WP: Welfare Changes A Burden To States (Work Alternatives Cut)

[RamboLiberal]

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/08/06/AR2006080600879.html

Having grown up on welfare, Rochelle Riordan had vowed never to ask for a government handout. That was before her hard-drinking husband kicked her and their young daughter out of their house near Lewiston, Maine, leaving her with a $300 bank account, a bad job market and a 15-year-old car held together in spots with duct tape.

Maine's welfare agency, she heard, was offering help for poor parents to go to college full time. With the state paying for day care and $513 a month in living expenses, Riordan, 37, has been on the dean's list every semester at the University of Southern Maine, expecting to graduate and start a social work career next spring. But this summer, her plans -- and Maine's Parents as Scholars program -- suddenly are on shaky ground; under new federal rules, studying for a bachelor's degree no longer counts by itself as an acceptable way for people on welfare to spend their time.

A decade after the government set out to transform the nation's welfare system, the limits on college are part of a controversial second phase of welfare reform that is beginning to ripple across the country. The new rules, written by Congress and the Bush administration, require states to focus intensely on making more poor people work, while discouraging other activities that might help untangle their lives. By Oct. 1, state and local welfare offices must figure out how to steer hundreds of thousands of low-income adults into jobs, or longer work hours. They also must adjust to limits on the length of time people on welfare can devote to trying to shed drug addictions, recover from mental illnesses or get an education.

This second generation of change reverses a central idea behind the 1996 law that ended six decades of welfare as an unlimited federal entitlement to cash assistance. The law decentralized welfare, handing states a lump sum of money and the freedom to design their own programs of temporary help for poor families. Ten years later, the government is tightening the federal reins.

[don954]

1. if they cant have illegales

they will do their dam-dist to make sure poor Americans stay uneducated and poor. This is something the neocons hate, a Clinton program designed to get people out of poverty, they want to make it next to impossible to accomplish that.

[rodeodance]

2. "Now you have fixed block grants in exchange for federal micromanagement.

....Many state officials and advocates are furious. "You had fixed block grants in exchange for state flexibility," said Elaine M. Ryan, deputy executive director of the American Public Human Services Association, which represents welfare directors around the country. "Now you have fixed block grants in exchange for federal micromanagement. . . . That was not the deal."

Based on interviews with welfare officials in 10 states, including in the Washington area, the new requirements conflict in significant ways with the eclectic approaches to welfare that states have chosen.

[rodeodance]

3. "buried in a sprawling bill meant mainly to cut federal spending,"

......Despite that unexpected success, when the law came up for renewal in 2002, lawmakers deadlocked in a bitter ideological fight over how it should be changed. Democrats argued that the government should give states more money to subsidize child care while parents were at work. Republicans argued that the work requirements were not strict enough.

The law, the GOP pointed out, had envisioned that half the adults on welfare would get jobs. In reality, fewer than one-third were working -- and in some places, many fewer than that -- because the law had given states an inducement: The more people a state moved off its welfare rolls, the smaller the share of those who remained had to work.

Last December, buried in a sprawling bill meant mainly to cut federal spending, Republicans finally got the welfare changes they wanted. They compel states to find jobs for fully half their adult clients, and they increase the required work hours from 20 hours per week to 30. Then, in late June, the Department of Health and Human Services issued strict new rules defining what counts as work -- and who must be counted.

[Iowa]

4. Job placement is basically a sham...

The new rules, written by Congress and the Bush administration, require states to focus intensely on making more poor people work, while discouraging other activities that might help untangle their lives. By Oct. 1, state and local welfare offices must figure out how to steer hundreds of thousands of low-income adults into jobs...

Yeah, right! State employees don't have any control over how many jobs exist, nor do they control employer hiring decisions. So how in the hell are state employees supposed to place hundreds of thousands of unskilled people into jobs? Furthermore, republican meddling has made the task almost impossible:

--They have trashed the economy so badly that there aren't nearly enough jobs to go around, yet they proceed as if there are enough jobs. LIE #1
--They have stigmatized AFDC recipients as shiftless, lazy welfare bums - and yet they proceed as if employers are clamoring to hire them, and they pretend that it is simply a matter of convincing them to work. LIE #2
--Republicans have demonized people who work for the government, and yet they proceed as if government employees will be able to contact employers and convince them to hire all of their clients. LIE #3

LIE, LIE, LIE...

