That’s the experience of this reader, who thinks “the biggest problem with welfare and TANF is the work requirement.” Her story shows why:
In October 2013 I had my daughter. She was born with an ultra-rare
disease. (She is one of 50 patients worldwide.) I, at the time, had a decent job in the restaurant industry as an Event Director. I worked non-traditional hours and some weeks more than 70 hours a week. This wasn’t conducive to caring for a child with only a three-year life expectancy. I tried my hardest to juggle it all. In February of 2014 I lost my job.
No day care would take my daughter because of her condition. They didn’t have the proper equipment to keep her safe. No friends would babysit because they were afraid of her. The only day care that took assistance closed at 6 p.m.
But even if I had found another job, I would not have been able to find one making what I was making that would allow me to take off two days a week to make doctor’s appointments my child needed to survive—not to mention the several surgeries and hospitalizations.
I have always worked, often more than one job, since I was 14. But, now I needed help. I applied for TANF and was told that I would not qualify for any services because I was “work-ready.”
Nothing. All my hard work. All the taxes I have paid. I could get nothing.
Nothing does not put gas in the car to get to appointments. Nothing does not buy the medical equipment my child needed. Nothing would not keep our lights on, or buy diapers or tampons.
Well, currently I am homeless with four children, including the medically fragile one. I don’t make enough to afford housing that will fit us all. Vouchers for housing is closed. The waiting list, when it opens, will be two years or longer.
I do receive child support and disability ... but not enough. Because
I am homeless, I receive $34 in food stamps a month. (I have no housing expenses.)
While I can logically understand the need for Welfare Reform and how the policies came about, I cannot help but be slightly disgusted that someone who worked 40+ hours a week from age 18-35 cannot get the help they need, even for a short time, because of the rules that govern the programs. Had I not worked so hard in school or professionally, I would be able to get us back on our feet.
There may be very real and very serious reasons people cannot work. These should be taken into consideration. Not solely whether they are “capable” of working.
I wish I could say I was the only Rare Disease family going through this. I’m not.
If you’ve been through something similar, we’d like to hear from you. Please write to us at hello@theatlantic.com.
From the late 1970s to the mid-1980s, this reader was “the product of the AFDC program”—the Aid to Families With Dependent Children. Here she describes the ups and downs of growing up on welfare:
I was the third of four daughters. My mother was a traditional homemaker when my parents divorced. I’m not sure about the dynamics of what occurred, but I know that money from my father was not received. He insists he tried paying, but my mother insisted he never provided it.
In any regard, back then there were no reliable daycares, just other women who would babysit. Additionally, my mom had some mental-health issues that made it very difficult for her to ever maintain full-time employment. But mostly, she was a housewife—that was her dream growing up as a young woman in the 1950s. The option for my mother was to go back to work and leave us kids alone (like some other single moms did) or go on welfare. She opted for the latter.
I will admit, I was embarrassed as a child, growing up in a middle-class neighborhood on welfare. We did not live well. There was no extra money for new clothes or for the latest gadget. Clothes were hand-me-downs from older sisters or friends.
I have a distinct recollection of going with my mother one of the times she had to “prove” that she was still worthy of assistance. It was a humiliating process. The welfare office was filled with people who were treated like herds of cattle. Every aspect of your finances was scrutinized. Sometimes they would send out a caseworker to do a “spot check” on the house. My mother hated it, and it always left her in a sour mood.
Being on AFDC also qualified us for free breakfast and lunches. I swear, I would’ve starved some days if we didn’t have that option. Many days there was only dry milk, bread, mayonnaise, and mustard in the refrigerator. More than once did my sisters and I eat mustard-and-mayonnaise sandwiches.
One winter, our hot-water tank broke and we didn’t have money to repair it. We live in Buffalo, New York—Buffalo with no hot water in January. Have you ever washed your hair in cold water? To bather we had to heat up pots of water on the stove to dump into the bathtub.
Repairs in the home had to wait and there was always something broken. Our car was always on the verge of breaking down. We did not have cable or Atari Pong (yes, it was way back then). We went way too long without doctor’s appointments and frequently went to clinics or emergency rooms because we owed the regular physician too much money. And not many doctors took Medicaid.
But despite all this, I have nothing but praise for AFDC. Why?
Looking back, without the AFDC program I do not know what would have become of my sisters and me. It provided for a roof over our heads, food on the table (no matter how meager), and assistance with utility bills. Growing up on welfare also qualified us for additional assistance to go to college.
So when someone starts railing against “people on welfare,” I proudly say: I’m one of them. I grew up on it, I graduated valedictorian of my high school class, I’ve held a job since I was 15, and I went to college and earned my bachelor’s and my master’s. I’ve been married for over 28 years and have four daughters myself and have worked for the federal government for over 12 years. Welfare worked.
It worked well for my sisters, too. One is an RN, one is an artist with a business degree, and one is a schoolteacher. People say that we are anomalies, but I say the opposite: We are the faces of AFDC, and those welfare queens are the anomalies.
I’m very, very grateful that we had what we had, and it breaks my heart to see what families have to go through today. Welfare has humbled me and been one of the best life lessons.
