Brookings: Topics - Welfare

Confronting Suburban Poverty in America

Alan Berube and Elizabeth Kneebone — Mon, 20 May 2013 00:00:00 -0400

Brookings Institution Press 2013 184pp.

Event:

On May 20, the Metropolitan Policy Program at Brookings will host an event marking the release of Confronting Suburban Poverty in America, co-authored by Elizabeth Kneebone and Alan Berube. They, along with some of the nation’s leading anti-poverty experts, including Luis Ubiñas, president of the Ford Foundation, and Bill Shore, founder and CEO of Share our Strength, will join leading local innovators from across the country to discuss a new metropolitan opportunity agenda for addressing suburban poverty, how federal and state policymakers can deploy limited resources to address a growing challenge, and why building on local solutions holds great promise.

Synopsis:

It has been nearly a half century since President Lyndon Johnson declared his War on Poverty, setting in motion development of America’s modern safety net. Back in the 1960s, tackling poverty “in place” meant focusing resources in the inner city and in isolated rural areas. The suburbs were home to middle- and upper-class families—affluent commuters and homeowners who did not want to raise kids in the city. But the America of 2012 is a very different place. Poverty is no longer just an urban or rural problem but increasingly a suburban one as well.

In Confronting Suburban Poverty in America, Elizabeth Kneebone and Alan Berube take on the new reality of metropolitan poverty and opportunity in America. For decades, suburbs added poor residents at a faster pace than cities, so that suburbia is now home to more poor residents than central cities, composing over a third of the nation’s total poor population. Unfortunately, the antipoverty infrastructure built over the past several decades does not fit this rapidly changing geography. The solution no longer fits the problem. Kneebone and Berube explain the source and impact of these important developments; moreover, they present innovative ideas on addressing them.

The spread of suburban poverty has many causes, including job sprawl, shifts in affordable housing, population dynamics, immigration, and a struggling economy. As the authors explain in Confronting Suburban Poverty in America, it raises a number of daunting challenges, such as the need for more (and better) transportation options, services, and financial resources. But necessity also produces opportunity—in this case, the opportunity to rethink and modernize services, structures, and procedures so that they better reflect and address new demands. This book embraces that opportunity.

The authors put forward a series of workable recommendations for public, private, and nonprofit leaders seeking to modernize poverty alleviation and community development strategies and connect residents with economic opportunity. They describe and evaluate ongoing efforts in metro areas where local leaders are learning how to do more with less and adjusting their approaches to address the metropolitan scale of poverty—for example, collaborating across sectors and jurisdictions, using data and technology in innovative ways, and integrating services and service delivery. Kneebone and Berube combine clear prose, original thinking, and illustrative graphics in Confronting Suburban Poverty in America to paint a new picture of poverty in America as well as the best ways to combat it.

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

Alan Berube

Elizabeth Kneebone

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Means-Tested Programs, Work Incentives, and Block Grants

Ron Haskins — Tue, 17 Apr 2012 09:26:00 -0400

Editor's Note: See the figures associated with this testimony in the attached PDF.

Chairman Ryan, Ranking Member Van Hollen, and Members of the Committee:

Thanks for inviting me to testify today. I consider it a privilege to have the opportunity to talk to members of the House Budget Committee.

In response to instructions from the Committee, I’m going to talk about three topics: trends in spending on means-tested programs; work incentives and phase out rates for means-tested programs; and block grants.

Trends in Means-Tested Spending

The lower line in Figure 1, based on a Brookings analysis of federal budget data published by the Office of Management and Budget, shows federal spending since 1962 in the ten biggest means-tested federal programs. In 2011, we estimate that about 87 percent of the spending was on entitlement programs.[1] Federal spending on poor and low-income Americans has increased enormously. Since 1980, by which time all but two of the ten programs that spent the most money in 2011 were in place, spending has increased by about $500 billion, from $126 billion to $626 billion after adjusting for inflation.

One cause of the increase in spending is that both the population and the number of poor people in the U.S. have increased over time. Thus, even if the federal government spent the same amount of money in 2011 on means-tested programs per person in poverty as we spent in 1962, spending would have increased. The solid line in Figure 1 expresses the increase in federal means-tested spending as spending per person in poverty. Expressed in this way, over the past five decades, federal spending on major means-tested programs has increased from about $516 to a little more than $13,034 per person in poverty. If we use the figure on spending per person in poverty in 1980, when most of the major means-tested programs were in place, the increase is from about $4,300 to $13,000 per person or more than $3 spent in 2011 for every dollar spent in 1980.[2] More recently, means-tested spending increased from about $477 billion to $626 billion in the three years of the Obama administration, an increase of about 31 percent. However, the recession that began in December 2007 and the increase in poverty during and following the recession is an important part of the explanation for increased means-tested spending during the Obama administration. Spending per person in poverty increased by about 9 percent as compared with the 31 percent increase in total spending during the first three years of the Obama administration. A portion of the rise in means-tested spending, which was authorized as part of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, began to expire in 2010.

Figure 2 shows how means-tested spending is distributed among eight broad categories of programs.[3] The categories include health, cash, food, housing, education, social services, energy, and employment and training. The figures are for 2009, the last year for which the Congressional Research Service has calculated means-tested spending within these eight categories. Not surprisingly, the figure shows that health is by far the biggest category of spending at $319 billion in 2009, about 2.5 times as much as cash programs, the second biggest category. Employment and training at $9 billion is the smallest of the eight categories. Figure 2 shows that means-tested spending, like total spending in the federal budget, is driven in large part by the rising cost of health care. In this respect, figuring out ways to control the growth of health care spending would reduce the rate of increase in both total federal spending (and debt) as well as federal means-tested spending.

A few additional points about these figures are in order. First, keep in mind that these spending data are for only the ten largest means-tested programs. The Congressional Research Service estimates that in 2009, spending on these ten programs represented about 75 percent of total federal means-tested spending.[4] If that percentage remained roughly the same for 2011, total federal means-tested spending in that year was closer to $835 billion than the $626 billion spent on the ten biggest programs.

Second, state and local governments spend their own money on many of these programs. The Congressional Research Service has estimated that state and local governments supplemented federal spending on means-tested programs by around 27 percent in 2004.[5] If we assume that the 27 percent has remained roughly constant, we can estimate that total federal, state, and local government spending on means-tested programs was probably around $1,143 billion in 2011.

On a per-person in poverty basis, that figure represents about $23,731 in spending by federal, state, and local governments. But this estimate should be considered in light of several caveats. The first is that not all of the spending on means-tested programs goes directly to individuals and families. Some of the money is spent on programs, such as the $14.5 billion spent on Title I of the No Child Left Behind Act and the $9 billion in spending on employment and training programs, that provide services rather than direct cash or in-kind benefits. Second, some of the money in programs that provide cash or in-kind benefits directly to households goes to individuals and families that are not below the poverty level. Children in families of up to 200 percent of the poverty level, for example, are eligible for Medicaid or the Child Health Insurance Program (CHIP) in almost every state.[6] Similarly, people in households with incomes up to 130 percent of poverty are eligible for SNAP benefits (Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, previously food stamps). In the case of the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC), in 2010 a single mother with two children could receive benefits if the mother’s income was below $40,964, about 225 percent of the poverty level for this family. Professor David Armor of the School of Public Policy at George Mason University is in the process of using Census Bureau data and data from other sources to estimate the percentage of benefits in health, nutrition, housing, and cash means-tested programs that go to individuals or households with income above the poverty line. Although Armor’s work has not yet been published, he is finding substantial fractions of the benefits in all these programs going to individuals and families with income above the poverty level and some of it even going to those with incomes above 200 percent of the poverty level.

