economy slowed down.

What is a block grant?

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A block grant is essentially a pot of money that the federal government gives to state governments to administer a program subject to federal guidelines.

One of the key limitations of block grants is that they can lose value over time. The TANF block grant, for example, has been flat-funded at $16.5 billion since the law was first implemented 20 years ago. In other words, despite the rising cost of living, TANF’s funding hasn’t increased at all. As a result, it has lost more than one-third of its value since 1996, leaving fewer low-income families able to access the help they need. Fewer than one in four families with children living below the federal poverty line are helped by TANF today—down from more than two-thirds in 1996.

Another major limitation is that block grants are unable to respond to economic downturns. During the Great Recession, the number of families helped by TANF barely budged—the number of unemployed workers spiked by nearly 90%, but families able to access TANF only ticked up by 16%. TANF’s failure to respond to rising economic hardship not only hurts struggling families; it takes away a critical tool to lessen the impact of recessions.

Isn’t state and local control more effective?

Not in TANF’s case. There’s very little accountability with regard to how states must spend this money, so many states treat the program like a slush fund by diverting the funds to a range of other purposes—including closing budget gaps.

As a result, just 1 out of every 4 TANF dollars goes to income assistance for poor families with kids—policymakers, the public, and the media lack even the most basic information on where the rest of the funds go. By comparison, over 95% of Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP, formerly known as food stamps) dollars go to helping struggling families purchase food.

Does it at least help people prepare for work?

Not well. Preparing people for work was one of the stated goals of the 1996 welfare law, but only 8% of TANF’s funding goes to employment preparation services. What’s worse, states aren’t actually required to track whether TANF recipients get jobs—employment isn’t even an outcome that gets measured (nor is poverty reduction, for that matter).

Conservatives claim the law gives states flexibility, but states face stiff constraints when it comes to helping participants prepare for and find work. For example, states aren’t allowed to provide “job search and job readiness assistance” for more than four consecutive weeks and six weeks in the entire year—no matter how hard someone is looking for work. In addition, vocational training only counts towards required work activity for 12 months. It’s no wonder that governors from both parties have requested greater flexibility in designing work programs for TANF.

Why does all this matter?

Great question. TANF’s shortcomings don’t just matter to the millions of poor families with kids who aren’t getting the help they need through the program. A full 70% of Americans will need to turn to the safety net at some point—whether it’s TANF, nutrition assistance, Supplemental Security Income, or Unemployment Insurance. Without these programs, our nation’s poverty rate would be nearly twice as high as it is today.

But despite TANF’s dismal record, many congressional Republicans want to model effective antipoverty tools, including nutrition assistance and housing aid, after TANF—by converting them to block grants.

In total, Speaker Ryan has called for ending 11 antipoverty programs—including housing assistance, food assistance, and child care—and combining them into a single block grant. Just like TANF, the funding would be fixed—making it woefully unresponsive to recessions or changes in the unemployment rate.

So where do we go from here?

To begin with, the federal government should require states to spend a certain share of TANF funds on the law’s core purposes—income assistance, child care, and work programs. Requiring states to spend even half of TANF funds on these priorities would ensure that more families get the help they need. We should also hold states accountable for meaningful outcomes such as actually helping TANF recipients get jobs, and reducing poverty.

In addition, Congress should stop rewarding states for ending aid to families in need. Right now, states receive a so-called “caseload reduction credit” for reducing the number of people they help—regardless of whether they have jobs when they leave the program. In effect, instead of giving states incentives to provide needed assistance, we’re doing the opposite.

We also need to increase benefits so that families can meet their basic needs. In no state are benefits equal to even half the austere federal poverty level (the maximum benefit was about $10,000 per year for a family of three in 2015).

Strengthening TANF is critical to ensure that our nation’s safety net provides adequate protection against life’s unpredictability. But it is just one part of a broader antipoverty agenda.

Building an economy that works for everyone—not just the wealthy few—will require creating good jobs and ensuring a living wage; adopting work-family policies that ensure parents are not forced to choose between work and caregiving; putting childcare and high-quality education within reach for all families; and removing barriers to opportunity so that all families have the opportunity to succeed.

Unfortunately, the program has failed to deliver on its promise, and it has left some families in even worse condition.

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Since TANF was signed into law in 1996, the number of children living in extreme poverty—defined as no more than $2 per person per day—has doubled, from 1.4 million to 2.8 million children. That’s evidence of a failed approach, not a successful model we should apply to other federal programs, as many Republicans would now like to do.

Our country is capable of developing a system that will create brighter futures for poor families with children; ensuring a robust safety net for families when they can’t work; and preparing impoverished parents to succeed in today’s labor market.

To achieve these goals, here’s what we need to do:

First, we must hold states accountable for properly spending the funding they get from Washington. A key premise underpinning TANF was that if states were given more flexibility they would do a better job providing families with a strong safety net when they can’t work and they need help to obtain a good job.  But two decades of evidence has shown that when states get a pot of money accompanied by few federal standards, they will act in their elected leaders’ self-interest, not in the interest of poor children and their families.

The TANF block grant has thus become welfare for states. Most of them use the money once provided directly to poor families to instead plug state budget holes—some of which were created when these same states enacted tax cuts that mostly benefit the wealthy. In 2015, states spent only about half of their TANF funds on the program’s core purposes—work preparation, child care, and direct assistance. My own state of Texas, which so often neglects disadvantaged children, spent less than 14 cents of every TANF dollar towards these ends. Nationwide, states are spending only about 1 cent of every TANF dollar on education and training for recipients to find long-term and good-paying employment.

That’s not what Congress envisioned, and we need to ensure meaningful accountability.

Second, we need to eliminate provisions that restrict access to the education and training that low-income parents need to succeed. TANF recipients—mostly single parents raising their children—should not be denied the opportunity to pursue education and training that will prepare them for better jobs.  And yet, in many states a parent receiving TANF assistance would not be able to attend a community college or university to obtain the skills they need for a family-supporting career. Instead they might be forced into a for-profit job-training program in a low-wage industry, or a work assignment with no promise of upward mobility.

Preparing disadvantaged individuals for jobs that are in demand offers significant long-term payoffs. For example, Project Quest in San Antonio has enabled many individuals to escape poverty by training for in-demand jobs that pay a living wage, in sectors such as health care and bioscience, information technology and security, and aerospace. We need to ensure that struggling individuals have access to those kinds of high-quality opportunities.

Third, we need to hold states accountable for providing a safety net for families who either can’t work or can’t find work. The 1996 welfare law contained a number of incentives for states not to serve families who need cash assistance—and states have responded by serving fewer and fewer. In 1996, for every 100 families with children living in poverty, 68 received cash assistance. By 2014, TANF reached just 23 of 100 poor families. Texas is one of a dozen states that provide income assistance to less than one in ten poor families with children.

Moreover, the value of TANF funding has fallen by more than one-third since 1996 because it was never adjusted for inflation. We must therefore provide more, and change the incentives so that states are encouraged to assist more families—those who are able to transition to work, and those who need assistance because they are unable to work.

TANF was enacted 20 years ago on a bipartisan basis.  It’s past time for us to revisit the law and improve it on a bipartisan basis as well.  Unfortunately, congressional Republicans continue to reject any genuine change, content to talk about reform but offering only kinder talk with less help. Indeed, Speaker Ryan would double-down on this broken system to make other types of assistance—such as housing and nutrition—even harder for struggling families to obtain.

We need to heed the lessons of the past two decades and create a new approach—one that will truly put good jobs within reach, while strengthening the safety net to keep families from falling into poverty when they are experiencing hard times.

But mass incarceration is not the end of the story. Each year, more than 600,000 individuals are released from lock up and return to their communities. And then America proceeds to punish them for having been punished.

The felony drug ban is just one example. Adopted by Congress twenty years ago, the ban imposes a lifetime restriction on the cash assistance program known as Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) and nutrition assistance (SNAP) for anyone convicted of a state or federal drug felony, unless states opt out. In states where the ban applies, a person released from a long prison sentence could be denied basic assistance at a time of extreme vulnerability and risk.

