the reality of "welfare" in Michigan & elsewhere
Mike Malloy called Bill Clinton "the best Republican president we've ever had." Bill oversaw legislative changes that the GOP had long wanted, such as carving big chunks out of welfare programs in 1996, & turning it into TANF -- temporary assistance for needy families -- & doling it out to the states in big
block grants, which were then divided up amongst the needy.
Or so you might believe, if you're suceptible to Doublespeak.
TANF supposedly would save taxpayers gazillions because it removed the Feds from sending out checks to individuals. In that it appears to have succeeded. However, that can't be a primary criterion, else the Feds could achieve the same result from burning the money in a big pile.
It's TANF's 20th anniversary, & today the weekly Marketplace Money financial program on Public Radio is looking at how these moneys are actually spent in Michigan, a cash-strapped state with deeply troubled cities such as Detroit & Flint & Lansing. First, some background.
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It's amazing to find out how (1) the rules are circuitously "interpreted" to support questionable programs, & (2) how little of the block grants actually goes to directly assist poor people.
Alaska spends 91 percent of its TANF dollars on the central goals of welfare reform: cash assistance, promoting work, and providing child care.
South Carolina, on the other hand, only spends 16 percent on these core goals of welfare reform, and nearly 77 percent in a minimally defined “other” category.
Your State On Welfare
The four purposes of TANF --
- assisting needy families so children can be cared for in their own homes or the home of relatives;
- reducing the dependency of needy parents by promoting job preparation, work, and marriage;
- preventing out-of-wedlock pregnancies; and
- encouraging the formation and maintenance of two-parent families.
Considering the site we're on, you may have noticed the "two-parent" thing.
But the supposed intent of "welfare" -- ensuring that people short on cash can find adequate food & housing & maybe have their kids cared for while obtaining jobs (sometimes called
core welfare) -- is buried in #1, & the rest is largely
social engineering, thought-shaping. (Jeez --
promoting marriage??? that's like marketing daylight.)
And that's where TANF falls to crap.
The Center on Budget & Policy Priorities says that when it comes to fulfilling a stated purpose of helping poor families, the block-grant structure is not merely inadequare, but fundamentally
incompatible, & will readily fail "where, due to economic or other circumstances, the size of a state’s poor population rises."
An argument often used to support block grants is that states are better at making decisions about how to help families in need. Yet under TANF, many states shifted substantial amounts intended to help poor families to other uses ... in ways that often have left many of the most disadvantaged families without much of a safety net -- and without the employment resources that might help them gain a foothold in the labor market. In every state, TANF plays a markedly smaller role in providing cash assistance to very poor families to help them meet basic needs than AFDC did. Moreover, states have used only a modest share of their TANF resources to help individuals find employment, and few states have invested the necessary resources to help poor parents with the most serious employment barriers find and maintain work.
The tremendous flexibility states have had to use TANF funds for other than core welfare reform purposes has meant that Congress has sent a significant amount of funding to states with little accountability or even knowledge about how much of the money is being used. Under TANF, much of the spending has been used to supplant existing state spending, fill state budget holes, and/or fund new spending outside of welfare reform. Moreover, the difficulty inherent in changing block grant allocations across the states has meant that over time, Congress is providing money that increasingly is not being distributed in a manner that best furthers TANF’s original purposes. States are required to report how they spend their federal TANF block grant dollars and how they are meeting their state MOE requirement, but they must provide detailed data only on those program recipients who receive cash assistance, which constitutes a relatively small part of TANF/MOE spending
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I've seen some damned goofy Lefty social programs in my time, but when there's the smell of cash in the air, it's the Rightists who crowd right up to the trough, & these pigs ain't too proud to cloak themselves in God & Flag at every turn.
First, you can keep up with the Marketplace podcasts (to date) as there's no transcriptions yet:
The Uncertain Hour home
S01-1 -- meet The Magic Bureaucrat
S01-2 -- two lives changed by welfare reform
S-01-3 -- What's love (styles) got to do with it?
S01-4 -- Everything but the kitchen sink
In Oklahoma & other states, middle-income couples can take church-centric classes on how to communicate better. These work to fulfill TANF goals 2-4, after all.
Meanwhile, poor broke Michigan "spends about $100 million a year in TANF dollars on college scholarships -- and many recipients are from families that earn more than $100,000 year." Because that's
the same thing as granting a poor single mother enough support (like childcare) to find a decent job, right...?
Michigan is one of eight states that spends less than 25 percent of its total welfare funds on the issues that were at the center of the welfare reform debate: cash assistance, work support and child care, all to help welfare recipients get jobs. The largest share of its spending, 33 percent — nearly $500 million in 2014 — went to out-of-wedlock pregnancy prevention
...which you can do by bullying young women -- pregnant or not -- into marriage. Again, cash for Rightist brainwa-- whoops,
educational programs.
And since it's an anti-abortion state, & also against birth control in general, & proper sex education too, that means funding to crypto-religious groups to scare kids away from having sex (because that's worked so well through the ages), & funding church-based groups to "support" pregnant women... which some of us might see as kinda working directly
against TANF point #3.
Out of Wedlock Pregnancy Prevention & Two Parent Family Formation/Maintenance, $500m
Child Care, $30.9m
From morbid curiosity, I looked up Minnesota, a notoriously Lefty Liberal Populist state, & was pleased to learn that childcare was second (behind Refundable Tax Credits, a get-a-damn-job carrot that works really well here) followed by cash assistance, & that OWPP/TPFF/M was ninth of nine, a mere $1.48m -- about 0.3% of what Michigan throws away, & less than half what North Dakota (25 miles from me, home to ~15% of my co-workers) spends even though they get a much smaller block grant.
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This is all an outgrowth of a GOP social-control strategy launched in the mid-'80s: since we hate welfare, then we can accelerate "bleeding the beast to death" by lining the pockets of our constituents & supporters, & therefore graft & favoritism is both right & moral.
Better still if they can both cripple AND corrupt the system, because they can work up to pronouncing the whole thing irreversibply damaged & end it altogether.