Means-tested spending has increased enormously, no matter how it is measured. Although there have been some periods of comparatively rapid growth, such as during the recession of 2007 to 2009, Figure 1 shows that spending has grown almost every year for the last five decades. The increase in spending has been the most rapid in health programs, but cash, nutrition, and several other types of spending have also increased rapidly. Similarly, spending per person in poverty has also increased substantially, although not quite as rapidly as total spending.

Work Incentives and Benefit Phase Outs

The impact of welfare benefits on work incentive has always been a contentious issue. Common sense tells us that if able-bodied people get welfare benefits without doing anything in return, their incentive to work and achieve self-sufficiency will be diminished. This common sense view is also supported by a host of research studies. Reviews of the empirical evidence on this issue have consistently shown that welfare reduces work effort.[7] To reduce such work disincentive, most means-tested programs have phase out rates because program designers want to maintain a financial incentive for benefit recipients to work. The hope is that by reducing welfare benefits by less than a dollar for each dollar of earnings, recipients will have at least some incentive to work or work more. The ideal outcome would be to design benefits so that an extra dollar of earnings would always produce a net income increase that is as close to the amount of earnings as possible. The lower the phase out rate, the greater the increase in net income and therefore work incentive. However, lower phase out rates make means-tested programs more expensive. There is a clear tradeoff between program cost, benefit phase out rates, and work incentive.

The difficult problems posed by phase out rates and work disincentives is greatly complicated by the fact that all families with earnings are subject to taxation of their earnings and some families receive more than one means-tested benefit. Consider some of the possibilities: workers are subject to the roughly 15.3 percent FICA tax[8] from their first dollar of earnings; they could face an EITC phase out of up to 21 percent; families with housing benefits face a marginal tax rate of 30 percent on their earnings; and so forth. Considering all of the effects on net income and work incentives simultaneously strains the ability to understand just how much net income would change at a particular point in a person’s earnings curve. Figure 3 is taken from a 1995 report from the Congressional Research Service. Although the specific phase out rates portrayed in the figure are somewhat out of date, a mere glance at the figure conveys the immense complexity of trying to figure out the net impact of so many different phase out and phase in rates operating simultaneously. The Congressional Budget Office is now completing a similar report on marginal tax rates in the tax and transfer system which goes into great detail in showing the actual marginal tax rates faced by individuals and families with various characteristics. Some of the rates are very high and under some circumstances an extra dollar of earnings can result in net income increases of 50 cents or less.

Problems maintaining work incentives are an inevitable consequence of means-tested programs. It would be possible to reduce, but not eliminate, the work disincentive effect of the current system if all benefits could be combined and then phased out at a single phase out rate. However, there are many problems with creating such a system. For one thing, the current benefits system is a combination of cash (the EITC, the Child Tax Credit, TANF, and Supplemental Security Income) and in-kind benefits (primarily SNAP and other nutrition programs, housing, Medicaid and SCHIP, and home heating). Perhaps the in-kind benefits could be paid as cash, but that would cause problems with various interest groups such as the National Grocers Association that would fight against cashing out SNAP benefits. Democrats might oppose converting benefits to cash because providing a lump sum cash payment would make the high level of benefits paid to some families more transparent than under a system when some of the benefits are paid in kind, thereby raising objections from Republicans who would likely argue that the system is too generous and should be cut. Moreover, the administrative complexity of such a system might make it very difficult to operate. Yet another problem is that an all-cash system could greatly increase the number of means-tested benefits families receive (although they would be combined into one benefit). As surprising as it might seem, under the current system few families actually receive all the means-tested benefits for which they qualify. A recent study sponsored by the Department of Agriculture showed that only 72 percent of people qualified for SNAP benefits actually receive them and that in some states the rate is below 60 percent.[9] Both the Current Population Survey and the Survey of Income and Program Participation show that random samples of Americans receive relatively few of the benefits for which they are qualified.[10]

Given the difficulty of phasing out means-tested benefits and maintaining work incentives, an approach to this issue taken in the TANF program established by the 1996 welfare reform legislation is important to consider. Regardless of benefit phase out rates, a matter that was left up to states by the 1996 law, the federal statute requires state programs to have two features that directly address work incentive. The first is that all state programs are required to have strong work requirements. Specifically, at any given moment 50 percent of TANF recipients must be involved in work activities that are tightly defined in the legislation. States that do not comply are fined. As part of the work requirement, states are required to impose financial sanctions on recipients who do not comply with the work requirement. The combination of work requirements imposed on both states and individuals backed up by financial sanctions serve to motivate states to adopt demanding programs and recipients to prepare for and look for work, usually in the private sector. In addition, the TANF legislation imposes a five-year limit on benefit receipt, sending a strong signal that benefits are not permanent, as they had been under the Aid to Families with Dependent Children program that TANF replaced. With strong work requirements and time limits, the work incentive created by benefit phase out rates is much less important. Soon enough, individuals must work regardless of the financial work incentives.

Despite these strong pro-work features of the TANF program, it would be a serious mistake to think that American social policy depends exclusively on these essentially negative inducements to work. Beginning roughly in the mid-1980s, Congress created or reformed a host of programs that supplemented the income of poor and low-income working families, especially single mothers. These reforms included:

Expansion of Medicaid and CHIP benefits so that all children in families under 200 percent of poverty are eligible for coverage in most states
Several expansions of funding for child care and reform of child care programs to give states more flexibility in use of child care subsidies to help working families
Several reforms of the SNAP program making it easier for working families to receive food subsidies
Numerous expansions of the EITC; the maximum EITC benefit in most states is greater than the average value of their TANF benefit
Creation of the refundable child tax credit that, like the EITC, provides a cash benefit to low-income families with earnings.

Taken together, these work support benefits constitute the nation’s most successful method of attacking poverty among families with children.[11] The combination of increased work by poor mothers following welfare reform and benefits from the work support system resulted in substantial declines in poverty among children in female-headed families. Even today, after two recessions, the poverty rate among children living in female-headed families is lower than it was before welfare reform and the work rate among single mothers is still higher than before welfare reform.[12]

The TANF experience demonstrates that using phase out rates to increase work incentive can be trumped by strong work requirements and a comprehensive work support system.

