This topic is way off the current news radar and I was just wondering how welfare reform in it’'s various manifestations actually worked out in practice as it has been implemented so far. Did it help prevent prior abuses and motivate people to get back into the work world or did it deprive needy people of necessary assistance… or both? What’s the real world verdict so far?
The following is excerpted from the executive summary of “National Evaluation of Welfare-to-Work Strategies: How Effective Are Different Welfare-to-Work Approaches? Five-Year Adult and Child Impacts for Eleven Programs,” a November 2001 report from HHS and the Department of Education. (Damn unwieldy gummint report titles!)
Comparing the programs to the controls:
Comparing LFA programs and HCD programs:
The Features of the Most Effective Program:
The Limits of Pre-Employment Strategies:
All emphases added; more (and more precise) details about study design or results available if anyone wants 'em.
As the excreble Michael Moore’s new film points out, it didn’t work out very well for the single mother who has to ride 80 minutes each way on a special welfare bus everyday to go to a rich mall to work two jobs that still don’t pay enough to meet her rent, forcing her to house her child with a relative while she went to work too early to even get him up or see him off to school, where that same child found a gun, took it to school, and killed a little girl. As the film also pointed out, many people were so desperate as to not want to consider anything other than blaming the little boy for this that they actually wanted to see a six year old, who obviously had no idea what he was doing, prosecuted.
Of course, that’s entirely anecdotal, and shouldn’t be used to judge the program as a whole… which seems to be somewhat of a success from the perspective of reducing welfare rolls.
Bosda’s on the money (no pun). The welfare reserves are significantly smaller since the reform, meaning that they’re seriously strained with an increased number of unemployed people tapping into them.
I don’t have the time to contribute a lot of substantive thoughts to this thread, but here is a very good link to a whole special issue of The American Prospect on welfare reform that came out this past summer. This gives a fairly comprehensive view of welfare reform from an admittedly liberal perspective: http://www.prospect.org/issue_pages/welfare/