A study by The Sentencing Project found that in the 12 states that impose the lifetime ban, an estimated 180,000 women are impacted. If we include the other 24 states that impose a partial ban, the number of people affected is significantly higher. And because drug law enforcement is conducted with racial biases, people of color are disproportionately denied assistance.

The felony drug ban can be traced back to the 1990s, when politicians of both parties sought political gain by getting “tough on crime.” Senator Phil Gramm (R-TX), the sponsor of the ban, argued that “we ought not to give people welfare benefits who are violating the nation’s drug laws.”  After just two minutes of floor debate, the measure was adopted by unanimous consent as part of the 1996 welfare “reform” legislation.

The felony drug ban was consistent with other efforts in Congress to get tough on formerly incarcerated individuals.  In the early 1990s, Congress began to erect barriers and cut services for people struggling to reenter society. First, Pell grants were barred for incarcerated individuals, ensuring that most could not receive a college education prior to release. Then restrictions were enacted to deny people with drug convictions access to welfare benefits, public housing, and financial aid for higher education. Largely missing from the debate was any discussion of whether such post-incarceration punishments are effective or even counterproductive.

Two decades later, there is little evidence that these tough on crime policies have improved public safety.  In general, post-incarceration punishment does little to deter crime, as most people are unaware that a conviction could result in the loss of public benefits.  For example, one study found that of 26 women facing drug charges, not a single one had been aware that she could lose food stamps or welfare benefits as a result of a conviction.

Meanwhile, the felony drug ban is counterproductive to safe reentry. After an individual leaves prison, food and welfare benefits can help meet basic survival needs as she searches for a job and housing.  The denial of such assistance increases the likelihood that formerly incarcerated individuals will return to criminal activity to provide sustenance for their families. And when welfare benefits are not available to offset the cost of drug treatment, it is less likely that former prisoners struggling with addiction will be able to live drug-free and avoid a return to prison. A study by researchers at the Yale School of Medicine even found that denying SNAP to women with felony drug convictions is harmful to public safety.

In recent years, there has been a broad re-thinking of policies that put thousands of people behind bars for long prison terms. States in every region of the country have scaled back harsh penalties that have contributed to mass incarceration.

In Congress, a bipartisan group of Senators has introduced the Sentencing Reform and Corrections Act, which would reduce the impact of harsh mandatory minimum penalties and create rehabilitative programming in federal prisons. The bill would mean fewer people locked up for decades for low-level drug offenses and it would free up funds that could be used for crime prevention and substance abuse treatment.

Federal sentencing reform is indeed necessary to reduce excessive rates of incarceration, which have had diminishing returns for public safety over the years. But along with that should come a reconsideration of post-incarceration punishments that strip former prisoners of the basic assistance they need to get back on their feet. In the past year, Texas and Alabama have taken steps to opt out of the felony drug ban. Until Congress acts to repeal the ban altogether, other states should follow their lead.

It is time to stop punishing people after they have been released from prison—not only to improve the life prospects of people who have served their time, but also as part of a broader effort to strengthen public safety and our communities.

In some of the worst performing states, almost one in three children live in poverty.

Despite performing so poorly, many states on this list have adopted conservative policies that have made life harder for low-income children:

• In Arizona, Arkansas, Mississippi, Georgia, and Louisiana, fewer than 10 families for 100 living in poverty can access cash assistance through the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) program. Arizona presents a particularly brutal example of prioritizing cutting families off of aid over cutting poverty. Although the state still faces one of the nation’s highest child poverty rates, it has dramatically reduced eligibility. As a result, the number of families served by TANF fell 61 percent between December 2006 and December 2013.

• Arizona, Georgia, Mississippi, and South Carolina fully ban individuals with felony convictions from accessing the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program and TANF—even well after they have served their sentence. Such bans increase the risk of parents being unable to provide for their children’s basic needs or being charged with child neglect; these policies also encourage recidivism by denying individuals the services they need to successfully reenter society after incarceration.

• Arkansas, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, South Carolina, and Tennessee do not allow incarcerated noncustodial parents to pause child support orders—this policy traps non-custodial parents in a vicious cycle of debt, nonpayment, and even re-incarceration, further undermining their ability to be involved with their children. It is this cycle that led to the tragic death of Walter Scott, a South Carolina father who was pulled over for a broken tail light and then shot in the back while trying to flee law enforcement for fear of being arrested for owing child support debt.

In $2.00 a Day: Living on Almost Nothing in America, Edin and Shaefer trace this disturbing trend to the 1996 welfare law, which has gradually but inexorably gutted the cash assistance safety net for families with children. Attention to this often neglected side of our nation’s extreme economic inequality is especially timely as policymakers from both parties consider reauthorizing the 1996 welfare law. As the book vividly shows, we are long overdue to take a different path — one that upholds our nation’s values, including our responsibility to protect and empower the most vulnerable by eliminating extreme poverty.

Living on less than $2.00 per person per day is the World Bank’s standard for measuring poverty in developing countries. Through rigorous data analysis and in-depth interviews, Shaefer and Edin document the dramatic rise in extreme poverty since the 1996 welfare law. Similarly, research by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities confirms a rise in “deep poverty” — income below half the poverty line, or below roughly $10 per person per day for a typical family — and shows that Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), created in 1996, reduces deep poverty far less than its predecessor, Aid to Families with Dependent Children. Research shows that early childhood poverty causes short- and long-term harm, in turn posing enormous costs to our economy.

To be sure, many experience $2.00-a-day poverty for months, not years. But trying to make ends meet with such minimal cash resources can be devastating even for the shortest periods. For many families, perilous work, unpredictable work schedules, and housing instability add up to much longer periods of destitution. Through story after story, Shaefer and Edin show how the inability to afford basics like personal hygiene items and transportation, combined with insufficient work and meager public benefits, can drive people towards abusive relationships, precarious housing, mistreatment by employers, and impossible choices between breaking the law and feeding a child.

How did we get here, and how do we get out?

First, when policymakers supposedly shifted to a work-based safety net in 1996, they didn’t ensure that there would be enough decent jobs for everyone who wants one. While President Clinton’s proposed welfare overhaul in 1992 guaranteed a public-sector job for anyone who couldn’t find one, the 1996 law had no such guarantee. Both the labor market since 2000 and the experience of the successful but short-lived TANF subsidized jobs program in the Great Recession have made clear that many more people want jobs than can find them, in good times and bad.

Second, changes in the structure and funding of welfare have given states incentives to keep people out of TANF and to kick off many of those who do manage to enroll. As much as other programs like the EITC and SNAP (formerly food stamps) have done more over the past two decades to help families in poverty, including deep poverty, these improvements have been little match for the continued underfunding of housing assistance and the huge hole blown in our cash assistance safety net by the 1996 law.

$2.00 a Day shows that charities and individuals provide some help to extremely poor families, often making the difference between spending the night on the street and having shelter. But Shaefer and Edin also observe that people with the greatest need often live the farthest from available assistance. And even the communities with the most resources can’t meet the need without government help.

Shaefer and Edin suggest a straightforward strategy to change the unacceptable status quo: create jobs and prepare the most disadvantaged adults for them; update labor standards to reflect the reality of work in America today; invest in affordable housing; and provide a real safety net for times when people who want to work simply don’t find work possible given their caregiving responsibilities and other challenges.

We hope that this new book forces us all to grapple with the destructive circumstances we have allowed to persist for our nation’s most vulnerable families. We must reform our public policies to ensure that nobody faces a poverty so deep that many of us wouldn’t even believe it exists in this wealthy nation. We can’t ignore the shortcomings of our safety net that are exposed by the growth of $2.00-a-day poverty in America.

Despite these staggering numbers, there is widespread denial of the reality of marital poverty. Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) has gone so far to claim that being “married with kids versus unmarried with kids is the difference between living in poverty and not.” It appears he is unaware there are more married parents living in poverty in his state than never married parents living in poverty.

