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 Means Tested Transfer Programs in the United States written by National Bureau of Economic Research and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2003-10-15 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Few United States government programs are as controversial as those designed to aid the poor. From tax credits to medical assistance, aid to needy families is surrounded by debate—on what benefits should be offered, what forms they should take, and how they should be administered. The past few decades, in fact, have seen this debate lead to broad transformations of aid programs themselves, with Aid to Families with Dependent Children replaced by Temporary Assistance to Needy Families, the Earned Income Tax Credit growing from a minor program to one of the most important for low-income families, and Medicaid greatly expanding its eligibility. This volume provides a remarkable overview of how such programs actually work, offering an impressive wealth of information on the nation's nine largest "means-tested" programs—that is, those in which some test of income forms the basis for participation. For each program, contributors describe origins and goals, summarize policy histories and current rules, and discuss the recipient's characteristics as well as the different types of benefits they receive. Each chapter then provides an overview of scholarly research on each program, bringing together the results of the field's most rigorous statistical examinations. The result is a fascinating portrayal of the evolution and current state of means-tested programs, one that charts a number of shifts in emphasis—the decline of cash assistance, for instance, and the increasing emphasis on work. This exemplary portrait of the nation's safety net will be an invaluable reference for anyone interested in American social policy.

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 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 Property Rights written by Terry L. Anderson and published by Hoover Press. This book was released on 2013-09-01 with total page 148 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Drawing on the thoughts of various philosophers, political thinkers, economists, and lawyers, Terry Anderson and Laura Huggins present a blueprint for the nonexpert-expert on how societies can encourage or discourage freedom and prosperity through their property rights institutions. This Hoover Classic edition of Property Rightsdetails step-by-step what property rights are, what they do, how they evolve, how they can be protected, and how they promote freedom and prosperity.

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 Welfare Reform Reauthorization Proposals written by United States. Congress. House. Committee on Ways and Means. Subcommittee on Human Resources and published by . This book was released on 2003 with total page 406 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Lifting Up the Poor written by Mary Jo Bane and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2003-10-10 with total page 193 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: People who participate in debates about the causes and cures of poverty often speak from religious conviction. But those convictions are rarely made explicit or debated on their own terms. Rarely is the influence of personal religious commitment on policy decisions examined. Two of the nation's foremost scholars and policy advocates break the mold in this lively volume, the first to be published in the new Pew Forum Dialogues on Religion and Public Life. The authors bring their faith traditions, policy experience, academic expertise, and political commitments together in this moving, pointed, and informed discussion of poverty, one of our most vexing public issues. Mary Jo Bane writes of her experiences running social service agencies, work that has been informed by "Catholic social teaching, and a Catholic sensibility that is shaped every day by prayer and worship." Policy analysis, she writes, is often "indeterminate" and "inconclusive." It requires grappling with "competing values that must be balanced." It demands judgment calls, and Bane's Catholic sensibility informs the calls she makes. Drawing from various Christian traditions, Lawrence Mead's essay discusses the role of nurturing Christian virtues and personal responsibility as a means of transforming a "defeatist culture" and combating poverty. Quoting Shelley, Mead describes theologians as the "unacknowledged legislators of mankind" and argues that even nonbelievers can look to the Christian tradition as "the crucible that formed the moral values of modern politics." Bane emphasizes the social justice claims of her tradition, and Mead challenges the view of many who see economic poverty as a biblical priority that deserves "preference ahead of other social concerns." But both assert that an engagement with religious traditions is indispensable to an honest and searching debate about poverty, policy choices, and the public purposes of religion.

Download or read book A Roadmap to Reducing Child Poverty written by National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine and published by National Academies Press. This book was released on 2019-09-16 with total page 619 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The strengths and abilities children develop from infancy through adolescence are crucial for their physical, emotional, and cognitive growth, which in turn help them to achieve success in school and to become responsible, economically self-sufficient, and healthy adults. Capable, responsible, and healthy adults are clearly the foundation of a well-functioning and prosperous society, yet America's future is not as secure as it could be because millions of American children live in families with incomes below the poverty line. A wealth of evidence suggests that a lack of adequate economic resources for families with children compromises these children's ability to grow and achieve adult success, hurting them and the broader society. A Roadmap to Reducing Child Poverty reviews the research on linkages between child poverty and child well-being, and analyzes the poverty-reducing effects of major assistance programs directed at children and families. This report also provides policy and program recommendations for reducing the number of children living in poverty in the United States by half within 10 years.