My sisters and I have told many stories to our children that they do not understand the meaning of poverty—and even we don’t understand because I never saw as “poor.” My sisters and I once cried to my mom how “poor” we were, and her response was to make us volunteer at the local soup kitchen or shelter on Thanksgiving and Christmas Eve. “This is poor,” she told us. “This is the only meal these children will have, and these may be the only gifts they receive. They may not even have a home to go to after this. We do and we have enough. If you feel poor, then you are just simply poor in spirit.”
I’ve carried that tradition on with my children, volunteering at soup kitchens and shelters; and honestly, it makes for the best holiday memories for our family.
I found out much later in life about the financial toll on my mother. Our childhood home became so dilapidated over time that when I finally convinced my mother to sell, it was way under market for homes in that area. Then, I found out that she had a lien against her house put on by the county for receiving AFDC payments. So it was never “free” for us; they essentially took her house.
I was able to negotiate the price of the lien down, so that in the final year of my mother’s life she bought new furniture for the first time in her life. Nothing expensive, mind you, but to her it was the most wonderful piece of furniture ever created. I wish she would have lived longer to enjoy it more.
I know this is probably much longer than you wanted, but I for one am happy to say that I’m an AFDC success story. And there are lots of us.
Are you another one? If you had a similar—or contrasting—experience with AFDC or TANF, we’d like to hear from you: hello@theatlantic.com.
Yesterday marked 20 years since Bill Clinton’s controversial welfare reform bill went into effect, replacing America’s old safety net, Aid to Families With Dependent Children (AFDC), with a new one—Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF)—intended to encourage welfare recipients to find work and become self-sufficient. But the reforms didn’t work out quite as well as policymakers hoped. Kathryn Edin and H. Luke Shaefer, two experts on public policy, have an Atlantic piece this week critiquing the program as it functions today. This reader has a lot of firsthand experience with the problems:
I was not on aid during welfare reform (although I was many years previously). But I was a vocational counselor in California whose job it was to get people who applied for aid into some sort of work activity. Preferable was “unsubsidized” employment, but most often it was “Work Experience,” in which the “participant” was placed in a government or nonprofit agency (anywhere from 20-32 hours a week) and they were paid minimum wage, of which a portion was deducted from their grant. Transportation and childcare was paid for. This lasted for six months.
And after that? Well, we moved on to step two, which was usually just more of the same until they “timed out” or were lucky enough to land a job. Some people came in, got in the program, and took off running and wound up in good jobs with just a little hand up. Other people, even though they did well, did not always wind up with a paying job at the end. The reasons are many, but we can start with the economy.
When welfare reform was enacted in 1996, the economy was booming, employers were begging for entry-level workers, and getting welfare recipients into those jobs made sense. But those heady times did not last, and even the most talented of people struggled to find a job that would get them off aid—never mind those retail and fast food jobs with crazy hours that made childcare a nightmare and kept people in poverty anyway.
Also, many women on aid suffer from mental health issues—not so severe that they would qualify for disability, but severe enough that they do not have the emotional resources to show up to work every day and focus on their tasks and get along with their supervisors and co-workers. And the struggle to raise children on top of work … they are sadly going to fail, and the system was set up to make them fail.
As a vocational counselor, I could have put together a plan for them that would “meet the participant where she is at.” Some would get a job and get off aid sooner, others would take much longer. And of course, some never would—at least not get off aid through finding work. What I often saw instead was women who lived with men to have some means of support. I could go on ... and on ...
If welfare reform had enacted good policy based on reasoned analysis instead of playing politics, many of the failures I saw in outcomes would not likely have occurred. The program failed most because of bad policy based on political bias. I recall the hearings that were held prior to the enactments of the legislation. Many of those who spoke addressed the very issues I have recounted here. They went right over the heads of the committee members.
Now they ask why it failed. They set it up to fail.
If requiring people to get jobs doesn’t work, what is good policy? According to Edin and Shaefer:
We’ve traveled to many different parts of the country getting to know people in need. While greedy, heartless landlords were sometimes a source of their troubles, their biggest problem—by far—has been the lack of access to a cash safety net—money—when failing to find or keep a job. In 21st-century America, a family needs at least some cash to have any chance at stability. Only money can pay the rent (though a minority of families get subsidies via a housing voucher). Only money buys socks, underwear, and school supplies. Money is what’s needed to keep the utilities on. Each of the families we followed—technically eligible if our reading of the rules is right—weren’t getting that money from TANF.
This reader has a suggestion for how to provide such cash:
Federal and state, we spend close to a trillion dollars a year (it was $927B in 2011) on means-tested welfare programs, but half of that is Medicaid. If you really want to encourage work and independence, then rolling all these dollars—most of which are more effective at signaling our own moral rectitude and compassion than they are at making people's lives better—into a reformed version of the earned income tax credit (EITC), with a steep phase-in and a shallow clawback, direct deposited regularly into a bank account and based on the last few weeks’ paychecks, would be a lot more useful. Save out a little for those who are truly unemployable, and we’d reach a lot more people for the same amount of money.
A trillion dollars divided by the 48 million Americans living in poverty in 2015 comes out to about $20,833 per individual. That’s plenty of money to make life decent, if not comfortable, for most of the impoverished.