We know from a vast body of research that poverty and related financial stressors are risk factors for marital conflict, domestic violence, and divorce. And notable recent research by Laura Tach and Kathryn Edin found that economic factors are a more important predictor of dissolution for married parents than for cohabiting ones.

The Temporary Assistance (TANF) program should be playing a central role in helping married families overcome the kinds of economic hardship and other factors that contribute to the high divorce rate among working class families. Under the Temporary Assistance program, states receive funds to provide means-tested, re-employment assistance and other services to struggling unemployed and underemployed parents with low incomes. One of the four purposes of Temporary Assistance is to “encourage the maintenance of two-parent families.”

Despite this mandate, Temporary Assistance is failing struggling, married families. The extent of TANF’s failure is shown in the chart below. Between 2000 and 2012, the number of married parents living in poverty increased 39 percent, but the already extremely low number of married parents being helped by TANF plummeted by 54 percent. In the majority of states today, fewer than 1000 married parents receive Temporary Assistance. In Louisiana, for example, over 50,000 married parents live in poverty, but only about 50 of them receive Temporary Assistance.

Where Temporary Assistance has failed, other better-designed programs have stepped up. In 2014, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) helped 5.2 million low-income children who lived with both of their married parents, and another 1.2 million children who lived with both of their unmarried parents. Unlike Temporary Assistance, SNAP actually responded to the increase in married-parent unemployment and hardship during the Great Recession. Similarly, early evidence suggests that the Affordable Care Act—including Medicaid expansion and the Premium Tax Credit—has increased health insurance coverage among working-class married families.

How can we fix Temporary Assistance so that it doesn’t effectively exclude millions of struggling, married parents from getting the temporary financial help – as well as employment and other services – that could make the difference between staying together and splitting up?

The first and arguably most important step is to acknowledge the extent of the problem of marital poverty and hardship in the United States, and the destructive impact it has on family life.

Then we need to look at models for reforming Temporary Assistance. Most notably, the original version of the Minnesota Family Investment Program (MFIP) that was evaluated in the mid-1990s reduced divorce among participating disadvantaged, two-parent families. The reductions in divorce were particularly large—70 percent—among black married couples. In addition, both MFIP and Milwaukee’s New Hope Project increased rates of marriage among disadvantaged single mothers.

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These progressive demonstration projects ensured that low-income married- and cohabiting-couple families had an adequate income to support themselves while searching for work or addressing issues that limited their work capacity, including through transitional jobs, re-employment, and other services. Unlike the current Temporary Assistance program, these programs did not utilize unreasonably restrictive participation rates or harshly punitive measures that are mostly aimed at reducing the number of people who receive help; instead, these programs emphasized helping parents obtain and maintain stable employment, while meeting their basic needs.

Unfortunately, the current financial structure of Temporary Assistance and the federal law that governs it makes operating rigorously tested programs like the original MFIP or New Hope all but impossible for states. Fixing this should be at the top of the list of reforms that would help struggling, two-parent families. At the very least, the federal government should establish a national Temporary Assistance demonstration project for married and unmarried two-parent families based on the original MFIP program and New Hope. Of course, some policymakers would prefer to just talk about family values, but even in today’s polarized political environment it should be possible to move forward on a concrete initiative like this one that actually values working-class families by helping them stay together.

In many ways, the District of Columbia has been an outlier in its approach to TANF, a federal block grant program meant to provide income assistance, job training, and other services to low-income families with children.  When other states instituted time limits on how long a family could receive benefits, DC resisted and used local funds to allow families to stay in the program as long as their need remained.

However, when budget considerations made that approach less feasible, the District instituted a series of graduated cuts that reduced benefits for families’ receiving TANF for five years or more.  At the same time, the District engaged in a massive redesign effort to improve the services available to parents.  It recognized that the services needed to be better tailored to meeting the needs of all parents receiving TANF—including those who faced numerous barriers to work, ranging from disability and domestic violence to a lack of work experience.

But the redesign also had a catch—the families who had received benefits for five years or more would lose all access to the TANF safety net on a date certain.  That date certain is October 1, 2015.  This October, 6,000 District families—including 13,000 children—will lose their primary income source.  In the months that follow, more families will lose their income too as they reach the five-year TANF time limit.

The withholding of TANF cash help and services comes despite evidence that single parents in the District—the local population most likely to rely on TANF—face a higher rate of unemployment than their childless counterparts or parents with partners.  At the same time, studies in other states have found that parents who have stayed on TANF for many years are more likely to have significant barriers to employment, including low cognitive functioning, limited levels of education, and limited English proficiency.  The economic landscape in the District and pressures of single parenthood, combined with the barriers known to limit many long-term TANF participants, suggest that parents affected by the impending TANF cut will have a difficult time finding permanent, stable work that allows them to replace even their small monthly TANF benefit.  (It’s also important to note that even a small amount of cash assistance can make a significant difference in a family’s ability to cover basic expenses, such as buying necessary personal care items or school supplies for children.)

Moreover, the changes promised in the TANF redesign are not fully available to the parents who most need them.  Many of the parents subject to the full loss of benefits in October have spent months or years without being offered meaningful services by the DC government.  Wait times for these improved services can be as long as 10 to 11 months.  At the same time, those especially vulnerable parents who may not be ready to work due to other demands in their lives, such as managing the effects of domestic violence or caring for a sick family member, are without a clear path for stopping the clock on the time limits.

Although District law outlines exemptions from the TANF time limits for families experiencing certain types of hardships, the government has yet to propose regulations or publish any publicly-available policies to explain how and to whom these exemptions should be applied.  Without timely access to employment-related services, long-time TANF recipients who could find and maintain work if given the right assistance are effectively shut out of the reforms.  Likewise, without transparent, detailed standards for exemptions from the time limits, parents who could qualify may be overlooked by agency staff and unaware of their own rights.

In this environment, it is difficult to see how cutting families off of TANF in October will have anything but negative consequences.  Parents who lose eligibility for TANF will lose not just cash and services, but possibly also their priority access to subsidized child care.  Approximately 2,000 children between the ages of 0 and 3 are expected to be affected by the upcoming TANF cut.  Their parents are even less likely to find work if child care is no longer available at low or no cost.  The loss of income could put further stresses on the District’s already burdened systems for responding to homelessness and child welfare concerns while perpetuating the District’s notable level of income inequality.  There are also longer-term effects of this kind of deep poverty, including physical and mental health problems for children who are continually exposed to high levels of stress.

The DC government still has time to mitigate some of the effects of its flawed TANF time limit policy, if it acts soon.  It can change its TANF law to allow parents who have exceeded the program’s five-year time limit to remain able to access benefits and services until it can create a more reasonable approach to addressing these families’ needs.  With a delay of a year, the government could direct funds towards reducing the wait times for all TANF parents seeking to connect to employment-related services, so that the parents who could possibly benefit from this kind of help are realistically able to do so.  Government officials could also use this extra time to streamline and formalize the process of identifying families who should be exempted from the limits due to employment barriers.

The District’s long-term vision for its TANF program must recognize that reform does not have to penalize people in our city who are least likely to be able to bear its costs.

Last year, Representative Paul Ryan proposed the most recent conservative block-grant proposal. Under his Opportunity Grant program, funding for the nation’s bedrock nutrition assistance program (SNAP) and several other means-tested programs would be combined into a single block grant with a fixed annual funding level. Rep. Ryan says he draws inspiration from the United Kingdom’s Universal Credit—a new means-tested cash entitlement benefit that consolidates six current benefits, including the Housing Benefit, Child Tax Credit, and Job Search Allowance. The Universal Credit has gotten off to a slow start in the UK due to implementation challenges, but the government says it will be fully implemented by 2019.

We will hear more about the Universal Credit this week. At an event at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, Iain Duncan Smith, UK Secretary of State for Work and Pensions—and the architect of the policy—will keynote a discussion of what the United States can learn from the Universal Credit.