Block Grants

Block grants provide states with a sum of money to accomplish broad policy purposes which are specified in the authorizing language. Block grants can be constructed so that they achieve a major goal of state policy and a major goal of federal policy.[13] States are always pleased to accept federal dollars, of course, but they also want flexibility with how the dollars are to be spent. Thus, states are doubly pleased if the block grant specifies the broad purposes of the federal grant and leaves it to state government to decide how best to achieve those purposes. From the federal perspective a major potential advantage of block grants is that spending can be controlled. In the case of open-ended entitlement programs such as Medicaid and SNAP, everyone who meets program qualifications has a legal right to receive the benefit. By contrast, in programs with capped spending such as housing programs and the major child care programs, local authorities or states receive a fixed amount of money and individuals are not entitled to receive the benefits. Most block grants, including the TANF program, the Child Care and Development Fund, and the Social Service Block Grant, have fixed funding. In all three of these cases, federal spending has increased slowly if at all in recent years and then only when Congress explicitly authorized and appropriated the additional funds. Given the enormous and growing deficit that afflicts the federal government, the possibility of spending control in major areas of social policy through the use of block grants should not go unnoticed.

The history of federal block grants shows that it is rare for the federal government to provide states with funds to achieve broad social goals without some strings attached. In the case of TANF, for example, the block grant came accompanied by substantial requirements for data reporting, work requirements that states had to follow, and many other strings. These requirements were negotiated with states in marathon sessions that resulted in requirements that states felt they could live with. If Congress is to create additional block grants, it would be advisable to negotiate the terms of the block grant with states. In the case of TANF, Congress worked with the National Governors Association, the National Conference of State Legislators, and the American Public Human Services Association to find mutually acceptable provisions on work requirements, data reporting, and other details.

The general issue of block grant requirements is especially important because of the need for accountability in spending federal funds. Under the Single Audit Act, all federal grants of over $100,000 given to states must be audited under widely accepted audit standards. But accountability for spending goes far beyond ensuring that funds are spent on activities for which they are intended. Rather, recent years have seen increased emphasis on showing whether federal funds are spent on state programs that actually achieve their purposes. Especially in education programs and welfare programs designed to encourage work, high quality program evaluations, usually involving random assignment designs, are the order of the day. Both the Bush and Obama administrations placed great emphasis on the importance of evidence-based policy.[14] Evidence-based policy is especially important today because the nation’s major social intervention programs in preschool, the public schools, delinquency, employment and training, and many other areas usually do not have significant impacts on the social problems they were designed to address.[15]

To continue this growing federal practice of insisting on program accountability, block grants should include, in addition to financial accountability, two types of mandatory reporting. First, all programs receiving block grant funds should be required to report a standard set of data on program participants such as number and characteristics of people served, type of treatment, length of treatment, and, where possible, evidence of program success. Second, the secretary of the federal agency administering the program should be provided with funds to conduct high-quality evaluations of selected programs to determine if particular approaches or program models, as well as the specific characteristics of program models, are effective in producing the desired program outcomes.

[1] Housing, Title I grants to local education agencies, and half of Pell Grants were counted as non-entitlement spending. Thus, $545.0 of total spending of $626.2 or 87 percent was entitlement spending in 2011.

[2] The number of people in poverty in 2011 will not be published by the Census Bureau until next fall. Based on a model designed by Richard Bavier, a former senior official at OMB, that has successfully predicted the poverty level for the past several years, poverty increased by .6 percentage points in 2011, bringing the poverty rate to 15.7 percent in that year. According to the American Community Survey, the population of the United States in 2011 was 306 million. Thus, around 48,042,000 people were poor in 2011. This is the figure used to compute means-tested spending per person in poverty for 2011.

[3] Karen Spar, “Federal Benefits and Services for People with Low Income: Programs, Policy, and Spending, FY2008-FY2009” (R41625), Washington, DC: Congressional Research Service, January 2011, p. 9.

[4] Karen Spar, “Federal Benefits and Services for People with Low Income: Programs, Policy, and Spending, FY2008-FY2009” (R41625), Washington, DC: Congressional Research Service, January 2011, p. 12.

[5] Domestic Social Policy Division, “Cash and noncash Benefits for Persons with Limited Income: Eligibility Rules, Recipient and Expenditure Data, FY2002-FY2004” (RL33340), Washington, DC: Congressional Research Service, March 2006.

[6] According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, only North Dakota, Oklahoma, Arkansas, and Idaho set the child eligibility level for Medicaid and CHIP below 200 percent of poverty; half the states are at 250 percent or above. See http://www.kff.org/medicaid/upload/7993-02.pdf

[7] Robert Moffitt, “Incentive Effects of the U.S. Welfare System: A Review,” Journal of Economic Literature, 1992, 30(1): 1-61; Sheldon Danziger, Robert Haveman, and Roert Plotnick, “How Income Transfers Affect Work, Savings, and the Income Distribution: A Critical Review,” Journal of Economic Literature, 1981, 97(3): 975-1028.

[8] The FICA tax for Social Security and Medicare is split between employer and employee payments totaling 15.3 percent of earnings (up to a limit of about $106,800 in the case of the Social Security Tax). However, economists assume that if the portion of the tax paid by employers were not required by federal law, employers would increase wages by an amount equal to the tax.

[9] Karen E. Cunnyngham, “Teaching Those in Need: State Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program Participation Rates in 2009,” Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Agriculture, December 2011.

[10] Janet Currie, “The Takeup Rate of Social Benefits,” Los Angeles, CA: UCLA, 2004.

[11] A study in the 2008 edition of the Ways and Means Committee’s Green Book (see Appendix E, Table E-31) shows that, primarily because of increased work rates, the poverty rate of families headed by never-married mothers

before any government taxes or transfers, fell from 48.3 percent to 39.6 percent between 1989 and 2006. Thus, due to work effort by these mothers, the poverty rate before taxes and transfers had fallen by nearly 20 percent. When support for these working families from the work support system were added to income in 2006, the poverty rate fell from 39.6 percent to 26.1 percent or by an additional 35 percent. The combination of increased work rates and an improved work support system has had a major impact on poverty among families headed by never-married mothers.

[12] Poverty rates for families headed by single mothers decreased between 1996 and the start of the Great Recession in late 2007, from 35.8 percent to 30.7 percent. Even with increased hardship and unemployment during the recession, the 2010 rate of 34.2 percent is still below the 1996 rate. According to Brookings tabulations of data from the Current Population Survey, the average employment-to-population ratio for never-married mothers in the five years before welfare reform in 1996 was 44.6 percent. The ratio increased every year through 2000, increasing to 65.6 percent in that year, an increase of 47 percent compared with the five years before welfare reform. Even in 2010, after two recessions, the rate was 58.7 percent, still over 30 percent above the pre-welfare reform level.

[13] Pietro S. Nivola, Jennifer L. Noyes, and Isabel V. Sawhill, “Waive of the Future? Federalism and the Next Phase of Welfare Reform,” Brookings Institution, Welfare Reform and Beyond Policy Brief #29, March 2004.

[14] Ron Haskins and Jon Baron, “Building the Connection between Policy and Evidence,” London: NESTA, September 2011.

[15] Isabel V. Sawhill and Jon Baron, “Federal Programs for Youth: More of the Same Won’t Work, Youth Today, May 2010, p. 21.

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Ron Haskins

Publication: House Budget Committee

Image Source: © Jessica Rinaldi / Reuters

Welfare Reform Worked

Ron Haskins and Peter H. Schuck — Tue, 28 Feb 2012 10:32:00 -0500

The primary election campaign has intensified a justified concern about inequality in America: People at the top are rising much faster than everyone else. Even low-income Americans consider relatively high levels of inequality acceptable if they have a decent opportunity to improve their condition. But because they may work fewer hours and at stagnant wages, their gains are very limited.

Among the poor, surprisingly, never-married mothers have gained the most in recent decades. Their story shows the best way to reduce poverty and inequality: by encouraging individuals to work more and by supplementing their earnings with tax credits, child-care subsidies and other benefits for low-income working parents.

Until the mid-1990s, never-married mothers seldom worked outside the home, had poverty rates of over 60% and were at least five times more likely than married-couple families to be poor. Then in 1996, congressional Republicans and President Clinton collaborated on a welfare reform law requiring adults on welfare, including never-married mothers, to work.

When Clinton signed the law, many of his strongest political supporters reviled him for entering into "a pact with the devil." They predicted that poor women and their children deprived of welfare would die in the streets. Any employment gains, they insisted, would vanish in the first economic downturn.

The data refute these dire predictions. In fact, according to Census Bureau data, between 1996 and 2000, the percentage of never-married mothers in jobs increased by about a third (to 66%), while the poverty rate for these mothers and their children declined by about a third (to 40%). For the poorest of the poor, this large an improvement based on their own efforts was unprecedented. Since then, two recessions have reduced these gains somewhat; their employment rate is down to 58.7% (still better than for women generally) and their poverty rate is up to 49.3%.

Yet even in the worst recession since the Depression, more are employed and they are less poor than they were before the 1996 law. In fact, researchers Bruce Meyer of the University of Chicago and James Sullivan of Notre Dame have found that if all the work-based benefits given to low-income workers were included — such benefits are mostly ignored by the official poverty measure — the incomes of these mothers and children would be even higher and their poverty rate even lower.

The reasons for this policy success are clear, suggesting some lessons for the future. The 1996 law created strong incentives, both positive and negative, for the most uneducated, untrained and unpromising welfare recipients to join the workforce. As shown by their high employment rates, poor mothers responded to these incentives even more resourcefully than most policymakers had expected despite their often chaotic domestic circumstances. The federal law meshed well with many experimental state and local welfare-to-work programs, helping states pay for job search and readiness, health insurance, child care and other vital work support services.

Most politicians did not cave in to the intentionally inflammatory "dying in the streets" rhetoric; instead, they figured that the program could hardly be worse than the status quo of welfare dependency and that many of the poorest of the poor would end up better off. Both Congress and the states resisted the temptation to cut and run once the recipients' situations improved; the governments largely maintained their efforts over time, mindful of how fragile these gains could be. Knowing the failures of many earlier welfare-to-work programs designed to reduce welfare dependency, government tried something new and stuck with it. Even today, virtually every state still runs a strong welfare-to-work program, in part because the programs are relatively inexpensive.

The gains from the 1996 welfare reform and other work-related subsidies are certainly no cause for smugness. Even after 15 years, the law's incentives have not yet lifted all mothers and their children out of poverty — not by a long shot. After all, many who have benefited from the program are stuck in low-wage jobs, and others still don't work at all. Many are so disabled that no program or personal desire to work will enable them to hold decently paying jobs. Still, the never-married mothers — and single mothers more generally — have clearly improved their and their children's living standards and prospects, and interview studies show that they express pride in these gains and in their status as workers. Over time, they may be able to progress further as they accumulate job skills, experience and work habits, and as the economy improves.

Entrenched, multi-generational poverty is arguably America's greatest domestic enemy today. Our first priority should be figuring out how to reduce it permanently by increasing work and human capital among the poor. Welfare reform shows what is possible. This is not only just; it is also the only enduring way to reduce poverty and inequality.

Authors

Ron Haskins
Peter H. Schuck

Publication: Los Angeles Times

Image Source: © Lucy Nicholson / Reuters

@ Brookings Podcast: Automatic Spending Cuts and Programs for the Poor

Ron Haskins — Fri, 30 Dec 2011 11:02:00 -0500

The failure of the congressional super committee to reach a budget accord means that the budget ax will fall across many domestic spending programs and defense spending in the next fiscal year, including a number of programs that help the poor. Senior Fellow Ron Haskins says that while the automatic budget cuts will do some harm to some anti-poverty programs, the largest and most important programs – including Medicaid and Social Security – have been largely shielded.

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The 15-Year Anniversary of Welfare Reform

Ron Haskins — Mon, 22 Aug 2011 20:00:00 -0400

August 22, 2011 marks the 15-year anniversary of the signing of the landmark welfare reform legislation, the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act. Expert Ron Haskins says the law has largely succeeded in its goals of reducing poverty, especially for single mothers and children. However, the recession has taken a toll, and budget pressures bode ill for anti-poverty programs.

The 15 Year Anniversary of the Welfare Reform Law
“It was an extremely ugly congressional debate. Amazing! I mean Democrats calling Republicans Nazis and…just horrible stuff. But in the end half the Democrats on the Hill supported it, almost every Republican, and it was signed by a Democratic president. The bipartisan vote on welfare reform was actually greater in percentage terms than the bipartisan vote on Medicare in 1965. In the end it was a rare example of a very ugly debate where people really disagreed, and in the end they came together. Since then, to my way of thinking, it has been quite successful.”

(0:54)
What were the greatest accomplishments of the legislation?
“Welfare reform had a big impact on employment by females (especially poorly-educated females), and had an effect on child poverty (namely that it declined). From my own work I can tell you that child poverty declined by [20% in four years] (Ed.: Video mistates statistics. Haskins later corrected himself with this figure.) The child poverty among female-headed families, and child poverty among black children, both had reached their historic lows. They plummeted. It was primarily because the mothers were working. It was not because of any increase in government benefits. The most important point here is that if the nation is going to have an impact on poverty, we have to deal with black kids and we have to deal with kids from female-headed families because their poverty rates are, simply, so high.”

(1:45)
Where has the law failed in its intent?
“There are a lot of moms who can’t make it under this kind of demanding regime. Most of them can get a job, but they cannot hold it. So they get a job; they lose their job; then they try to find another one; they lose that one. So they are in and out. Some of them just try it once and they are out. Research shows that these are usually moms who have two or more problems – problems such as depression (which is a big issue among welfare mothers); three or more kids (which raises issues about child care); problems with transportation; problems with housing. Most mothers can deal with one of those things and can keep going, but once they hit two or three (especially) there really is a drop-off.”

(2:40)
What has been the effect of the recession?
“During the recession people expected that when jobs were tougher (it takes longer to find a job) there still should be work requirements. People still ought to try to get back in the labor force just like the typical American does, but it will take longer. [They assumed] roles would build up and they haven’t. It makes you wonder exactly why and what we should do about it.”

(3:06)
Will budget pressures affect funding for welfare programs?
“Out of all the entitlement money [welfare] is a block grant. It would be very easy to cut. In fact, you wouldn’t have to change a word of the legislation. All you would have to do is go right to the line that says how much money it is and just cut that back. That is going to be tempting. That is going to be very tempting. So yes, I think there is a possibility that there could be less money. Ironically, the more aggressive the country is (and that the Congress and the President are) in solving what I think is the most important problem facing the country – that if we’re not solvent we are really in trouble – the more difficult it could turn out to be, and will turn out to be, for some programs. Maybe [don’t cut] program A, but program B. And if you don’t cut program A, then you have to cut program B even more. There are some real issues here, and there will be cuts for sure.”