This is classic republican. Everything they do is riddled with incompetence and lies. I'd hate to be a state employee and have to deal with this, and I'd hate to be a person trying negotiate the system. Both have my sympathy.

[mntleo2]

5. Worse Welfare Is Only 3% Of The Budget

They had been demonizing welfare mothers for years to get everybody looking the other way about the rest of the budget. When Welfare DEFormed was enacted welfare mothers were treated as if they were all K street lobbyists, living the high life, like they were phamaceutical, energy and military lobbyists all rolled into one. But the REAL steal was happening right under our noses and they used the welfare mom as their scapegoat while they set up and enacted laws that make all Americans their slaves. The truth was that in 1996, welfare was a mere 4% of the budget, while the military during peacetime was 47%of the budget. And we will not even mention the pork that was in the rest of those budgets, even then.

The truth then was that welfare moms stayed on the average of 2 years on welfare and used it as a leg up to get an education. Over 70% of welfare moms graduated from, college. They had on the average 1.7 kids and multigeneration welfare was mostly in communities where there was rampant racism, sexism, unemployment and lack of opportunities.

One of the biggest and saddest part of Welfare DEFormed is that it says in essence that Americans are expendable and the only way they can contribute is by working a job ~ any job no matter how poorly paid, how terrible, or what it does to the family. It denigrates women whose unpaid work is now codified as "doing nothing" because women have traditionally performed this work. Work such as raising children, taking care of elderly relatives, taking care of neighbors, and volunteering in their communities. All of this is now "doing nothing." So now, all that time, effort and money you put into raising the next generation to take care of this country, fight in our wars, pay the taxes, run the corporations for our country's future, is "doing nothing." ONLY working a McJob is "doing something" for your country.

If you think for one minute this law was enacted only for the poor you are wrong and I would say you would be UnAmerican to consider ANY law only aimed at one segment of the population. The enacters of this law knew you would fall for it though ~ because you would believe that, of course this law does not apply to YOU.

The real name of Welfare DEFormed is "the Personal Responisibility Act." It was written by Robert Recter of the Heritage Foundation and pushed through by Newt Gingrich, signed into law by Clinton. These are politicians who have been anything BUT "personally responsible" themselves. They are the elitists who enacted NAFTA at the same time in order to enslave you and make you and your children work for nothing. They are now the ones enriching themselves with your tax dollars on wars that only kill people and destroy property so they can be paid to rebuild it. They are the pricks who have not one whit of concern for We The People. The Heritage Foundation is the place where Grover Nordquist resides and said he would like to see government "drowned in the bathtub" so corporations could take their facist place in our lives so they can be funded by We The People while exploiting us.

This law also opens the door to giving away to the rich and corporations all our tax dollars. Since they are the only ones "doing anything" because they "give" us jobs, and they are the ones making it so you all "do something", they are the ones who "deserve" all the breaks.

Now do you get it? If you don't perhaps you are clinging like a limpet to the rock you call your job and selling your soul to endure so you don't become like more and more of the rest of us; poor, unemployed or underemployed, sick, homeless, and looking towards working for these bastards until we die of exhaustion. Welfare DEFormed is the facist elitist's dream come true.

My 2 cents

Cat In Seattle

[laheina]

6. Amen.

And so much for those "family values" that the RW is always talking up.

[raccoon]

7. Great post. Also illustrates that the two parties (so-called)

aren't much different.

"It was written by Robert Recter of the Heritage Foundation and pushed through by Newt Gingrich, signed into law by Clinton. "

[eppur_se_muova]

8. Specifically, welfare for the POOR.

Welfare for the rich and the corporations may well be a majority of the Federal budget.

on edit: "Personal Responsibility Act" -- how chillingly Orwellian. The Repukes are masters of the arcane art of de-legitimization through nomenclature.

GREAT post, by the way.

[undergroundpanther]

10. I wish we could get

These elitist shit wads and put them in chains and make them lick the gutters "give them something to DO" Work the rich like dogs until they die.Let them feel how it feels to be a working poor or a welfare recipient.Let them be humiliated hopeless and suffer and WORK WORK WORK..

Take away all their money and property of their"families" and drain the offshore accounts and wherever else these pigs hide their booty and use it ALL to create a NEW America that values the general welfare, that honors equality, help people who have been oppressed traumatized hurt and exploited by these wealthy thugs and their evil scams and financial abuse.