The fact is the Universal Credit doesn’t even remotely resemble Rep. Ryan’s proposal—or, for that matter, TANF or other block grants in the United States. Perhaps the most fundamental difference is that the Universal Credit will be an entitlement to eligible low-income people, one that is administered centrally by a single government agency.

We’re all for learning what we can from other countries, but the Universal Credit is not the most relevant policy for the United States to draw on. Among the key differences limiting its relevance to our system is the fact that one of the main problems the UK is trying to address—financial penalties for work—is far less of an issue in the United States. This is due to the design of our Earned Income Tax Credit—which kicks in at the first dollar of earnings—and the limited nature of other means-tested benefits for low-income unemployed people.

Moreover, a primer the Center for American Progress co-authored last year on the Universal Credit notes several concerns with the policy. For example, the UK’s Housing Benefit is currently a locally administered in-kind housing benefit paid directly to landlords on behalf of low-income tenants. Under the Universal Credit it will be paid directly to tenants as a cash benefit and administered centrally by the UK’s Department of Work and Pensions. This has raised concerns about how tenants, especially vulnerable ones, will manage direct payments of housing costs, and what happens if they fall behind on rent.

We do, however, welcome a conversation on how the Universal Credit can spur momentum stateside to reduce the administrative burdens associated with navigating multiple safety net programs. But it is worth noting there are already a long list of effective homegrown practices and policy reforms on this front that are seeing results. For example, the Affordable Care Act created a new, simplified system that states can use to enroll eligible people into Medicaid and CHIP, including an option to enroll people based on their SNAP eligibility.

Beyond the Universal Credit, when it comes to social policy more generally there is indeed a lot the US could learn from the UK: the UK has stronger labor market protections, more modern workplace standards, and a longstanding commitment to ensuring that working-age people—whether in or out of work, and with or without children—have access to health care for free as well as a minimum floor of housing and income assistance. While we don’t know if these types of lessons and reforms will be discussed at this week’s AEI event, any discussion of the UK’s Universal Credit and its relevance to US social policy should not be divorced from this broader context.

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To that end, here are a few things we hope US policymakers do consider when taking lessons from across the pond:

• Health services and almost all prescription drugs are free for everyone in the UK. But in the US, 22 states have refused to implement the Affordable Care Act’s Medicaid expansion, leaving millions without access to care and subject to higher “marginal tax rates.”
• In the UK, all low-income people who rent are guaranteed means-tested housing assistance; in the US only about one-quarter of eligible low-income renters receive help.
• The UK guarantees means-tested unemployment assistance to low-income people who are unemployed—a single unemployed person without children is eligible for weekly grants that total about $450 a month[i]. The US does not have a means-tested unemployment assistance program that guarantees benefits nationwide. Low-income people can access SNAP, but the benefits are much more modest, and can only be used for food.
• The UK provides a family allowance to all low- and middle-income families with children through its Child Benefit and Child Tax Credit. In 2015, a single parent with one child and no earnings would be eligible for about $6,300 as a basic income guarantee under just these two benefits. While the US has a Child Tax Credit, it is modest by comparison and completely excludes families with no or very low earnings.

Although some of these programs—means-tested unemployment assistance, Housing Benefit, and Child Tax Credit—will be brought into the Universal Credit, they will continue to function as entitlements with the same base benefit levels.

Beyond benefit differences, it’s also worth noting that the UK has a national minimum wage, which is updated annually and currently equal to about $9.50 an hour (it will go higher when updated later this year) and gives almost all workers a legal entitlement to paid sick days. In addition, it provides paid family leave and a comparatively expansive system of pre-K and child-care assistance. This may help explain why women’s labor force participation has grown steadily since 2000 in the UK, while trending downward in the US.

In short, the US has a lot to learn from the UK. But we should glean our biggest lessons from the UK’s policy and reform successes that have improved basic labor standards, strengthened work-family balance, and fortified benefits for low-incomes families. Efforts like these have led to better outcomes for individuals and families, including lower poverty rates, than we have accomplished to date in the United States.

[i] This and other UK benefits amounts are converted into US dollars using an exchange rate that adjusts for cost of living differences between the UK and US.

Disclosure: Alyssa Peterson previously served as a volunteer domestic violence advocate with the organization.

Alyssa Peterson: How does economic security matter in domestic violence cases?

DC SAFE: If the abuser and the victim are living together, she has limited options. Most people of an average income wouldn’t be able to just go and put themselves up in a hotel on zero notice. If you don’t have family or friends in the city, it’s two-hundred dollars a night for a hotel. If it’s thirty degrees out, you can’t just go sleep on a park bench—if that’s even an option for anybody. If you have children, it’s even more complicated. So, having access to housing, or money for housing, is one of the biggest barriers to getting away from the abuser.

Domestic violence is said to affect people equally across sections of society regardless of income, but [that’s] not what we experience. And that’s mostly because those with income can handle domestic violence on more of a self-help basis, whereas those without income are forced to resort to [public] services and place their violence that they’re experiencing out into the open. Somebody with means can put themselves up into a hotel [or] can hire an attorney to divorce somebody and seek assets. Those without means are going to have to come to the D.C. Superior Courthouse and seek emergency housing through the city.

Alyssa: Can you all explain a little bit about your work?

DC SAFE: One of our programs is called the Court Advocacy Program (CAP). We accompany clients to court, provide them emotional support, [and] we can also work on different things that happen in court like warrants.

We can also refer survivors to different social services, including Crime Victims Compensation, which is an organization run by the government and the court systems that assists and gives some financial support to victims of crime in D.C. We [also] have several partner agencies that provide free legal services to survivors of domestic violence. We can also refer and place individuals in our shelter program, and provide them with referrals for counseling [or] forensic nurse examinations.

We assist with running our 24-hour help line, OCAP. We do things like book emergency housing, get lock changes, safety plan, [and] talk victims through both the civil and legal remedies that are available to them, often referring them to come to the intake center if they want to talk to an advocate or file for a protective order. Transportation is also something, especially [to get] to a safe place or a courthouse.

Alyssa: We’ve seen a massive shortage in affordable housing.  Has that put a lot of pressure on your services?

DC SAFE: Absolutely. One of [our] top concerns when we meet with survivors is where is [the survivor] supposed to go?

If you have a client that can transfer to a different county in Maryland—that looks very different from a client who’s really stuck in the housing system in D.C. Some people were on [a] waiting list for a long time which could be as long as 10 years or more in many cases—[they] are afraid to leave their situation because they don’t want to lose that spot.  They don’t want to be with the abuser, but they don’t want to lose this place that they finally got to after all these years.

Then, if you look at the homeless systems, the challenges there are that we work on a crisis basis and [the homeless system] may not be working on a crisis basis. [The homeless systems] may take months for them to take a client. Or there may be sobriety rules that a client can’t adhere to. If you have a program that requires that a client have documented clean time for sixty days, and we’re a crisis shelter [with maximum stay period of less than sixty days], then there’s no way that those numbers are going to match up. Even if my client is saying: “I want to be clean, I’ve been clean since the moment I got here,” that’s still over a month left before the client can even begin to think about getting into these programs.

Alyssa: Is the shelter system even a real option for survivors?

DC SAFE: It’s not ideal. Usually, the conversation is [that] if you have kids and you need an emergency shelter, and you aren’t getting in a transitional program [(another housing option for survivors)], you’re going to be leaving the district. There just aren’t options really here currently. For people who face multiple levels of trauma, going into a shelter [means] there’s little observation of what’s happening, or sharing rooms with multiple people. That may cause [survivors] to face other levels of trauma. [Survivors] may be victimized in those shelters. And then there’s the fact that [you usually] have to take your stuff with you every single day when you leave, it’s so much easier for someone to find you when you’re out on the street every day.

And ultimately, we believe that a survivor knows her situation better than anybody else in the whole world. She or he is the only one that knows what’s best, so we have some situations where they may choose option B as opposed to going to a shelter. That’s an empowered decision and we support that. It can be very difficult when you have a limited number of options. As a society, we have created a system where people really have a lack of choices.