Download or read book Work Over Welfare written by Ron Haskins and published by . This book was released on 2006 with total page 472 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As a key staffer on the House Ways and Means Committee, Haskins was one of the architects of the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act of 1996. Here, he portrays the political battles that produced the most dramatic overhaul of the welfare system, since its creation as part of the New Deal.

Download or read book Immigrants and Welfare written by Michael E. Fix and published by Russell Sage Foundation. This book was released on 2009-11-25 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The lore of the immigrant who comes to the United States to take advantage of our welfare system has a long history in America's collective mythology, but it has little basis in fact. The so-called problem of immigrants on the dole was nonetheless a major concern of the 1996 welfare reform law, the impact of which is still playing out today. While legal immigrants continue to pay taxes and are eligible for the draft, welfare reform has severely limited their access to government supports in times of crisis. Edited by Michael Fix, Immigrants and Welfare rigorously assesses the welfare reform law, questions whether its immigrant provisions were ever really necessary, and examines its impact on legal immigrants' ability to integrate into American society. Immigrants and Welfare draws on fields from demography and law to developmental psychology. The first part of the volume probes the politics behind the welfare reform law, its legal underpinnings, and what it may mean for integration policy. Contributor Ron Haskins makes a case for welfare reform's ultimate success but cautions that excluding noncitizen children (future workers) from benefits today will inevitably have serious repercussions for the American economy down the road. Michael Wishnie describes the implications of the law for equal protection of immigrants under the U.S. Constitution. The second part of the book focuses on empirical research regarding immigrants' propensity to use benefits before the law passed, and immigrants' use and hardship levels afterwards. Jennifer Van Hook and Frank Bean analyze immigrants' benefit use before the law was passed in order to address the contested sociological theories that immigrants are inclined to welfare use and that it slows their assimilation. Randy Capps, Michael Fix, and Everett Henderson track trends before and after welfare reform in legal immigrants' use of the major federal benefit programs affected by the law. Leighton Ku looks specifically at trends in food stamps and Medicaid use among noncitizen children and adults and documents the declining health insurance coverage of noncitizen parents and children. Finally, Ariel Kalil and Danielle Crosby use longitudinal data from Chicago to examine the health of children in immigrant families that left welfare. Even though few states took the federal government's invitation with the 1996 welfare reform law to completely freeze legal immigrants out of the social safety net, many of the law's most far-reaching provisions remain in place and have significant implications for immigrants. Immigrants and Welfare takes a balanced look at the politics and history of immigrant access to safety-net supports and the ongoing impacts of welfare. Copublished with the Migration Policy Institute

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 Oxford Handbook of U S Social Policy written by Daniel Béland and published by Oxford Handbooks. This book was released on 2015 with total page 689 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This handbook provides a survey of the American welfare state. It offers an historical overview of U.S. social policy from the colonial era to the present, a discussion of available theoretical perspectives on it, an analysis of social programmes, and on overview of the U.S. welfare state's consequences for poverty, inequality, and citizenship.

Download or read book Public Finance and Public Policy written by Jonathan Gruber and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2005 with total page 806 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Chapters include: "Income distribution and welfare programs", "State and local government expenditures" and "Health economics and private health insurance".

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 United States Welfare Policy written by Thomas Massaro and published by Moral Traditions series. This book was released on 2007 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Welfare Reform Act of 1996 drastically changed the delivery of social services in the US. This title uses Catholic social teaching as a lens through which to view contemporary American welfare policies, citing the tradition's emphasis on serving the needy - including a preferential option for the poor - and the common good.

Download or read book Rainy Day and Other Special TANF Issues written by United States. Congress. House. Committee on Ways and Means. Subcommittee on Human Resources and published by . This book was released on 2001 with total page 56 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: