Download or read book Ending Welfare as We Know It written by R. Kent Weaver and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2000-08-01 with total page 502 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Bill Clinton's first presidential term was a period of extraordinary change in policy toward low-income families. In 1993 Congress enacted a major expansion of the Earned Income Tax Credit for low-income working families. In 1996 Congress passed and the president signed the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act. This legislation abolished the sixty-year-old Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) program and replaced it with a block grant program, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families. It contained stiff new work requirements and limits on the length of time people could receive welfare benefits.Dramatic change in AFDC was also occurring piecemeal in the states during these years. States used waivers granted by the federal Department of Health and Human Services to experiment with a variety of welfare strategies, including denial of additional benefits for children born or conceived while a mother received AFDC, work requirements, and time limits on receipt of cash benefits. The pace of change at the state level accelerated after the 1996 federal welfare reform legislation gave states increased leeway to design their programs. Ending Welfare as We Know It analyzes how these changes in the AFDC program came about. In fourteen chapters, R. Kent Weaver addresses three sets of questions about the politics of welfare reform: the dismal history of comprehensive AFDC reform initiatives; the dramatic changes in the welfare reform agenda over the past thirty years; and the reasons why comprehensive welfare reform at the national level succeeded in 1996 after failing in 1995, in 1993–94, and on many previous occasions. Welfare reform raises issues of race, class, and sex that are as difficult and divisive as any in American politics. While broad social and political trends helped to create a historic opening for welfare reform in the late 1990s, dramatic legislation was not inevitable. The interaction of contextual factors with short

Download or read book The Temporary Assistance for Needy Families TANF Block Grant written by Gene Falk and published by . This book was released on 2008 with total page 90 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) block grant provides federal grants to states for a wide range of benefits, services, and activities. It is best known for helping states pay for cash welfare for needy families with children, but it funds a wide array of additional activities. TANF was created in the 1996 welfare reform law (P.L. 104-193). TANF funding and program authority were extended through FY2010 by the Deficit Reduction Act of 2005 (DRA, P.L. 109-171). TANF provides a basic block grant of $16.5 billion to the 50 states and District of Columbia, and $0.1 billion to U.S. territories. Additionally, 17 states qualify for supplemental grants that total $319 million. TANF also requires states to contribute from their own funds at least $10.4 billion for benefits and services to needy families with children -- this is known as the maintenance-of-effort (MOE) requirement. States may use TANF and MOE funds in any manner "reasonably calculated" to achieve TANF's statutory purpose. This purpose is to increase state flexibility to achieve four goals: (1) provide assistance to needy families with children so that they can live in their own homes or the homes of relatives; (2) end dependence of needy parents on government benefits through work, job preparation, and marriage; (3) reduce out-of-wedlock pregnancies; and (4) promote the formation and maintenance of two-parent families. Though TANF is a block grant, there are some strings attached to states' use of funds, particularly for families receiving "assistance" (essentially cash welfare). States must meet TANF work participation standards or be penalised by a reduction in their block grant. The law sets standards stipulating that at least 50% of all families and 90% of two-parent families must be participating, but these statutory standards are reduced for declines in the cash welfare caseload. (Some families are excluded from the participation rate calculation.) Activities creditable toward meeting these standards are focused on work or are intended to rapidly attach welfare recipients to the workforce; education and training is limited. Federal TANF funds may not be used for a family with an adult that has received assistance for 60 months. This is the five-year time limit on welfare receipt. However, up to 20% of the caseload may be extended beyond the five years for reason of "hardship", with hardship defined by the states. Additionally, states may use funds that they must spend to meet the TANF MOE to aid families beyond five years. TANF work participation rules and time limits do not apply to families receiving benefits and services not considered "assistance". Child care, transportation aid, state earned income tax credits for working families, activities to reduce out-of-wedlock pregnancies, activities to promote marriage and two-parent families, and activities to help families that have experienced or are "at risk" of child abuse and neglect are examples of such "nonassistance".