Alyssa: Do you see a lot of survivors in a situation where an abuser has harmed their credit or economic wellbeing?

DC SAFE: Credit is a continuing issue and it’s something that we’re trying to find more resources [to address]. Even a client who has the option to transfer [to alternative low-income housing], we may see that because of back rent, they may not be able to transfer until they pay that off. The reason that they may not have paid it off is because of financial manipulation that happened with the abuser.

Which is why there’s a real need for second chance housing in the District for people who have credit issues and need to be able to prove income.

In addition, [survivors] may have wages in cash. They have wages that may be much easier to steal and manipulate. And of course, sometimes the abuser is borrowing money. He keeps borrowing. He borrows a hundred here, two hundred there, and never pays it back. And suddenly, the victim is out two-thousand dollars that she’s just been fronting to him out of her paycheck, and she can’t pay rent.

Alyssa: Are there other things that D.C. is doing specifically that help the economic security of survivors?

DC SAFE: D.C. is starting to recognize domestic violence as an extremely serious issue, as opposed to something that should stay inside the home. Every agency is continuing to take this very seriously. [D.C. has] some of the most progressive policies surrounding domestic violence.

D.C. has sick and safe leave.  You can take sick time and you can also take safe time. So, you can take time off of work, utilizing your sick days to get safe if you are experiencing domestic violence.

[But] there remains a ton of work to be done. It’s great that that law is in place, but it isn’t going to do very much for a tipped worker or a low-income [worker] who has no idea what sick and safe leave is; or an employer who is going to look at a sick and safe leave request and just not [allow it]. So, there’s a lot of work to do in outreach and enforcement.

Survivors in D.C. also have the right to break their lease early with no penalties, which is fantastic. So, if a survivor just signed a lease in January, [it] may be actually one of the reasons that they may not report [domestic violence]. They may say I just signed this in January. They may say I’ll just stay here and keep the doors locked and then in a year when I feel like I can move, I can.

And then when you tell people—and this is something people don’t really know—and I was meeting with someone today and I said, “Let’s write up this template together.” It’s a letter from the survivor. It’s something from her that she gives to the landlord that explains what her rights are. She signs it and then she’s theoretically supposed to be able to move two weeks later. I think that’s very helpful.

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Alyssa: Are there other programs to support low-income survivors?

DC SAFE: The D.C. Department of Human Services does have a domestic violence work exemption for TANF [(Temporary Assistance to Needy Families)]. If [a TANF recipient] is a domestic violence survivor, not only can they be exempted from the work requirement for three months, with the option of re-opting after three months, but they can also be referred to counseling and case management.

Alyssa: I’ve read studies that the TANF exemption is underutilized. Is that the case in D.C.?

DC SAFE: Last year, they had a grand total of three exceptions granted because people just didn’t ask for it. People don’t know. Because of the vast bureaucracy of the D.C. Department of Human Services, it makes it almost impossible for a client to know how to navigate [the system]. [A survivor has] to get a referral letter from an advocate that would be faxed to a certain person [in the Department of Human Services], and then a follow up call would have to be made to that person, who would then have the client verify, and then work through the process of initiating a work exemption.

That’s the entire reason that SAFE exists because clients can’t navigate the system on their own. It’s bureaucratic, it’s byzantine… you need an MSW to know how to access all the services that you’re entitled to. And [survivors are] dealing with their court case, and finding housing and child care, and a new job, or whatever. They need to focus on doing that, and then we can focus on advocacy piece.

And when you’ve spent years being beaten down by somebody who’s trying to make you not advocate for yourself… Your abuser’s been telling you for however long that everything is your fault; that you’re a terrible person. So why do you feel comfortable advocating for yourself? You need somebody to tell you that you have a right to these services—somebody who can help you connect with the agencies and tell you that you deserve them.

Yet much has changed in the past 50 years. Demographic shifts, insufficient access to jobs that pay decent wages, and an economy that increasingly serves only the wealthy few pose a new set of challenges. Meanwhile, several components of our system of work and income supports have grown weaker and been cut back—Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, or TANF, is the poster child of this troubling trend—and today far too few individuals and families get the help they need and deserve in hard times.

Too bad, but this is all someone else’s problem, right?

Wrong.

As my colleague Melissa Boteach points out in her column published earlier this week, four out of five Americans will experience at least one year of significant economic insecurity—defined as living in poverty or near-poverty, or needing to turn to unemployment insurance or another form of public assistance—at some point during their working years. Yep, you read that right: four out of five.  Perhaps even more staggering: half of us will experience three years or more of significant economic insecurity.

While poverty might be a condition we associate with “other people,” just take a look at the most common precipitating factors: Job loss. Birth of a child. Illness. These are life events that could hit any of us. While some paint poverty as something that only happens to flawed people, or a condition affecting a stagnant, marginalized minority, in reality it’s something most of us will encounter at some point in our lives. As Dr. Mark Rank, whose research yielded those staggering findings, wrote in the New York Times: “Put simply, poverty is a mainstream event experienced by a majority of Americans.”

In the coming months, the Center for American Progress poverty team will explore policies that strengthen and modernize our nation’s safety net, and promote economic mobility for families on the brink. Since we’re all in this together, shouldn’t we ensure that our social contract provides adequate protection amid the ups and downs of life?

Yesterday, Representative Paul Ryan’s unveiling of his new proposal to address poverty offered the opportunity to gather responses from some of the people who might lead such a movement.

Here is what they had to say:
Tianna Gaines-Turner: About Work and People Receiving Public Assistance
Tom Colicchio: ‘Opportunity Grants’ Will Make Hunger Worse
Laffon Brelland, Jr.: ‘My Family Does Not Struggle Because We Lack Work Ethic’
Melissa Boteach: Ryan’s Case Against Himself
Peter Edelman: Compassionate Conservatism Rides Again
Anne Ford: Put Energy into Raising Wages
Deepak Bhargava: Ryan’s Poverty Plan Equals More Attacks on the Poor
Dr. Mariana Chilton: Not a Serious Dialogue

Tianna Gaines-Turner: About Work and People Receiving Public Assistance

Earlier this month, I had the honor of testifying at one of the War on Poverty hearings. I testified as a member of Witnesses to Hunger, and as a representative for millions of Americans like me who are struggling with poverty. I had hoped that by sharing my story, and my ideas for change, Congressman Paul Ryan would have released a poverty plan that listened a little more closely to my recommendations.

I do appreciate some of what he said in yesterday’s event at the American Enterprise Institute. I’m glad he recognizes that the government has an obligation to expand opportunities in America. Many of his ideas are good. Increasing the Earned Income Tax Credit would help a lot of struggling Americans—although paying for it by eliminating the Social Services Block Grant wouldn’t—and results-driven research is an important part of understanding what works and what doesn’t.

I did not appreciate Mr. Ryan’s comments about work and people on public assistance. He started out by saying that today’s Americans are working harder than ever before, but aren’t getting ahead. This I agree with. My husband and I both work part-time jobs, but we still struggle to make ends meet. Millions of Americans face similar situations as my husband and me.

But Mr. Ryan went on to explain that he wants to incorporate work into the safety net, like they did with welfare reform in 1996. I do not think this is a good idea. I stressed this during my testimony in front of the House Budget Committee. I explained that families are working. We don’t need to be placed in more work programs, we need our jobs to pay living wages, and to offer family-oriented policies like paid sick and paid family leave. This way, we can earn more, save money, and create our own safety net so that we never have to turn to the government for help again.

I am happy that Congressman Ryan ended his speech by encouraging people to send him constructive criticism, and more recommendations for him to consider when developing this poverty plan. He can be sure that I will be writing to him with more of my ideas, and more recommendations from my Witnesses to Hunger brothers and sisters.