Authors

Ron Haskins

Image Source: © Jessica Rinaldi / Reuters

Fighting Poverty the American Way

Ron Haskins — Mon, 20 Jun 2011 00:00:00 -0400

This paper was prepared for the conference “Anti-Poverty Programs in a Global Perspective: Lessons from Rich and Poor Countries,” held by the Social Science Research Center in Berlin on June 20-21, 2011.

Introduction

President Lyndon Johnson declared war on poverty in the United States in 1964. At the time, the United States had a very modest commitment to programs, other than public education, aimed at the poor. Part of Johnson’s intent was to accompany his anti-poverty commitment with a host of programs that would help the poor. It is invigorating to read about the optimism with which his team worked to invent programs that might help the poor improve their well-being or even avoid poverty in the first place. In retrospect, it is clear that there were lots of ideas about how to help the poor, but few of the ideas had been tested. Then as now, it was mathematically certain that poverty could be reduced by simply giving families money, but Americans do not like giving money to able-bodied people who don’t work. Thus, anti-poverty policy in the United States has been in large part a struggle to provide the poor with enough cash and in-kind benefits to have a decent if spare standard of living while simultaneously trying to help them and especially their children achieve self-sufficiency and get a foot on the ladder to success. The goals of this paper are to discuss the causes of poverty in the United States, provide an overview of anti-poverty programs, review spending on the programs, and then examine evidence that the programs have had an impact on poverty. I also focus some attention on what we have learned about the programs that attempt to fight poverty by improving children’s development and by helping children and young adults avoid or overcome conditions that are associated with poverty.

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Ron Haskins

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Challenges Associated with the Suburbanization of Poverty: Prince George's County, Maryland

Martha Ross — Wed, 08 Dec 2010 00:00:00 -0500

Martha Ross spoke to the Advisory Board of the Community Foundation for Prince George’s County, describing research on the suburbanization of poverty both nationally and in the Washington region.

Despite perceptions that economic distress is primarily a central city phenomenon, suburbs are home to increasing numbers of low-income families. She highlighted the need to strengthen the social service infrastructure in suburban areas.

Full Presentation on Poverty in the Washington-Area Suburbs » (PDF)

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Martha Ross

The Great Recession and Poverty in Metropolitan America

Elizabeth Kneebone — Thu, 07 Oct 2010 00:00:00 -0400

As expected, the latest data from the Census Bureau’s 2009 American Community Survey (ACS) confirm that the worst U.S. economic downturn in decades exacerbated trends set in motion years before, by multiplying the ranks of America’s poor. Between 2007 and 2009, the national poverty rate rose from 13 percent to 14.3 percent, and the number of people below the poverty line jumped by 4.9 million. Yet because the economic impact of the Great Recession was highly uneven across the nation, the map of U.S. poverty shifted in important ways over the past couple of years, with implications for both national and local efforts to alleviate poverty.

An analysis of poverty in the nation’s 100 largest metro areas, based on recently released data from the 2009 American Community Survey, indicates that:

The number of poor people in large metro areas grew by 5.5 million from 1999 to 2009, and more than two-thirds of that growth occurred in suburbs. By 2009, 1.6 million more poor lived in the suburbs of the nation’s largest metro areas compared to the cities.

Between 2007 and 2009, the poverty rate increased in 57 of the 100 largest metro areas, with the largest increases clustered in the Sun Belt. Florida metro areas like Bradenton and Lakeland, and California metro areas like Bakersfield, Riverside-San Bernardino-Ontario, and Modesto, each experienced increases in their poverty rates of more than 3.5 percentage points.

Poverty increased by much greater margins in 2009 than 2008, with cities and suburbs experiencing comparable rates of growth in the recession’s second year. Between 2008 and 2009, cities and suburbs gained 1.2 million poor people, together accounting for about two-thirds of the national increase in the poor population that year.

Several metro areas saw city poverty rates increase by more than 5 percentage points, while many suburban areas experienced increases of 2 to 4 percentage points between 2007 and 2009. The city of Allentown, PA saw a 10.2 percentage-point increase in its poverty rate, followed by Chattanooga, TN with an increase of 8.0 percentage points. Sun Belt metro areas were among those with the largest increases in suburban poverty, including Lakeland, FL and Riverside-San Bernardino-Ontario, CA.

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Elizabeth Kneebone

Publication: Brookings Institution

The Social Service Challenges of Rising Suburban Poverty

Scott W. Allard and Benjamin Roth — Thu, 07 Oct 2010 00:00:00 -0400

Cities and suburbs occupy well-defined roles within the discussion of poverty, opportunity, and social welfare policy in metropolitan America. Research exploring issues of poverty typically has focused on central-city neighborhoods, where poverty and joblessness have been most concentrated. As a result, place-based U.S. antipoverty policies focus primarily on ameliorating concentrated poverty in inner-city (and, in some cases, rural) areas. Suburbs, by contrast, are seen as destinations of opportunity for quality schools, safe neighborhoods, or good jobs.

Several recent trends have begun to upset this familiar urban-suburban narrative about poverty and opportunity in metropolitan America. In 1999, large U.S. cities and their suburbs had roughly equal numbers of poor residents, but by 2008 the number of suburban poor exceeded the poor in central cities by 1.5 million. Although poverty rates remain higher in central cities than in suburbs (18.2 percent versus 9.5 percent in 2008), poverty rates have increased at a quicker pace in suburban areas.

Watch video of co-author Scott Allard explaining the report's findings » (video courtesy of the University of Chicago)

This report examines data from the Census Bureau and the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), along with in-depth interviews and a new survey of social services providers in suburban communities surrounding Chicago, IL; Los Angeles, CA; and Washington, D.C. to assess the challenges that rising suburban poverty poses for local safety nets and community-based organizations. It finds that:

Suburban jurisdictions outside of Chicago, Los Angeles, and Washington, D.C. vary significantly in their levels of poverty, recent poverty trends, and racial/ethnic profiles, both among and within these metro areas. Several suburban counties outside of Chicago experienced more than 40 percent increases of poor residents from 2000 to 2008, as did portions of counties in suburban Maryland and northern Virginia. Yet poverty rates declined for suburban counties in metropolitan Los Angeles. While several suburban Los Angeles municipalities are majority Hispanic and a handful of Chicago suburbs have sizeable Hispanic populations, many Washington, D.C. suburbs have substantial black and Asian populations as well.

Suburban safety nets rely on relatively few social services organizations, and tend to stretch operations across much larger service delivery areas than their urban counterparts. Thirty-four percent of nonprofits surveyed reported operating in more than one suburban county, and 60 percent offered services in more than one suburban municipality. The size and capacity of the nonprofit social service sector varies widely across suburbs, with 357 poor residents per nonprofit provider in Montgomery County, MD, to 1,627 in Riverside County, CA. Place of residence may greatly affect one’s access to certain types of help.

In the wake of the Great Recession, demand is up significantly for the typical suburban provider, and almost three-quarters (73 percent) of suburban nonprofits are seeing more clients with no previous connection to safety net programs. Needs have changed as well, with nearly 80 percent of suburban nonprofits surveyed seeing families with food needs more often than one year prior, and nearly 60 percent reporting more frequent requests for help with mortgage or rent payments.