Download or read book Race and the Politics of Welfare Reform written by Sanford F. Schram and published by University of Michigan Press. This book was released on 2010-03-10 with total page 391 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It's hard to imagine discussing welfare policy without discussing race, yet all too often this uncomfortable factor is avoided or simply ignored. Sometimes the relationship between welfare and race is treated as so self-evident as to need no further attention; equally often, race in the context of welfare is glossed over, lest it raise hard questions about racism in American society as a whole. Either way, ducking the issue misrepresents the facts and misleads the public and policy-makers alike. Many scholars have addressed specific aspects of this subject, but until now there has been no single integrated overview. Race and the Politics of Welfare Reform is designed to fill this need and provide a forum for a range of voices and perspectives that reaffirm the key role race has played--and continues to play--in our approach to poverty. The essays collected here offer a systematic, step-by-step approach to the issue. Part 1 traces the evolution of welfare from the 1930s to the sweeping Clinton-era reforms, providing a historical context within which to consider today's attitudes and strategies. Part 2 looks at media representation and public perception, observing, for instance, that although blacks accounted for only about one-third of America's poor from 1967 to 1992, they featured in nearly two-thirds of news stories on poverty, a bias inevitably reflected in public attitudes. Part 3 discusses public discourse, asking questions like "Whose voices get heard and why?" and "What does 'race' mean to different constituencies?" For although "old-fashioned" racism has been replaced by euphemism, many of the same underlying prejudices still drive welfare debates--and indeed are all the more pernicious for being unspoken. Part 4 examines policy choices and implementation, showing how even the best-intentioned reform often simply displaces institutional inequities to the individual level--bias exercised case by case but no less discriminatory in effect. Part 5 explores the effects of welfare reform and the implications of transferring policy-making to the states, where local politics and increasing use of referendum balloting introduce new, often unpredictable concerns. Finally, Frances Fox Piven's concluding commentary, "Why Welfare Is Racist," offers a provocative response to the views expressed in the pages that have gone before--intended not as a "last word" but rather as the opening argument in an ongoing, necessary, and newly envisioned national debate. Sanford Schram is Visiting Professor of Social Work and Social Research, Bryn Mawr Graduate School of Social Work and Social Research. Joe Soss teaches in the Department of Government at the Graduate school of Public Affairs, American University, Washington, D.C. Richard Fording is Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science, University of Kentucky.

Download or read book Poor Support written by David T. Ellwood and published by . This book was released on 1988 with total page 294 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Examines the forms that poverty takes in American families and what can be done to remedy it.

Download or read book Immigrants Welfare Reform and the Poverty of Policy written by Philip Kretsedemas and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2004-04-30 with total page 324 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In many respects, the United States remains a nation of immigrants. This is the first book length treatment of the impact of the 1996 welfare reform act on a wide range of immigrant groups in North America. Contributors to the book draw on ethnographic fieldwork, government data, and original survey research to show how welfare reform has reinforced socio-economic hardships for working poor immigrants. As the essays reveal, reform laws have increased the social isolation of poor immigrant households and discouraged large numbers of qualified immigrants from applying for health and welfare services. All of the articles highlight the importance of examining federal policy guidelines in conjunction with local enforcement policies, labor market dynamics, and immigrant attitudes toward government agencies.