Tianna Gaines-Turner is a member of Witnesses to Hunger, a program hosted by the Center for Hunger Free Communities at Drexel University featuring the voices and photography of parents and caregivers who have experienced hunger and poverty firsthand. She is a married mother of three children, and works with children at a local recreation facility in Northeast Philadelphia. 

Tom Colicchio: ‘Opportunity Grants’ Will Make Hunger Worse

When Congressman Paul Ryan talks about consolidating means-tested programs like food stamps, child care, welfare and housing into a single grant, he’s talking about a block grant.  And that’s something we already know all too much about.

The TANF block grant created in 1996 made cash assistance much harder to obtain.  In 1996, about 68 percent of families with children living in poverty were able to get TANF cash assistance.  Now about 25 percent can get it.  Plus, the block grant is still funded at 1996 levels so cash benefits have decreased dramatically in terms of their real purchasing power.

We can’t allow the same thing to happen with food assistance.

We already have a hunger crisis in this country.  Nearly 50 million people don’t necessarily know where there next meal is coming from.  It’s unacceptable in the wealthiest nation in the world, and it’s a crisis virtually unknown in other wealthy nations.

But hunger is also a problem we can solve—if we look honestly and critically at the policies that contribute to either making hunger worse, or to reducing it.

Lumping nutrition assistance in with other much needed assistance—like housing and childcare—would make hunger worse.  For one thing, it makes it much more difficult for our growing Food Movement to hold legislators accountable for their votes on food issues.  If they vote to cut the block grant is the money cut from food or housing? And if we leave it to the whims of states to decide how much nutrition assistance people can receive, or whether they can receive it at all—as with TANF—then how will we ever resolve as a nation to end hunger?

As I’ve written previously, it’s time we have a Food Movement that votes on a good fair food system for all.  That same movement needs to be vigilant and speak out against bad ideas that will make our food system worse.

That means speaking out in no uncertain terms against Congressman Ryan’s proposal.

Tom Colicchio is a Chef and food-activist.  You can follow him on Twitter @tomcolicchio.

Laffon Brelland, Jr.: ‘My Family Does Not Struggle Because We Lack Work Ethic’

Living in a single-parent household is tough. I grew up with my mother and two sisters, and although my mother always worked, we struggled to make ends meet. When the economy tanked, my mother lost her job. My older sister was in college, and even with the help from other outside family members and government assistance, we could not cover the cost of her education and all of our family’s other expenses.

I remember the day my mother looked me in the eye and said, “I’m going to be honest with you, son. With the way things are right now, I won’t be able to help you pay for college. What happens to you now is all on you.”

I took her advice and got to work. In addition to being a full-time high school honor student, I worked two low-wage jobs to help my family pay the bills. The years went on and things got harder at home. My family was always working. With my help, we were able to put my sister through college. I will be a sophomore at the University of South Carolina in the fall. But even with every able body in the house working, it is still a challenge every month to cover the bills.

My family does not struggle because we lack work ethic, which Paul Ryan’s new plan implies is the underlying cause of poverty in America. My family struggles because of poverty wages, which Ryan’s plan does nothing to rectify. Yesterday marked the fifth anniversary of the last time the federal minimum wage was raised. My family and I work tirelessly, but until employers are required to pay us enough to thrive, my families and thousands like ours will continue to scrape by.

Laffon Brelland, Jr. is a rising sophomore at the University of South Carolina, double-majoring in English and Spanish. He is a Junior Writing Fellow at the Center for Community Change.

Melissa Boteach: Ryan’s Case Against Himself

Yesterday, Rep. Ryan proposed a plan that would eliminate a program that consolidates multiple antipoverty programs into a single grant to states in the name of providing greater flexibility. Yep, you read that right.

While the press coverage has focused on Rep. Ryan’s “new” idea of consolidating multiple programs into a single “Opportunity Grant,” most of the coverage missed the fact that he proposed to pay for part of his plan by eliminating the Social Service Block Grant (SSBG).

The SSBG is a capped, flexible stream of funding to states that funds services such as adoption, childcare, counseling, child abuse prevention, community-based care for seniors and people with disabilities, and employment services. Last year it helped approximately 23 million people, about half of them children. The program dates back to 1981, when a series of social services were consolidated into this single grant, and since then, many nonprofits have been funded by it to provide services like case management. Sounds a lot like Rep. Ryan’s “Opportunity Grant”, right?

Unfortunately, while SSBG provides states with enormous flexibility, over time it lost a lot of political capital. Politicians began to complain that it was duplicative of other programs. Policymakers could cut it time and again without having to cite any specific consequences since the money was “flexible.”  Over time, it has lost 77 percent of its value due to inflation, cuts, and funding freezes, and in recent years, there have been attempts to eliminate it altogether.  This is surely predictive of Rep. Ryan’s new proposal.

Which brings me back to the “Opportunity Grants.”  Right now, Rep. Ryan is claiming that his plan is completely deficit neutral, and states would not lose any money.

Yet, in a cautionary tale, calls for elimination of SSBG have been supported by none other than Rep. Ryan, who out of the other side of his mouth is proposing an eerily similar idea: to consolidate, in the name of flexibility, major funding streams that currently help low-income families. In fact, Rep. Ryan proposes eliminating the Social Service Block Grant altogether to pay for his proposed EITC expansion for childless workers. In an ironic twist that he seems to miss, he claims that SSBG is “ineffective.”

Thank you, Paul Ryan, for illustrating more clearly than anyone else possibly could why your proposal is so dangerous.

Melissa Boteach is the Vice President of the Poverty to Prosperity Program and Half in Ten Education Fund at the Center for American Progress.  You can follow her on Twitter @mboteach.

Peter Edelman: Compassionate Conservatism Rides Again

Paul Ryan has a new suit of clothes, but inside he’s still just Paul Ryan.  In fact the suit of clothes is made of porcupine quills—take a close look and it’ll poke you in the eye.  He’s now seeming sweet and sympathetic in wanting to do something about poverty, but what he’s proposing is mainly a shell game—now you see it, now you don’t.

Never mind that his budgets for the past four years—which would have cut $5 trillion dollars over 10 years, with 69 percent of the cuts coming in programs for low- and moderate-income people—are still on the table.  The latest Paul Ryan says he will turn well over $100 billion in federal programs into block grants once his state demonstrations prove successful.  And he says he won’t cut any of the programs in his block grant.  Will the real Paul Ryan please stand up?

Of course, the new and improved version of his proposals is still pretty lousy.  Block grant food stamps?  Terrible idea.  I guess he thinks it’s fine for Mississippi to say that the definition of hunger there isn’t the same as it is in Minnesota.  Make housing compete with child care by putting them both in the same block grant?  Why?  What we need is more investment in both.

Block grants are not the friend of low-income people.  TANF, among other issues, is receiving the same $16.6 billion appropriation now as it had in 1996.  The Social Services Block Grant received $2.5 billion when it was enacted in the early 70s and is now getting $1.7 billion.   I guess there’s no reference to inflation in Paul Ryan’s instruction manual.

It’s time to get real.  There are two huge problems (and lots of smaller ones) that are making it difficult to reduce poverty right now.  One is the flood of low-work in our country—which results in 106 million people with incomes below twice the poverty line, below $39,000 for a family of three.  What does Paul Ryan propose to do about that?  Nothing. The other is the huge hole in our national safety net for the poorest among us—6 million people whose total income is from food stamps, which by itself is less than about $7,000 annually for a family of three.  Paul Ryan has a proposal there—put TANF, which is already almost nonexistent in most of the country, into a block grant along with food stamps, housing, child care, and God knows what else.  How does he think that will go?

We tried compassionate conservatism.  There was no there there then—and there still isn’t.

Peter Edelman is a Professor of Law at the Georgetown Law Center, and the Faculty Director of the Georgetown Center on Poverty and Inequality.

Anne Ford: Put Energy into Raising Wages

I’ve been a nurse for more than 30 years. I worked at DC General for 17 years and as a home health nurse for 10 years before a back surgery left me unable to care for adults. So, I switched to working with children. I’ve worked in children’s hospitals and as a school nurse and I loved it. But when I lost my job of five years, I also lost a $2,000 per month paycheck – resources I needed to care for myself and pay for my mortgage, car loan, insurance, and other bills.