Almost half of suburban nonprofits surveyed (47 percent) reported a loss in a key revenue source last year, with more funding cuts anticipated in the year to come. Due in large part to this bleak fiscal situation, more than one in five suburban nonprofits has reduced services available since the start of the recession and one in seven has actively cut caseloads. Nearly 30 percent of nonprofits have laid off full-time and part-time staff as a result of lost program grants or to reduce operating costs.

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Scott W. Allard
Benjamin Roth

Publication: Brookings Institution

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Editors' Summary of the Fall 2010 Brookings Papers on Economic Activity

David H. Romer and Justin Wolfers — Thu, 16 Sep 2010 00:00:00 -0400

The papers discussed below can be found at the Brookings Papers on Economic Activity archive.

The Brookings Panel on Economic Activity held its ninetieth conference in Washington, D.C., on September 16 and 17, 2010, just as the economy was struggling to recover from the Great Recession. The Brookings Papers has always strived to provide timely policy analysis, and ﬁve of the papers in this volume study aspects of the causes and consequences of this slump. These papers examine the effects of the business cycle on the incomes of the very richest Americans; welfare, welfare reform, and poverty during recessions; the failure of modern macroeconomic models to adequately forecast economic conditions; the role of shadow banking in the financial crisis and the appropriate regulatory response; and expenditures by state and local governments over the business cycle. The remaining paper studies the impact of the No Child Left Behind Act, a far-reaching education reform that will shape the skills of the labor force for years to come.

In the first paper, Jonathan A. Parker and Annette Vissing-Jorgensen study the cyclicality of income at the very top of the income distribution. The conventional wisdom has been that the brunt of recessions falls on less educated, lower-income workers. Parker and Vissing-Jorgensen show, however, that households in the top 1 percent of the income distribution see their income rise steeply in booms and fall sharply in busts, much more so than the average household. This pattern is robust: it appears regardless of the occupation of the high-earning households and is not driven by the timing of exercising stock options. It is not even conﬁned to the United States: the authors present evidence of similar patterns in Canada. Importantly, they find that consumption as well as income moves with the business cycle among those at the top.

These results do not mean that the conventional wisdom was entirely wrong, however. It remains true that less educated households also suffer disproportionately during recessions, largely because of increased unemployment. The impact of recessions on income is therefore U-shaped across the income distribution: many low-income households are adversely affected, the middle of the distribution is less affected, and the very top of the distribution is hit hard.

Parker and Vissing-Jorgensen’s new results are driven in part by their examination of post-1982 data. In earlier years, when top incomes were not so extraordinarily high, they were also less cyclical. Thus, an increase in the cyclicality of high earners corresponded with an increase in their relative incomes. Parker and Vissing-Jorgensen show that this pattern holds across different income groups, across decades, and even across countries: the more unequal the income distribution, the more cyclical is the income of the rich. The authors conclude by developing a theoretical model linking income cyclicality with income inequality. The model suggests that one source of their findings may be progress in information and communications technology, which has enabled very high ability entrepreneurs to leverage their talents, earning them more in good times but exposing them to plummeting demand in bad times.

In the second paper, Marianne P. Bitler and Hilary W. Hoynes take the opposite perspective from Parker and Vissing-Jorgensen, exploring the cyclicality of well-being among the poorest. The United States has historically protected its poorest citizens from economic ﬂuctuations through a patchwork system of welfare and social insurance programs: Aid to Families with Dependent Children provided cash assistance to poor families with children, while the food stamp program and Medicaid, among others, provided in-kind beneﬁts. Welfare reform in the 1990s overhauled the cash assistance system (now called Temporary Assistance for Needy Families), and researchers have found that participation in this and some other welfare programs has declined since the reform. An unexplored— but currently pressing—question is whether welfare reform has weakened the social safety net, so that it no longer insures poor Americans against large income swings.

Bitler and Hoynes marshal an impressive array of evidence to attack this question, analyzing decades of data and studying numerous indicators of adult and child well-being. They ﬁnd some evidence that welfare reform has weakened the safety net: poverty (using the ofﬁcial measure, which excludes noncash transfers) has risen more sharply with the unemployment rate in the years after reform than it did in the years before. On the other hand, the authors also find that welfare reform has had no impact on the cyclicality of food consumption, food insecurity, health insurance coverage, household crowding, or health. Reconciling these results, Bitler and Hoynes report that participation in noncash safety net programs generally, and especially the food stamp program, has become much more responsive to economic conditions in the years since welfare reform. On the other hand, participation in cash assistance programs has, if anything, become less responsive to the business cycle. Overall, therefore, Bitler and Hoynes ﬁnd that cash welfare reform weakened the safety net, but that the food stamp program picked up much of the slack.

In the third paper, Thomas S. Dee and Brian A. Jacob evaluate the signature education legislation of the last several decades, the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001. This policy brought dramatic changes to the education landscape by instituting regular, high-stakes assessments of students in public schools. Proponents of No Child Left Behind hoped that these high-stakes tests would motivate school districts to improve educational outcomes, thereby aligning the interests of schools and teachers with those of voters and parents. Critics, however, worried that high-stakes testing would distort teacher incentives even further, encouraging them to teach to the test, ignore nontested subject matter, inappropriately place low-achieving students in special needs classrooms, and neglect high-achieving students.

In their thorough evaluation, Dee and Jacob find support for both the proponents and the critics. The authors focus on tests that are not part of the high-stakes tests under No Child Left Behind, and thus are unlikely to be substantially distorted by teaching to the test. They find that No Child Left Behind appears to have had a positive impact on math learning, especially at lower grades and for students from traditionally disadvantaged populations. They find no evidence of an adverse impact on math achievement at either the top or the bottom of the ability distribution; indeed, the evidence suggests that No Child Left Behind had a roughly constant impact across the ability distribution. On the other hand, the policy appears not to have improved reading performance.

Several mechanisms contributed to the improvement in math learning. No Child Left Behind induced schools to spend about $600 more per student per year, Dee and Jacob estimate, with much of the extra money coming from state and local rather than federal sources. This money supported additional instruction as well as education support services. The legislation also led to an increase in the share of teachers with master’s degrees. But some of the critics’ fears were justiﬁed: schools reduced instruction in social studies and science—nontested subjects—and increased instruction in tested subjects, especially reading.

In the fourth paper, Rochelle M. Edge and Refet S. Gürkaynak study the forecasting performance of the dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) models currently fashionable among macroeconomists. DSGE models’ emphasis on deep structural parameters, such as individuals’ preferences, the available technology, and resource constraints, means that—if the models’ underlying assumptions about economic behavior are correct— they are immune to the Lucas critique (that is, the possibility that forward-looking behavior can cause previous patterns to break down in response to policy changes or other developments). Yet their success in predicting macroeconomic movements remains largely unexplored.