I hope someday there is NO ruling class. That no one will ever be rich enough to corrupt the country and scam billions of people out of their own lives,self actualization,hopes,dreams and happiness.

And I hope all people learn to recognize what a scam artist is,what an authoritarian and conduct disordered personality is ,What Abuse is,and what manipulation is. And I hope people treat the abusers, the greedy,the over ambitious,the control freak and dominator's as the cancerous non entities they are and NEVER EVER trust them or give them power,prestige,pity or too much money.

[SoCalDem]

11. But "Welfare Mom with a new cadillac & a fur coat" is what the public

has heard for 3 decades...The facts are so "boring" compared to the slick slogans..:sarcasm:

the truth is that upwards of 80% of ALL of us are a few paychecks away from "needing" welfare..


THIS is the message that needs to get out..

Everyday people need to see the "oreo budget" presentation and to start asking the "government" jusy WHY+ it is that with OUR own money, we do not deserve ANY safety net...

[mntleo2]

12. Thank-You SoCalDemand Others!

When more of us see the light about the war on the poor and middle class and recognize that, while it began with the poor, these laws that were enacted 10 years ago are now moving to the middle class, then we will begin the arduous task of rebuilding that safety net. I am only sad that, when we poor were trying to tell the middle class this was going to be a result, we were not heard. I do think this was because at that time, there was a huge outrage toward the poor and homeless when in reality we are/were the canary in the mine. There is a myriad of problems with poverty that is tangled, ugly and very difficult to solve. No simple answers. Except perhaps one. Money. I am going to say something perhaps shocking: I do not think the poor have any different problems than the upper classes, they are just held more accountable for them.

I was struck once by a comment from one of my kids (who, as usual teach me far more wisdom than any college I have attended). We lived by the grace of Section 8 in an upper middle class neighborhood. I am white, but my kids are hispanic and we were by far both a minority in race as well as income. One time, in the late summer heat around 11 at night, the police brought my son home and told me they had also brought his friend home (a black girl). He had gotten a complaint that my son and his friend along some other neighborhood kids (all white and upper income) were standing under a street light doing what 13 and 14 year olds do, chasing each other, laughing and talking loud. The policeman said there was no curfew violation, and no, nobody was doing anything illegal, but it just made the neighbors "nervous" that they were there.

After the policeman left, in embarrassment and anger I wailed at my son, "Why do YOU always have to get into so much trouble, your other friends never seem to have these problems!" He looked at me sadly and said, "They DO have the same problems as me, Mom. But their parents are rich and nobody knows ..."

His point here is, that drug abuse, alcoholism, and other problems are experienced just as much by the upper classes but they are not as visible. Poverty has its problems right out there in the open where everyone can see them, not hidden in some suburban McMansion. But people turn the other way and refuse to see what is right before their eyes. The law is based on paying fines and if they are not paid, then you "do time." For instance, if an upper income kid gets in trouble Daddy can pay the fine and the kid is immediately out of the System. A poor parent cannot do that, so the kids stay in the System, which further corrupts and angers them. The cycle of crime, poverty, and human suffering continues. My point is that the System in its present state does not work and the poor are the canaries that will tell you that. Welfare DEFormed is another bit of proof that punishing one segment of the population only creates more problems and they do not stop with the poor. If we did the careful work of actually supporting one another rather than destroying each other, perhaps we would have less problems across the board.

So yeah, we poor are the scapegoats in so many ways, and it could be a way of helping ALL of us if we just realized we are all a paycheck away from the street. But many prefer to deny that reality sometimes ~ and therfore vote against their own best interests. I am not trying to make we poor as victims here, because we also make our choices, which we should own. I am just saying the "owning" those problems helps when you have support, not demonization and alienation. As the commenter below this comment said, this discussion should not have dropped to the bottom of the list, but unfortunately poverty is not a hot-button issue ~ until it hits you.

Cat In Seattle

[brer cat]

9. This thread should not have hit bottom on DU

Granted, we are all dealing with so much going on, but this is key and bread-and-butter Democratic. These mothers...and probably some fathers...are taking a small amount of gov't money to make their future bright. Giving a small stake to someone responsible enough to get a higher education in order to improve not only their lives, but pay taxes at a much higher rate to REPAY the small amounts they received is democracy in action. Why is this not important at DU?

[stepnw1f]

13. Only 3% Goes to Welfare, Yet They Attack it with Fervor

Disgusting... how ignorant and backwards the right wing is.