When I was finally able to enroll in food stamps and unemployment insurance, I received $700 per month and had to rely on my daughter’s help to make ends meet. Thankfully, I also received Medicaid, which covered my doctor’s appointments, medications, and follow-up care from my surgery. Without that care I wouldn’t have been able to leave my house. I really relied on these three benefits to survive until things could get better, same as a lot of people I met in lines, filling out forms alongside me.

With his new proposal, I can see that Paul Ryan doesn’t care about us. If he did, why would he want to make getting help harder? If he had asked any person in my situation what kind of help they needed, he never would have come up with this plan. He’s never, not for one day, walked in our shoes.

Paul Ryan and I are both Christians, and I encourage him to pray on his new plan. What he’s doing is not godly. Through my church, I volunteer at So Others Might Eat (SOME), an organization that helps people who can’t make ends meet access food, clothing, and healthcare. If Rep. Ryan’s plan goes through, the number of people needing to reach out to organizations like this will only increase, and these organizations can’t meet that kind of increased demand.

If Paul Ryan really wanted to help he should have proposed creating something, not messing up programs like food stamps that are already working well.  He should have proposed to create jobs, or increase the supply of affordable housing. He should have put his energy into raising the wages at all these jobs that don’t pay enough to survive. The truth is if you don’t have a job that pays more than the cost of living, you can’t afford the necessities to live. And that’s how we ended up with all these people with nowhere to live who are fighting every minute to put food in their stomachs.

I depend on food stamps, Medicaid and unemployment insurance, but it still isn’t enough to make ends meet. But, for myself, I’m hopeful. Just this Wednesday, I accepted a full-time job as a school nurse without even asking the salary. For all those people out there who are still looking for jobs, what Paul Ryan wants to do makes me scared.

Anne Ford is a school nurse in Washington, DC.

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Deepak Bhargava: Ryan’s Poverty Plan Equals More Attacks on the Poor

For those of us who wish our nation’s leaders would pay more attention to the 106 million people living on the brink in this country, Paul Ryan’s new plan to address poverty is so bad it might make us think, “Careful what you wish for.”

Rep. Ryan’s plan adopts the conventional Republican analysis that individual failure and insufficient effort is the main driver of poverty, and then revives as the solution the bankrupt block grant proposals that have failed in the past.

Let’s be clear—the premise of Ryan’s argument is wrong.  The evidence of our own history and from around the world shows that we can—through concerted government action—make a big difference in reducing poverty.  The positive effect of better labor market standards and government supports is undeniable, in the U.S. and around the world.

So what would a serious effort to reduce poverty look like? We could reduce poverty in the U.S. by 80 percent by taking three simple steps:

First, we need to raise wages so that workers earn a living wage. The minimum wage must be increased to catch up with productivity growth, and workers must have the right to organize and collectively bargain for better wages.

Second, we need to eliminate racial and gender inequality in the labor market. Poverty isn’t just an economic issue; it’s a women’s rights and racial justice issue. A paycheck should be equal to the amount of work you produce, not be based on the color of your skin or your gender.

Finally, we need full employment. We need to invest in key sectors of the economy—from the green economy to infrastructure—so that we can create millions of jobs.

This strategy would reduce poverty in America by 80 percent because it would improve access to what people living in poverty really need: quality jobs that pay a decent wage. Paul Ryan’s plan, in contrast, would give people living in poverty more of what they absolutely don’t need: blame that reinforces the conditions that keep people poor.  It would also lead to more hardship by further weakening our already frayed safety net.

Deepak Bhargava is the executive director of the Center for Community Change which you can follow on Twitter @communitychange.

Dr. Mariana Chilton: Not a Serious Dialogue

It may be surprising to hear this, but Representative Paul Ryan is actually speaking my language.

He says he is interested in developing opportunity and choice for people, and that people need careers, not just “jobs.”  He also said, loud and clear, we need to get rid of the federal red tape.   In my state, the need to collect documentation of work participation hours creates such a gnarly cluster of inefficient busy-work and red tape that it sucks the creativity and life out of entire communities.

When Rep. Ryan said “too many families in America are working harder and harder yet falling further behind,” I perked up, thinking—Right! Their wages have deteriorated. We should raise wages to a living wage.  But discussion of wages was a glaring omission in his speech.

Another worrying thing—his talk of turning programs over to the states. There’s no good precedent for that.  Consider Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), which Rep. Ryan consistently holds up as a model for reform: that’s the birthplace of federal and state red tape.  Additionally, what we see on the ground with TANF is often punitive, and downright mean. Here’s an example in Pennsylvania: at a County Assistance Office, people waiting to speak to “career development workers” are actually forced to sit facing the wall with their backs to the case managers. This is dehumanizing and humiliating.

Unfortunately, that dehumanizing treatment of America’s families is what I see when I hear that Rep. Ryan is listening to his “mentors”—people who say such thoughtless, non-Christian things as “there is a deserving and undeserving poor.” Last I checked, there is no spiritual tradition, nor any political tradition, that says some people deserve to be hungry (read: poor).  Since Paul Ryan comes from a state that has the highest rates of racial disparities in wealth and in health, everything he says should be held up to our public accountability meter that measures for transparency, fairness and basic humanity.

As I was listening to Rep. Ryan, I almost started thinking I could actually work with him, and that I could join the dialogue. After all, he’s the only leader recently who has shown a public attempt to make fixing poverty a focus of their leadership. But when I saw all the men (read: no women) joining him on the discussion panel at the American Enterprise Institute after his speech, I laughed out loud.  Until Rep. Ryan starts including women—especially women of color, African American, Latina, American Indian, Asian and more—none of us can take this “dialogue” seriously.

Unmet diaper needs impact families’ ability to work and the public health of the communities where they live. Because diapers are required by most child care facilities, lack of diapers can reduce access to work and poor diapering can facilitate the spread of disease in public spaces.

According to The Diaper Bank, an adequate supply of diapers cost $100 or more per month. Making things worse, safety net programs such as TANF, SNAP and WIC do not allot money for diapers. Benefits themselves are already low. In California, the maximum TANF benefit—which provides cash assistance—is no more than 40% of the federal poverty level (around $670 per month for a family of three). According to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, there isn’t a state in the country with a TANF benefit higher than ½ of the federal poverty line. To get by, families report diapering less. Some even report that their infants or toddlers have spent a day or longer in one diaper, which not only leads to potential health risks for the baby, but also puts them at risk for social, emotional and behavioral problems, according to a Pediatrics study.

Here in California, there are eleven diaper banks that are part of the National Diaper Bank network. Meeting the unmet diaper needs of very young children with donated diapers is their business, and they too report shortages on a regular basis and admit to covering only a small percentage of the state.

This is what I learned when I started advocating in support of a bill introduced in California this year by Assembly Member Lorena Gonzalez and Senator Holly Mitchell to address the growing unmet need among poor families with infants and toddlers. The idea that we need legislation to address unmet diaper needs usually gets a chuckle out of most people at first. However, the grim reality is that a lack of an adequate supply of diapers can have severe mental, emotional, and developmental impacts on parents and children. In response, Assembly Bill 1516 would provide an $80 per month diaper supplement to eligible children receiving public assistance and would create a public-private partnership fund to help facilitate the distribution of financial donations and diaper contributions to the neediest of families.

My work on the bill is through the Women’s Policy Institute (WPI) at the Women’s Foundation of California. The WPI trains women about how the legislative process works and how to advocate for legislative change. Since I am a single mom who knows how costly it can be to keep an infant adequately diapered and how difficult it can be to try to figure it out on your own, I am motivated to make the most of this opportunity. Still, I am most inspired by the personal stories and the sense of how real policy decisions can impact real people’s lives.

A mother I know who has three little girls is one of these real people whose story has inspired me. She was working several jobs, but was still living under the poverty line and receiving just over $100 a month in TANF assistance, when extra hours at work and $20 more in her paycheck made her ineligible for the TANF program.

She lacked job security at her hourly jobs, and the loss of the income from TANF left her family on unstable footing. As a result, she struggled to meet her children’s basic needs. She told me about how she forced her children to potty train way before they were ready to save money and about her feelings of being overwhelmed with stress during this period in her family’s life.

Throughout the legislative session, the team of advocates working on this bill has heard other powerful testimonies about the consequences for children when parents are unable to make it through the end of each month without reusing lightly soiled diapers or prolonging periods between diaper changes.

I don’t know if Assembly Bill 1516 will pass and, if it gets passed, if it would get signed. But I hope that its introduction has helped to educate lawmakers in our state’s Capitol about the great risks associated with deep poverty and unmet diaper needs and to inspire them to do something about it.  I also know that bills like this one, which tackle the real needs of real people and real policy solutions, are desperately needed from Sacramento to Albany and in every state capitol in between.  Until we confront the human and fiscal costs associated with allowing children to live in deep poverty and the deep inequities that start at birth, our poorest children will be hampered by unequal footing before they even learn to walk.

First of all, we should stop calling it “poverty”—in political campaigns or otherwise. It is people in “acute financial distress.” When we hear of people in distress we want to help them. When we hear that they are poor we ignore them because of all of the stigmas associated with being poor.  “Acute financial distress” is a more accurate term too—it connotes a temporary predicament shared by many in our “new economy.” Poverty, on the other hand, is misperceived as a permanent condition, even though people slip in and out of being poor.

Having experienced acute financial distress, including being homeless, I think this is the central issue and major roadblock to eliminating poverty—the stigma that goes along with “being poor.” Lately, I feel like a modern day James Brown telling people to shout, “I’m Poor & I’m Proud. Sing it loud, Y’all!”

No joke. When you experience acute financial distress our society looks at you and says, aloud or not, “What did you do wrong?” and/or “What’s wrong with you?”

In my case, I became homeless because I refused to allow my mother, who was terminally ill with Alzheimer’s, to be placed in a nursing home. In the end, I was completely wiped out— physically, emotionally, spiritually and financially. There are many stories like mine.  But people prefer the stereotypes to the real stories—it makes it easier to maintain bad policies.

Bad policies like TANF which Peter Edelman wrote about in a TalkPoverty blog last month. I didn’t know who Edelman was at the time. But I’ve come to learn that he resigned from the Clinton Administration in 1996 after the President signed welfare reform legislation.  I researched why he did that and found out that Edelman was spot on. That legislation had two devastating effects: one, it dramatically reduced the amount of cash assistance that was available (for two years, believe it or not, I lived on a monthly general assistance stipend of $140.00); and secondly, it gave states nearly autonomous control of how and whether they provide cash assistance.

Now, this is where the stigma and these reforms intersect. Many of the people who administer social services (not the people working in the field who know better) also resent “poor people.”  That’s part of the reason why programs are designed in a way that makes it almost impossible for you to get your life back on track after a financial or personal trauma. And it works.  Most people give up and return to whatever situation got them into acute financial distress in the first place.

Case in point: I have been living on housing assistance in New Jersey the last four years or so. The state provides that assistance while a person applies for federally subsidized affordable housing. The understanding is that if you diligently apply for every affordable housing opportunity, they will help fund your housing until you are lucky enough to get one of the few federally-subsidized units.

But when I went to see my case worker in April, I was told that all extensions for the Housing Assistance Program were being terminated June 30th. No explanation; no recourse.

I was fortunate, because four days after meeting with my case worker I got a letter telling me there was an affordable housing unit available for me. This was a coincidence. But I can tell you, honestly, during those three days when I didn’t know where I’d be living in another month—after being a long-term caregiver for my mother, and then losing her and becoming homeless—I  came seriously close to triggering the PTSD that I had worked so very hard for the last two years to deal with.  I know many others, not so fortunate, who right now are totally freaking out. For what? Why do this to people? The point is, without federal regulation and guidelines to oversee how states administer social services, they can pretty much do as they please.

Right now I have SSI, food stamps and subsidized housing. So I’m good, sort of.  My food stamp allowance comes to $6 a day. So I’ll be going to a Food Pantry later. I help them work it and they help me with food.

That’s the last thing I’ll say because I think most people don’t know it: there’s a lot of solidarity out here among people living in acute financial distress. That’s what’s working—in spite of social services that aren’t designed with those of us who are struggling in mind.

Though they were originally.  See Robert Beezat’s excellent article on the Forgotten Lesson of the War on Poverty.

This is just plain wrong.

Lest I be immediately dismissed in what I am about to say (and the usual suspects will do so anyway), let me be clear that the main way to end poverty is jobs that result in a livable income, and the education necessary to get and keep those jobs.  The totality of strategies to reduce poverty also includes healthy communities and necessary services—including health and mental health services—child care, legal services, and more.  A discussion of welfare is not the same as a discussion of how to end poverty.

But one part of an antipoverty strategy is indeed a safety net.  And this is where people who should know better (or actually do) are averting their eyes.

Short history:  The old welfare system—Aid to Families with Dependent Children, or AFDC, which existed from 1935-1996—needed to be reformed.  It did not work hard enough at helping people get jobs and become self-sufficient.  There were 14.3 million people receiving it when President Clinton was elected and that’s too many.

In 1996, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) was enacted.  Just then, and quite unforeseen, the economy heated up and jobs became plentiful.   The welfare rolls plummeted and the number of never-employed single mothers obtaining jobs increased substantially.  But even then, because states had no legal obligation to grant benefits, about 2 out of 5 people who left welfare did not obtain jobs, and large numbers were turned away at the front door.

Beginning in 2001, the impressive numbers of single mothers at work began to go down, and now is nearly back to where it was before the 1996 law was passed.  But that didn’t mean that the TANF rolls went back up, because states did not extend benefits to those who were losing their jobs.  By the time the recession started, the TANF rolls were at 3.9 million.

TANF was absolutely useless as an antirecessionary tool.  Food stamps went up from reaching 26.3 million people to 48 million people, because there is a legal right to receive them.  TANF went from helping 3.9 million people to 4.4.million—and even reached fewer people during the recession in some states—because there is no legal right to assistance.

Here’s the bottom line: TANF is basically defunct in more than half the states and the percentage of children in poor families receiving cash assistance nationally has dropped from 68 percent to 27 percent.  In more than half the states, fewer than 20 percent of children living in poor families are receiving TANF.  Wyoming is the poster state.  About 600 people—4 percent of children living in poor families—receive cash aid in Wyoming.   Before 1996, with all of the faults in AFDC, the safety net at the bottom consisted of AFDC and food stamps combined.  The median income from welfare and food stamps combined was only half the poverty line, but there was a legal right to both.  No longer.

So, now 6 million people have incomes composed only of food stamps.  Stunning?  Who knew?  These are government figures and they have appeared on the front page of the New York Times.  A lot of people are averting their eyes.  Whatever the facts were about the success of TANF in the flush times of the late 1990s—and I think they weren’t so fact-based even then—the recession exposed the utter bankruptcy of TANF as a public policy.

This is enormously frustrating.  The minute the government gives someone a nickel we hear a chorus of aversion to handouts, a cacophony of complaints that these are people who do not want to work, a concert of disapproval of the character of anyone who would accept cash help (and now the disapproval extends to anyone receiving food stamps).

Of course we want to have a minimum number of people receiving cash assistance.  Of course we want to help mothers receiving TANF find work—and that help has to include child care assistance and health care coverage.  And we not only want to do those things well, which is not the case now, but we also need a safety net that is responsive to the individual problems and needs of the families it serves.  A properly designed cash assistance program for families with children would take into account the availability of work as well as the fact that recipients vary in their capacity to work.

It’s past time to acknowledge that we have blown a huge hole in our national safety net for the very most needy among us.  Shame on us.