The Uncertain Hour
| CommentsMarketplace's Wealth and Poverty team has launched an interesting new podcast called, "The Uncertain Hour" and it focuses on the things that we fight the most about but understand the least about. The first season centers on the continuing hot button topic: welfare.
The first episode - "The Magic Bureaucrat" - is about Larry Townsend, the former director of the Riverside Welfare office, who was one of the leaders of the welfare reform movement. It's a fascinating story that includes producing a 10-song welfare to work album, some unexpected short-term outcomes, and predictable long-term outcomes.
This series should be particularly interesting to many of us since Wisconsin was one of the states that began experimenting with welfare reform before Congress took it up in the late 90's. Jason DeParle's landmark book American Dream: Three Women, Ten Kids, and a Nation's Drive to End Welfare is a also great look at that time here in Wisconsin.
In 2016, 20 years after the welfare reform bill was signed, it's time we take a hard look back to better understand what "reform" meant in implementation and its consequences. The welfare reform bill did many things but the two big ones were to require work as a condition of getting benefits (a feature that as also extended to single adults without children enrolled in SNAP/FoodShare, or food stamps at the time) and to block grant the cash welfare program.
A block grant basically sets the amount of funds a state can have to administer a program with some broad rules about how the funds should be used. While this sounds innocuous, it can have devastating consequences on the accountability of a program and the flexibility the program has to adjust to changing local conditions.
There are lessons to be learned especially since we are seeing SNAP/FoodShare program being pushed down the same frightening path; work requirements are being reimplemented across the nation and the current House budget proposal would block grant the program, which would break the core promise that if you ran into tough times, society would provide just a little help so that you could buy the food you would need to get back on your feet.
This is the wrong starting point for how we improve the FoodShare/SNAP program. Grafting interventions popular in the 90's onto a program that was developed in the 60's will not position FoodShare to address food insecurity in the 21st century. We ought to have an honest discussion on how to continue improving the efficiency and effectiveness of the program with the tools that are available to us through data mining and matching and how SNAP can be leveraged combination with other programs as a platform for lifting families out of poverty.
Looking back on the effects of welfare reform, let's hope that this new podcast will have some useful lessons on how we have that conversation.