In 1996 the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act was made into law in the U.S. with the goal of 'ending welfare as we know it."
I remember clearly at the time many of my friend being very afraid of the repercussions that it would have on the poor.
But the desire was to encourage, even force, the poor to limit their time on welfare. This was supposed to help end the cycle of poverty by having the poor go into job training and become self supporting.
Has this made life easier or harder for the poor on welfare?
Has it succeeded in helping people learn to be self supporting?
Has it made it harder to cheat the system by staying on welfare endlessly?
Has it helped prevent the multiple generations of families who never learned the culture of getting a real job?
Has it withheld assistance from those who really need it?
Has it overall been a positive development?
I can’t find long-term stats for eligibility for the student free and reduced price lunch program. There are more students eligible since the recession started, but I can’t find whether the number had dropped in previous years. Some anecdotal cites suggest that eligibility was growing during 2000-2006, but don’t back it up with hard numbers.
So federal and state governments may be spending less on poor people, but I can’t find any statistics that suggest a sizable group of poor people have become less poor.
“All states, however, have allowed exceptions with the intent of not punishing children because their parents have gone over the time limit.”
You can take this in any direction you like. Either the states undermined the intent of the program by allowing people to stay on the welfare rolls as long as they have children. The “holding your own children hostage” arrangement was what people complained about in the first place, but in my opinion this is an intractable problem. If you are going to leave children in the custody of their parents (primarily single mothers) who do not have enough marketable skills to earn enough money to:
pay for child care that is safe and reliable
pay for transportation to and from work
support yourself and your kids at some minimum (socially defined of course) level
then you are screwed.
Properly consructed welfare reform costs more money rather than less. A lot more. Because instead of providing housing assistance and food stamps, you have to finance the difference between the employees earning power and the cost of child care, transportation and training. For a great many people, this is is not a good equation, especially if they have multiple children.