The authors focus on the forecasts of the most prominent of these DSGE models for the United States over the period 1992–2006. Consistent with previous evaluations, they find that DSGE models yield forecasts that tend to be less biased and more accurate than the professional forecasts, the Federal Reserve’s “Greenbook” forecasts, or purely statistical forecasts. But this is a limited success, as Edge and Gürkaynak find that the DSGE forecasts do relatively well only because the performance of all of these forecasts is quite poor. Indeed, the absolute performance of even the DSGE forecasts suggests that, for example, the 95 percent confidence interval around that model’s forecasts of annual inflation is 4 percentage points wide, and that most of the time its forecast of annual GDP growth cannot rule out anything from a near-recession to a boom. The slight edge that DSGE forecasts have over other forecasts is therefore not particularly noteworthy, since it involves comparing one weak forecast with others.

The authors argue that the poor performance of all forecasting techniques reﬂects the time period they study. Because they focus on the Great Moderation period, there is little variation in inﬂation or GDP growth, and therefore little to forecast. A final thought experiment drives this point home. They ask whether a policymaker considering the 1992–2006 period would have done better adopting any of the forecasts they consider, or, assuming that the policymaker knew the actual mean for that period, using that mean as the forecast. It turns out that the simple average predicts better than any of the forecasts, conﬁrming that none of the forecasts is providing much information.

A more telling evaluation of DSGE models’ usefulness must therefore await assessments of their performance in less stable environments. As a step in this direction, Edge and Gürkaynak take a preliminary look at the Great Recession. They present suggestive evidence that the DSGE forecasts were remarkably slow to provide any information concerning the fall in output as the recession unfolded, and that they were outperformed by the other available forecasts in this episode.

In the fifth paper, Gary Gorton and Andrew Metrick examine the “shadow” banking system and consider how it should be regulated. The shadow banking system refers to arrangements or institutions that are economically similar to traditional banking but that operate outside traditional banking arrangements—and, crucially, outside traditional regulation.

Gorton and Metrick begin by documenting the magnitude and sources of the rise in shadow banking and its role in the ﬁnancial crisis. They describe how a combination of regulatory restrictions on traditional banks, implicit government subsidies of shadow banking (notably through free implicit insurance of money market mutual funds), and ﬁnancial innovation led to an explosion of shadow banking over the past three decades. They emphasize that one key force behind the growth of shadow banking is special bankruptcy provisions for repurchase agreements (“repos”), which give ﬁnancial institutions access to a highly liquid source of short-term funding. They also describe how the conjunction of short-term liquid liabilities and long-term illiquid assets left shadow banking vulnerable to panics similar to traditional bank runs, and how such panics were critical in the ﬁnancial crisis that erupted in the fall of 2008.

The authors then offer both some general principles for regulating shadow banking and a speciﬁc proposal to implement those principles. They point out that the critical role of the special bankruptcy provisions for repos gives regulators a powerful lever: by restricting the circumstances under which the bankruptcy safe harbor applies, regulators can shape the system. They argue that much of shadow banking involves sensible arrangements for handling large ﬁnancial transactions, and thus that regulators should not try to use their powers to force a return to the traditional system. Instead, drawing on lessons from history, they argue that regulation should involve explicit insurance of money market mutual funds that guarantee stable asset values, and stronger collateral requirements for repos and securitization. The speciﬁc set of proposals they put forth involve creating new classes of narrow ﬁnancial institutions for money market mutual funds and for the holding of securitized assets.

In the final paper, James R. Hines, Jr. studies expenditure by state and local government over the business cycle. As Hines observes, more than 40 percent of total government expenditure comes from state and local rather than federal government. Since fiscal policy is a key tool for managing aggregate demand, how states and local governments respond to recessions is a key component of the ﬁscal policy response to the business cycle.

Whereas federal expenditure is clearly countercyclical, rising during recessions and falling (relative to GDP) during booms, Hines shows that aggregate state and local government expenditure hardly responds when GDP falls below its potential. Unlike the federal government, most states have balanced budget requirements that limit their ability to borrow during recessions. Countercyclical state ﬁscal policy therefore requires strong discipline; states need to save during the good times so they can spend in the bad.

Hines suggests, however, that poor governance in some states contributes to making their expenditure actually procyclical. States that rank higher in corruption, a proxy for more general incompetence, tend to have especially procyclical expenditure. Corroborating this story, Hines ﬁnds further evidence that states in general lack strong discipline in the fact that they have a high propensity (perhaps 80 percent) to spend out of federal grants. Whereas a rational state government would save the federal money, states apparently cannot help but spend the cash they have on hand. But this policy vice suggests a policy remedy: federal grants to state governments may be an effective way to stimulate aggregate demand during recessions.

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@ Brookings Podcast: Welfare's Transformation

Ron Haskins — Fri, 20 Aug 2010 12:27:00 -0400

Fourteen years ago, the nation’s welfare laws were changed and the federal guarantee of cash assistance to single mothers ended. In this week’s @Brookings podcast, Senior Fellow Ron Haskins says welfare was transformed, with child care assistance, tax credits and work requirements helping to move low-income parents into the workforce. With welfare reauthorization nearing, Haskins tells us more about the controversy and the issues facing policymakers today.

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Freedom is Not Enough: The Moynihan Report and America’s Struggle over Black Family Life, from LBJ to Obama

Thu, 10 Jun 2010 15:00:00 -0400

Event Information

June 10, 2010
3:00 PM - 4:30 PM EDT

Falk Auditorium
The Brookings Institution
1775 Massachusetts Ave., NW
Washington, DC

On June 4, 1965, President Lyndon Johnson delivered what was considered to be the greatest civil rights speech of his career. Proudly, Johnson hailed the new freedoms granted to African Americans in the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and soon-to-be-approved Voting Rights Act, but noted that “freedom is not enough.” The speech was co-drafted by a political appointee in the Labor Department, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, later one of the most influential figures in the U.S. Senate. He had written a report on the deterioration of low-income black families that became famous as the Moynihan Report. Moynihan's arguments were controversial and influential, and established the terms of a debate about social welfare policies that have endured for 45 years.

On June 10, Governance Studies at the Brookings Institution will host James Patterson, professor emeritus at Brown University to discuss his book, Freedom is Not Enough (Basic Books, 2010), a history of the report and its influence, and examine the connections between marriage, race and poverty. Following the presentation, Senior Fellow E.J. Dionne, Jr. and columnists Clarence Page and Ross Douthat will join a discussion of Patterson’s book and the crucial issues he raises.

After the discussion, panelists will take audience questions.

Participants

Panelists

James T. Patterson

Ford Foundation Professor of History Emeritus, Brown University

Clarence Page

Columnist, The Chicago Tribune

Ross Douthat

Columnist, The New York Times

Family Matters: Improving Inner-city Neighborhoods

Ron Haskins — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 10:49:00 -0500

Peter Edelman’s essay on improving inner-city neighborhoods contains both interesting history and a host of reasonable proposals. However, it lacks an emphasis on the major cause of problems in the inner city: personal responsibility, by which I mean the drive to finish school, shun delinquency and crime, avoid pregnancy before marriage, work steadily, stay off of welfare, and form a family through marriage. And while the policies he recommends lack evidence that they would actually work, policies that promote personal responsibility suffer from no such problem, even in the inner city. The task for the Obama Administration, and for all of us who care about improving America’s worst neighborhoods, is to expand such programs while simultaneously implementing and testing new neighborhood programs of the type recommended by Edelman.