Download or read book From Welfare to Workfare written by Jennifer Mittelstadt and published by Univ of North Carolina Press. This book was released on 2006-03-08 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1996, Democratic president Bill Clinton and the Republican-controlled Congress "ended welfare as we know it" and trumpeted "workfare" as a dramatic break from the past. But, in fact, workfare was not new. Jennifer Mittelstadt locates the roots of the 1996 welfare reform many decades in the past, arguing that women, work, and welfare were intertwined concerns of the liberal welfare state beginning just after World War II. Mittelstadt examines the dramatic reform of Aid to Dependent Children (ADC) from the 1940s through the 1960s, demonstrating that in this often misunderstood period, national policy makers did not overlook issues of poverty, race, and women's role in society. Liberals' public debates and disagreements over welfare, however, caused unintended consequences, she argues, including a shift toward conservatism. Rather than leaving ADC as an income support program for needy mothers, reformers recast it as a social services program aimed at "rehabilitating" women from "dependence" on welfare to "independence," largely by encouraging them to work. Mittelstadt reconstructs the ideology, implementation, and consequences of rehabilitation, probing beneath its surface to reveal gendered and racialized assumptions about the welfare poor and broader societal concerns about poverty, race, family structure, and women's employment.

Download or read book Generation Unbound written by Isabel V. Sawhill and published by Brookings Institution Press. This book was released on 2014-09-25 with total page 227 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Over half of all births to young adults in the United States now occur outside of marriage, and many are unplanned. The result is increased poverty and inequality for children. The left argues for more social support for unmarried parents; the right argues for a return to traditional marriage. In Generation Unbound, Isabel V. Sawhill offers a third approach: change "drifters" into "planners." In a well-written and accessible survey of the impact of family structure on child well-being, Sawhill contrasts "planners," who are delaying parenthood until after they marry, with "drifters," who are having unplanned children early and outside of marriage. These two distinct patterns are contributing to an emerging class divide and threatening social mobility in the United States. Sawhill draws on insights from the new field of behavioral economics, showing that it is possible, by changing the default, to move from a culture that accepts a high number of unplanned pregnancies to a culture in which adults only have children when they are ready to be a parent.

Download or read book The New Localism written by Bruce Katz and published by Brookings Institution Press. This book was released on 2018-01-09 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The New Localism provides a roadmap for change that starts in the communities where most people live and work. In their new book, The New Localism, urban experts Bruce Katz and Jeremy Nowak reveal where the real power to create change lies and how it can be used to address our most serious social, economic, and environmental challenges. Power is shifting in the world: downward from national governments and states to cities and metropolitan communities; horizontally from the public sector to networks of public, private and civic actors; and globally along circuits of capital, trade, and innovation. This new locus of power—this new localism—is emerging by necessity to solve the grand challenges characteristic of modern societies: economic competitiveness, social inclusion and opportunity; a renewed public life; the challenge of diversity; and the imperative of environmental sustainability. Where rising populism on the right and the left exploits the grievances of those left behind in the global economy, new localism has developed as a mechanism to address them head on. New localism is not a replacement for the vital roles federal governments play; it is the ideal complement to an effective federal government, and, currently, an urgently needed remedy for national dysfunction. In The New Localism, Katz and Nowak tell the stories of the cities that are on the vanguard of problem solving. Pittsburgh is catalyzing inclusive growth by inventing and deploying new industries and technologies. Indianapolis is governing its city and metropolis through a network of public, private and civic leaders. Copenhagen is using publicly owned assets like their waterfront to spur large scale redevelopment and finance infrastructure from land sales. Out of these stories emerge new norms of growth, governance, and finance and a path toward a more prosperous, sustainable, and inclusive society. Katz and Nowak imagine a world in which urban institutions finance the future through smart investments in innovation, infrastructure and children and urban intermediaries take solutions created in one city and adapt and tailor them to other cities with speed and precision. As Katz and Nowak show us in The New Localism, “Power now belongs to the problem solvers.”

Download or read book The End of Welfare written by Max Sawicky and published by M.E. Sharpe. This book was released on 1999 with total page 268 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Exploring the consequences of federal devolution on state budgets, this work deals with three major areas of concern: the effect of moving large numbers of welfare recipients into labour markets; the planned federal reforms in the health care field; and trends in federal aid.