Lastly, a reader who received aid before the 1996 reforms points to the program that most helped her family:
In the late 1980s and early 1990s, we weathered an extended period of unemployment and underemployment. We had moved to Kansas to help my in-laws, who were in declining health, but in rural Kansas jobs that paid a living wage were in short supply. So we found ourselves on the “welfare” rolls—I think we had AFDC for a short time, but for several years we received food stamps and we had medical cards. We also had WIC (Women, Infants, and Children) assistance and our youngest children went to Head Start preschool.
These all helped, but the program that I think made the biggest difference in helping us get out of poverty was subsidized childcare. When that became available to us, I was able to work at part-time jobs while my children were small without having to use everything I made to pay for childcare. It also made it possible for me to go to graduate school (for which I had earned scholarships and assistantships), which led directly to me being able to get better paying jobs. Our finances were still very tight and it was a long journey out of poverty, but it would have been even harder without childcare assistance.
Unfortunately, the childcare assistance program has been cut more and more over the last 20 years—not only here in Kansas but in other states as well. It’s always seemed strange to me for lawmakers to tell poor people to get jobs, but not offer any substantive support that makes it worthwhile to work.
So what do you think is the best way to provide that substantive support, if at all? Write us at hello@theatlantic.com, particularly if you have experience implementing a welfare program or receiving aid from one.
Gillian recently explored “How the Tax-Prep Industry Takes Advantage of Low-Income Filers”—namely by overcharging poor people to process the refund they receive through the Earned Income Tax Credit. “A new report finds that some Americans are giving away nearly 25 percent of their refund for services they could get for free,” Gillian wrote. Here’s a representative experience from a reader:
I get the EITC. This year I got my taxes done at H&R Block and they charged me almost $400. They didn’t have any price listings anywhere and didn’t explain pricing in person before we started. I walked in thinking it was a $50-100 service and left feeling scammed. Yes my refund is large, but that’s my emergency fund for the entire year. Next time I’ll know better.
A helpful email via hello@ just came in from two doctors, Michael Hole and Lucy Marcil, plugging a program they founded to help low-income people keep more of their tax money:
As pediatricians, we think Gillian B. White’s article means more than major tax-prep chains like H&R Block and Liberty taking money from America’s most vulnerable and working families. It means potential damage to the health and wellbeing of the country’s future and most precious resource—her children.
The EITC and Child Tax Credit, together, lift more children out of poverty than any other Federal policies. The EITC, in particular, has been linked to improved maternal health, higher birth weights among black populations, improved K-12 school performance, and increased adulthood income for children whose caregivers received the refunds.
[Our] new organization, StreetCred, files taxes and tax credit applications for low-income, working families waiting to see their doctors in pediatric clinics. For free. StreetCred, a VITA-sponsored organization that filed returns with 94% accuracy per the IRS during the 2016 tax season, maximizes convenience and minimizes complexity for taxpayers relying heavily on their refunds for basic necessities.
Meanwhile, here’s a substantive back-and-forth between a few readers in the comments section. The first:
Bilking people out of their EITC is just a particularly egregious example of what’s wrong with EITC in the first place: Lots of low-income families have lousy money management skills, and dropping a giant chunk of cash on them in late April is a recipe for ensuring that the cash has a minimal impact on their well-being, and is all gone by May.
EITC needs to be disbursed in smaller chunks, over the whole year. There used to be a program called “Advance EITC,” which enhanced the earner’s paycheck, but it was discontinued because it was fraud-prone and difficult to administer. [CB note: Here’s a good 2009 post from The Tax Foundation if you’re interested in details over the AEITC’s demise.]
There’s simply no reason why there isn’t a decent, secure, low-fraud IT solution to make something like AEITC work. It probably requires some surveillance of bank accounts (which will cause all sorts of civil libertarian hand-wringing), but spreading the money out over the whole year will be massively more beneficial than dumping it as a lump sum.
This reader disagrees:
People with lousy money management skills will still have lousy money management skills, regardless of how you distribute the money. If you give it to them all at once, they’ll blow the whole chunk on a 70" flat screen. If you dole it out in smaller pieces each month, they’ll buy smaller stupid items each month.
A counterpoint from the first commenter:
Semi-competent money management isn’t rocket science; it’s something that most people learn when they’re kids. And how do they learn it? By being entrusted with small amounts of money and learning the consequences of spending it, either wisely or unwisely. Drop a year’s worth of allowance on a kid and tell him that it’s all he gets for the year and he’ll ... go out and buy a 70" flat screen. Give him a weekly allowance and he’ll discover what he can and can’t do with it. He gets to make lots of little mistakes instead of a couple of big ones.
Update from a reader who essentially rebuts both of those readers, pointing to a 2015 report from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities:
The study found that the families spent roughly half of EITC refunds on current consumption, such as groceries, child expenses, and furniture. They spent the other half paying off past-due bills and debt, and for “asset-building” such as savings, education, or home ownership and home repairs. Nearly two-thirds of families spent part of their refunds on expenses related to raising children, and about one-third made car purchases or repairs.
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