The myth of welfare's survival

What Happens When Welfare Disappears

By Oscar Perry Abello | September 9, 2015

 

(Photo by Ildar Sagdejev)

“They don’t give that out anymore.”

“I don’t know anybody who gets it.”

“They told me to come back next year.”

“What’s that?”

These are just some of the things families said to Kathryn Edin and Luke Shaefer when they asked about Temporary Aid to Needy Families (TANF), the U.S. federal government’s cash assistance welfare program.

Edin and Shaefer are the authors of $2 a Day: Living on Almost Nothing in America, released last week. The book takes a long, hard look at what happens to the people and families left behind when welfare disappears.

They studied 18 families, and featured eight in the book. The stories put a human face on trends Edin and Shaefer found in U.S. Census Bureau data, which showed roughly 1.5 million households (with around three million children) were surviving on cash incomes of less than $2 per person, per day, in any given month.

Read more. 

Life without "Welfare"

What Happens If You Have No Welfare and No Job?

A new report from The Atlantic  looks at the devastating lengths single moms go to when they have neither employment nor cash assistance.

Olga Khazan

Jun 13 2014, 8:00 AM ET

 

                                          

A few weeks ago I wrote about how the welfare reform of the 1990s led to many poor mothers being kicked off welfare rolls. While some poor adults could still receive help from food stamps and disability insurance, the "Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act" dramatically cut how much cash aid they could collect. The hope was that they would find work, but many didn’t.

Meanwhile, spending on Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, or TANF, the only cash assistance program that non-disabled, non-elderly, poor single mothers are eligible for, has dropped precipitously: It was lower in 2007 than it had been in 1970.

That left me wondering—what happened to the moms who had neither jobs nor cash assistance through TANF, which comes with strict time limits?

Read the entire report here.