Welfare: Is Schwarzenegger taking California back to the bad old days?
Filed under: Economy, People, Healthcare
With the unemployment rate hitting a 26-year high and government stimulus plans searching for ways to generate jobs, state budget shortfalls are putting more traditional welfare and employee-support programs on the chopping block. In California, where the jobless rate has hit its highest point since 1940, brutal cuts in welfare spending are providing a harbinger of dark things to come.For much of its lifetime, welfare -- officially, Aid to Families with Dependent Children -- was effectively unlimited; qualifying families could draw on government benefits virtually forever. But in 1996, the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act completely changed the face of the program, placing lifetime limits on welfare recipients and actively encouraging employment.
Under the new program, Temporary Assistance to Needy Families, states controlled welfare spending, which has translated into a social-service safety net that varies widely by location. In California, TANF takes the form of CalWORKS, a welfare-to-work program that provides a wide variety of support services, including domestic violence and drug counseling, funding for child care, transportation to and from work, health care, and vocational training. Its ultimate goal is to ease recipients off the welfare rolls.
But CalWORKS, according to Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, is too lax in its job requirements and too generous in its benefits. Following a failed attempt to eliminate the plan, he has cut its funding, reduced eligibility to 48 months, increased oversight of the program, and imposed larger penalties on participants who fail to find work.
While these moves will reduce the cost of the program by $528 million, they won't go into effect until July 2011. In the short term, CalWORKS grants have been cut by 4 percent, reducing the program's payments to 1989 levels. In terms of inflation-adjusted income, however, CalWORKS recipients are actually receiving roughly 46 percent less than a welfare recipient did in 1989. These cuts have made job creation even more of a priority.
Unfortunately, Schwarzenegger has also moved to slice $375 million from CalWORKS by hacking away at the employee assistance programs that form the heart of welfare-to-work. The employment requirement, which necessitated vocational training, childcare, and transportation expenses, has been made optional for many recipients, and future program recipients may not even get the option to work. Cutting these programs has been a short-term boon for cash-strapped CalWORKS recipients, but program administrators fear the policy change will lead many recipients to feel entitled to handouts, as some critics charged of pre-1996 welfare culture.
While this change is difficult now, it promises to become unsustainable in 2011, when CalWORKS recipients will presumably be dropped from the welfare rolls without jobs, child care, or vocational training programs to soften the blow. While short-term stimulus programs like JOBS NOW are available to some CalWORKS recipients, they are limited, impermanent stopgaps. In San Francisco, where 45,600 people are unemployed, JOBS NOW is designed to fund only 1,000 jobs.
Some might expect that CalWORKS enrolees, freed from their work requirements and facing cuts in funded child care, would eagerly quit their jobs. In reality, the great majority of CalWORKS recipients want to keep working, even as their governor makes it harder for them to do so. While the idea of a "jobless recovery" continues to be bandied about, and the unemployed ranks swell to bursting, it's worth remembering that a society that encourages unemployment does so at its own expense.
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
10-07-2009 @ 4:20PM
Praise the Lord said...
Remember the men and women who were too proud to take handouts from the government and would take any job to keep it that way? I do, but sadly politics has created a welfare class that doesn't have any pride and takes these handouts with glee with no thought of ever being a productive citizen.
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10-07-2009 @ 4:28PM
Denise said...
I disagree with praise the lord, I was on afdc and landed in the calworks program back in 1984. That program was a God send to me. I have been productive ever since, no looking back.
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10-07-2009 @ 4:29PM
denise said...
OOPs, meant 1994, sorry.
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10-07-2009 @ 4:46PM
Earl Richards said...
Schwarzenegger and the Republican state senators are bad news. It is the government's duty to protect citizens and to ensure their well-being. Schwarzenegger and the Republican state senators are not doing this. The funding priority for battered women shelters (BWS) should be the same as for prisons, because human life is at risk. Prisons keep the criminals and the murderers in, and BWS's keep the good people in, and the criminals and the murderers out. The Governor's illegal cuts, with the backing of big oil (Chevron Corp. of San Ramon), are very dangerous for women and children, who are victims of domestic violence, and it is sub-human. During a recession, with its higher unemployment, government funding for BWS's should be increased, not eliminated. Obviously, this budget picks-on the most vulnerable, and it endangers children. If a battered wife is murdered in front of a closed-down BWS, then, Schwarzenegger, his oil industry tyrants and the Republican state senators should be charged with first-degree murder and child endangerment.
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10-07-2009 @ 8:07PM
ij70 said...
"It is the government's duty to protect citizens and to ensure their well-being."
Nope. It is not. It is Your responsibility to protect yourself. It is Your responsibility to ensure your well-being. Don't worry, I know that you do not understand that.
10-19-2009 @ 12:40AM
Jmcjunkmail@gmail.com said...
I support the cuts and I hope they would make people more responsible, get it when you need it, not as a way of life, because of the abuse of some, others will have to pay, what did we expect? I actually like what the governor is doing, and i would say there is more to do, the system is too abused by people who already know how to work it and milk it. I would say abuse is high, people that work and don't report income, don't even live in the state, never worked in this country, etc. but our regulations allow for them to qualify, unfairly competition because while you might be working to make ends meet, someone else is getting 400-500 in food stamps, cash grant of 800-1000, free medical, housing assistance worth 1000-1200 and no income tax, why would you work when you can stay at home and enjoy your kids? The line is raised, for someone who tasted this, if it was me, I would not leave this kind of programs unless I would make at least 6000 a month. By the way I am not talking about verified domestic violence or some other services that are core to the well being of the people, I know there are positives, we just have to trim the negatives. so keep up the good job Arnold. and please don't blame Arnold for the failure to get off welfare, specially if it's been years on welfare. He is fixing what other politicians deemed too risky, cowards. thanks.
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10-08-2009 @ 1:46PM
Rod said...
Clearly we need to make cut backs, what I don't understand is why we're fighting over which cuts to make within a program, when its the implementation of the program that is costing so much. If Gov. Arnold could just ask LA County to sign a long term contract with a private company to provide the welfare services, we'd immediately start saving millions of dollars that are be wasted now on a month-to-month contractual arrangement for Calworks. Maybe if we started there, we'd have less to fight about.
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