Welfare Data From Class

Here is the data from the contended remarks in class about welfare and its recipients:

DHHS:

Recipients (with few exceptions) must work as soon as they are job ready or no later than two years after coming on assistance.

Also note that the maximum lifetime benefits are five years:

Families with an adult who has received federally funded assistance for a total of five years (or less at state option) are not eligible for cash aid under the TANF program.

Note that there are exceptions to these rules, particularly at the state level. States that do not force recipients to comply with these rules can be penalized.

Also from DHHS:

Half (50 percent) of TANF spells for individuals entering the program between 2001 and 2003 lasted 4 months or less, compared to 30 percent of AFDC spells beginning between 1992 and 1994 (See Indicator 7).

I was a bit off in class. 50% of recipients are on TANF for less than four months and 74% are less than a year, rising to 84% for 20 months or less. The other major welfare programs -- Food Stamps and SSI -- do not have the same time limits on them and they have longer spells of use.

Some students had the concern that putting people on welfare enables them to become poor and increases poverty. Research shows otherwise. Log in to JSTOR and read the following article if you'd like to read more: Welfare Spending and Poverty: Cutting Back Produces More Poverty, Not Less, Sanford F. Schram, American Journal of Economics and Sociology, Vol. 50, No. 2 (Apr., 1991), pp. 129-141. Abstract

The "New Consensus" on welfare expresses the idea that the major problem in social welfare is dependency, not poverty. Much of the evidence for this perspective has come from trend line data indicating that over time poverty did not evaporate in the face of increases in social welfare spending. Using various measures of the "dependent" poor, the empirical analysis presented suggests that reducing welfare expenditures relative to need does not produce less poverty and dependency.

Total welfare spending for the poor is $362 billion (out of a $3 trillion dollar budget). Direct subsidies to corporations are about $172 billion and Social Security (84% of which doesn't go to the poor) equals more than $600 billion -- that alone is already twice as much as all programs for the poor and we've only touched the tip of the iceberg in social welfare for the nonpoor. Check out the books The Government Racket and The Tax Racket by Martin L. Gross for more.