THE PHONY 'END' OF WELFARE

CAT SULLIVAN, SEATTLE POST-INTELIGENCER - Welfare reform has reached its
tenth anniversary. Many crow about its success and how wonderful it is
that low-income moms are now working for a wage; they are now productive
members of society. As if raising children to run this country, fight in
the wars we create and teach children to become productive parents
themselves is not being productive. Some things we do know about the
impact of what welfare reform has or hasn't done:

- The U.S. has increased its poverty levels.

- Many welfare families are now part of the working poor and children
see their single parent less and less.

- We have the highest infant mortality of all the world's developed
nations.

- Underemployment is growing by leaps and bounds.

- We have exponentially raised the presence of whole families becoming
homeless.

- More Americans now live without health care.

ROBERT SCHEER - To hear Bill Clinton tell it, his presidency won the
war on poverty three decades after President Lyndon B. Johnson launched
it, having changed only the name. Unfortunately, however, for the
mothers and their children pushed off the rolls but still struggling
mightily to make ends meet even when employed, the war on welfare was
not the same battle at all.

Clinton masterfully blurred the two in a recent New York Times opinion
column, as did most others on the tenth anniversary of the passage of
the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act,
writing as if getting mothers and their children off the welfare rolls
is the same as getting them out of poverty. . .

The truth is we know very little about the fate of those moved off
welfare, 70% of whom are children, because there is no systematic
monitoring program, thanks to "welfare reform" severing the federal
government's responsibility to help the nation's poor.

The best estimates from Census and other data, however, indicate that at
least a million welfare recipients have neither jobs nor benefits and
have sunk deeper into poverty. For those who found jobs, a great many
became mired in minimum-wage jobs --- sometimes more than one --- that
barely cover the child-care and other costs they incurred by working
outside the home. . .

What we do know unequivocally is that real wages have been declining for
workers, both lower- and middle-class, despite increases in
productivity. As the New York Times reported on Monday, "wages and
salaries now make up the lowest share of the nation's gross domestic
product since the government began recording the data in 1947, while
corporate profits have climbed to their highest share since the 1960s.".
. .

The sad reality is that "ending welfare as we know it" was championed by
Clinton because it made him appear to be a "new Democrat" and not
because it would improve the lives of poor kids. Otherwise, he would not
dare boast in his column that "as a governor, I oversaw a workfare
experiment in Arkansas in 1980," because that program was a failure.

In Arkansas today, fully half the children are described in Census
department data as "low income," while one out of ten live in a
situation that researchers call "extreme child poverty," meaning that a
family of four survives on less than $9,675 per year.

http://www.alternet.org/columnists/story/41074/