It has been a decade since the full implementation of the Clinton era welfare reforms. The new legislation required healthy welfare recipients to work or go to school. The law also imposed a five-year lifetime benefits cap, and required participants to sign a personal responsibility statement. In several of the states where solid welfare recipient studies were the norm, the changes to the law revealed some ugly truths about the old program. In some places 60 percent of recipients dropped out of the system because they would not work or sign the personal responsibility statement. This was partly because many already had jobs, but the caricature of the welfare queen proved right enough to give everyone pause.

Welfare rolls today remain a small fraction of the pre-1996 levels. Today’s recipients are mostly women in their 20s and 30s who have recently become single parents. Very, very few lose benefits due to the 5-year limit – they are off the program long before that. The welfare queen is gone, and we are all the better for it.

The 1996 Welfare Reform Act also extended many benefits, including Medicaid, to the working poor. I personally think this a great public policy achievement. By allowing folks to retain health care it reduced a huge barrier to for poorer workers from entering the workforce. For most of these workers, as for everyone I know, the only upward path was, and is, through work.  

From 1996 to the present the ranks of low wage workers swelled. Workers who would have previously been on public assistance or labored in the shadow economy entered formal labor markets. This provided the statistical argument that wages for low wage workers was stagnant or dropping over the past decade or so. But, like many political arguments it fails to recognize the huge benefits to both society and the low wage workers of making productive labor a possibility.

Another result of this landmark legislation is that both public debate and public policy towards the working poor, and those in poverty, is far more complex and nuanced than it has ever been.

The unfortunate truth is that for folks stuck in poverty, and really low paid work, economic policy offers no good options. In the long run, business look for the right workers, so job attraction won’t directly help folks whose skills and education already place them into the ranks of the impoverished.

The fixes for poverty, and low wage workers is hard, deliberate and done family by family. This is why the cost of the welfare program didn’t plummet with lower enrollment. Those still on the rolls needed all the available services. Sadly, this also means that the likely effect of government on poverty and low wage work will be largely ineffective.

One persistent hope for the poor, working or not, is private sector service. We all know who these providers are in our communities. They are in churches and service agencies and the United Way.