Download or read book The New World of Welfare written by Rebecca M. Blank and published by Brookings Inst Press. This book was released on 2001 with total page 514 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The sweeping welfare reform legislation of 1996 will soon be up before Congress for reauthorization. The need for reauthorization presents an opportunity to assess what welfare reform has accomplished and what remains to be done. The New World of Welfare is an attempt to frame the policy debate for reauthorization, and to inform the policy discussion among the states and at the federal level.

Download or read book Evaluating Welfare Reform in an Era of Transition written by National Research Council and published by National Academies Press. This book was released on 2001-08-10 with total page 267 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Reform of welfare is one of the nation's most contentious issues, with debate often driven more by politics than by facts and careful analysis. Evaluating Welfare Reform in an Era of Transition identifies the key policy questions for measuring whether our changing social welfare programs are working, reviews the available studies and research, and recommends the most effective ways to answer those questions. This book discusses the development of welfare policy, including the landmark 1996 federal law that devolved most of the responsibility for welfare policies and their implementation to the states. A thorough analysis of the available research leads to the identification of gaps in what is currently known about the effects of welfare reform. Evaluating Welfare Reform in an Era of Transition specifies what-and why-we need to know about the response of individual states to the federal overhaul of welfare and the effects of the many changes in the nation's welfare laws, policies, and practices. With a clear approach to a variety of issues, Evaluating Welfare Reform in an Era of Transition will be important to policy makers, welfare administrators, researchers, journalists, and advocates on all sides of the issue.

Download or read book The Politics of Disgust written by Ange-Marie Hancock and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2004-12 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Hancock argues that beliefs about poor African American mothers were the foundation for the contentious 1996 welfare reform debate that effectively 'ended welfare as we know it.' She shows how stereotypes and misperceptions about race, class and gender were used to instigate a politics of disgust.

Download or read book 2 00 a Day written by Kathryn Edin and published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. This book was released on 2015 with total page 239 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The story of a kind of poverty in America so deep that we, as a country, don't even think exists--from a leading national poverty expert who "defies convention" (New York Times)

Download or read book Flat Broke with Children written by Sharon Hays and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2004-11-04 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This text explores the impact of recent welfare reform on motherhood, marriage, and work in women's lives. It also focuses on what welfare reform reveals about work and family life, and its impact on us all.

Download or read book The Failed Welfare Revolution written by Brian Steensland and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2017-10-31 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Today the United States has one of the highest poverty rates among the world's rich industrial democracies. The Failed Welfare Revolution shows us that things might have turned out differently. During the 1960s and 1970s, policymakers in three presidential administrations tried to replace the nation's existing welfare system with a revolutionary program to guarantee Americans basic economic security. Surprisingly from today's vantage point, guaranteed income plans received broad bipartisan support in the 1960s. One proposal, President Nixon's Family Assistance Plan, nearly passed into law in the 1970s, and President Carter advanced a similar bill a few years later. The failure of these proposals marked the federal government's last direct effort to alleviate poverty among the least advantaged and, ironically, sowed the seeds of conservative welfare reform strategies under President Reagan and beyond. This episode has largely vanished from America's collective memory. Here, Brian Steensland tells the whole story for the first time--from why such an unlikely policy idea first developed to the factors that sealed its fate. His account, based on extensive original research in presidential archives, draws on mainstream social science perspectives that emphasize the influence of powerful stakeholder groups and policymaking institutions. But Steensland also shows that some of the most potent obstacles to guaranteed income plans were cultural. Most centrally, by challenging Americans' longstanding distinction between the "deserving" and "undeserving" poor, the plans threatened the nation's cultural, political, and economic status quo.

Download or read book Welfare Reform written by Jeff GROGGER and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2009-06-30 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Welfare Reform, Jeffrey Grogger and Lynn Karoly assemble evidence from numerous studies to assess how welfare reform has affected behavior. To broaden our understanding of this wide-ranging policy reform, the authors evaluate the evidence in relation to an economic model of behavior.

Download or read book Congressional Record written by United States. Congress and published by . This book was released on 1968 with total page 1324 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: