Most of welfare reform $ now goes to pro-life counseling & other weird things
“Oh My God—We’re on Welfare?!”
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The strange story of what “welfare” has become since the 1996 reforms.
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Twenty years after President Clinton worked with a Republican-led congress to transform the nation’s cash assistance program for poor families and “end welfare as we know it,” most Americans don’t know much about welfare at all.
“A tiny chunk of what we spend on welfare is spent on what people think of when they think of welfare,” says DeVon Douglass, policy analyst with the Oklahoma Policy Institute. And Oklahoma is just one of many states across the country where federal welfare dollars are going toward things that surprise even the people who are benefitting from them.
For example, in Michigan, welfare spending includes a program that gives private college scholarships to students from households with incomes as high as $250,000 or more. In Pennsylvania, welfare dollars go to funding for so-called “crisis pregnancy centers” that counsel women against abortions.
So, how did this crazy quilt of spending happen?
The reforms of 1996 focused on one program in particular, called Aid to Families with Dependent Children, or AFDC. For 60 years, AFDC had worked as an “entitlement” program: If a family fell below a certain poverty threshold, the family was entitled to cash assistance; the federal government spent as much money on the program each year as there were poor families who qualified. The welfare reform bill did away with AFDC and created in its place TANF, the new system for cash assistance. Under TANF, time limits and work requirements regulate if and for how long a family can receive cash assistance. And rather than the entitlement system of AFDC, funding for TANF comes in the form of block grants to states. The federal government sets aside a fixed amount of money each year—$16.5 billion, never adjusted for inflation since 1996—and gives every state a portion.
What states do with the money from there—that’s where things get weird.
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The small amount of money Oklahoma spends on cash assistance might make sense if no one in Oklahoma were poor anymore. But 17 percent of Oklahomans live below the poverty line (defined in 2016 as having an annual income less than $20,160 for a family of three). It’s just that very few of those families currently receive any cash welfare in Oklahoma—just 7 out of every 100 families who live in poverty. That number has dropped by more than 80 percent in the two decades since welfare reform kicked in. (Nationwide, the numbers aren’t much better: Fewer than 23 in 100 families living below the poverty line receive cash welfare.)
As for those marriage classes? Promoting marriage and preventing out-of-wedlock pregnancy in the state accounts for 5 percent, or nearly $10 million, of TANF spending in Oklahoma. By comparison, about $18 million, or 9 percent, of Oklahoma’s TANF budget, goes to cash assistance for poor families—what most Americans think of when they think of “welfare.”
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http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/moneybox/2016/06/_welfare_money_often_isn_t_spent_on_welfare.html
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