Poverty is not the only salient feature of the types of inner-city neighborhoods that worry Edelman. Along with high levels of poverty, the worst neighborhoods also have numerous signs of social disorder. Crime and physical blight are the most apparent, but they are accompanied by low work levels among the residents, soaring high school dropout rates, low marriage rates, and high rates of non-marital births. It bears emphasis that each of these behaviors is partially or fully under the control of the residents themselves. The biggest failure of previous policies, including those proposed by Senator Robert Kennedy that are reviewed so colorfully by Edelman, was that they did too little to emphasize the importance of personal responsibility in converting inner-city neighborhoods into decent places to live.

The expansion of opportunity in America depends on principled behavior combined with wise government policies. Unfortunately, neither side of the aisle seems to fully accept this insight: Policies favored by conservatives tend to place too much emphasis on individual responsibility, while policies favored by liberals place too much emphasis on government programs. Progress will result only when the best ideas from both camps are employed to formulate policy and guide practice.

In our recently published book, Creating an Opportunity Society, my Brookings colleague Isabel Sawhill and I analyze data from the Census Bureau to show that if young people finish high school, get a job, and get married before they have children, they have about a 2 percent chance of falling into poverty and nearly a 75 percent chance of joining the middle class by earning $50,000 or more per year.

As Edelman says, we have learned a lot from previous policies. But both the data I would emphasize and the lessons I draw differ from his. As far back as the 1980s, writers such as Ken Auletta, Leon Dash, and Alex Kotlowitz wrote perspicaciously about what Auletta called the "underclass." All these authors spent considerable time in these neighborhoods and all emphasized the multiple social problems from which the resident populations suffered. But at the outset of his seminal book The Underclass, Auletta stated my theme in stark terms:

While I don’t believe in pink pills and panaceas, I do believe in making a concerted effort to help the underclass...I came to believe members of the underclass could not succeed without practicing self-help, but I also believe they usually need a helping hand.

In 1990, given the economist’s penchant to define concisely and measure, Erol Ricketts and Sawhill used Census Bureau data to go beyond mere poverty; instead, they defined underclass neighborhoods in behavioral terms. For them, underclass neighborhoods are those well above the national average in school dropout rates, female-headed families, households on public assistance, and able-bodied men not in the labor force.

Using the Ricketts-Sawhill behavioral definition or variations thereof, researchers such as Ron Mincy and Paul Jargowsky found that these underclass neighborhoods grew rapidly in the 1970s and continued growing, albeit more slowly, in the 1980s. But then, surprisingly, a study by Sawhill and Jargowsky published in 2006 found a sharp drop in the number of underclass neighborhoods in the 1990s. Viewed through the lens of the Ricketts-Sawhill underclass definition, the decline tracked closely the sharp fall in welfare dependency. Correlation may not be causation, but it is suggestive: In the mid-1990s, the Republican Congress and President Clinton reformed welfare by strongly encouraging recipients, mostly mothers, to leave welfare for work. Mothers who did not work or prepare for work had their benefits reduced or even terminated. Further, states that failed to place half their caseload in jobs or work programs were fined. The result was that for the first time ever, the nation’s cash welfare rolls underwent a sustained decline, falling by 50 percent or more in most states. More to the point, employment among poorly educated mothers increased dramatically –between 1995 and 2000, the percentage of never-married mothers with jobs increased by an astounding 44 percent. The importance of personal responsibility was made clear.

But responsible behavior by mothers formerly on welfare or who avoided welfare is only half the story. True, this explosion of employment by never-married mothers, a demographic group with among the highest poverty rates and lowest employment rates in the nation, was unprecedented. But the most reasonable explanation of their rising employment goes beyond welfare reform. Between roughly the mid-1980s and the mid-1990s, a series of Congresses - usually on a bipartisan basis - and a series of Democratic and Republican presidents greatly improved the system of federal programs that provides support to low-income workers, notably mothers leaving welfare. These work support programs, including two tax credits, food stamps, health insurance, and child care, were reformed, expanded, or created out of whole cloth to help low-income workers escape poverty.

Yet serious challenges remain. No family can escape poverty unless it has at least one worker. The combined value of cash welfare and food stamps is less than $11,000 in the typical state, compared with a poverty level of about $17,000 for a family of three. There is no chance that Congress will dramatically increase welfare payments in the foreseeable future to enable families to escape poverty, and so basic arithmetic tells us that adults simply have to work if their families are to escape poverty.

Unfortunately, as much as we would like to think that employment and training programs can help low-income workers achieve new skills and move up the wage distribution ladder, the evidence is not encouraging. The failure of most of the mothers leaving welfare to increase their earnings substantially over time is simply the latest example of how modestly effective employment and training programs have been since they were first tried on a large scale in the late 1960s. The nation will continue to have millions of low-wage workers for the foreseeable future, many of them mothers who in the past would have been on welfare. Research shows that they will earn about $8 or $9 an hour on average. Most will find it difficult, because of the short-term nature of their jobs, the prevalence of part-time jobs, and their penchant for changing jobs, to work full-time and year-round. And most will have trouble moving up the earnings scale.

Government, therefore, will need to provide them with work-contingent benefits. Otherwise, we will be letting them and their children remain in poverty, despite their best efforts. A major tenet of American social policy should be that poorly educated parents who work full time or close to full time shouldn’t live in poverty. The combination of increased personal responsibility demonstrated by the poor who eschew welfare in favor of work, plus the work support system developed over the past two decades or so by both federal and state governments, has made this goal a reality for millions of formerly poor families.

Should Edelman’s focus on neighborhood programs be ignored? Not at all - especially if the programs focus on improving inner-city schools, remodeling housing, creating mixed-income neighborhoods, and helping inner-city residents qualify for and find work, as he proposes. There is some reason to believe that neighborhood programs of these types could provide a useful supplement to the proven effective strategy of combining work requirements with generous work support programs to increase work levels and income. The problem is that we have been trying to implement effective neighborhood strategies for several decades and still lack persuasive evidence that they increase family well-being or children’s development, or that they reduce any of the Ricketts-Sawhill markers of underclass neighborhoods.

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Ron Haskins

Publication: Democracy

The Effects of the Recession on Child Poverty

Julia B. Isaacs — Mon, 04 Jan 2010 14:50:00 -0500

Nearly one in five children under age 18 lived in poor families in 2008, according to poverty statistics released by the Census Bureau in September 2009. Though high, this statistic does not capture the full impact of the economic downturn, which is expected to drive poverty even higher in 2009. However, updated poverty statistics will not be released by the Census Bureau until next August or September. To better understand the effects of the recession on children and families, this brief examines child poverty rates in 2008 in conjunction with increases in families’ use of nutrition assistance under the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP, formerly food stamps).

Between August 2008 and August 2009, the number of people receiving food stamps, or what are now called SNAP benefits, increased by 7.0 million, or 24 percent, as monthly caseloads skyrocketed from 29.5 to 36.5 million participants. This extraordinary increase means that roughly 3.4 million more children were receiving SNAP benefits in August 2009 than a year earlier, based on data showing that almost half (49 percent) of SNAP participants are children. Tracking SNAP recipient data by state provides an initial sense of which parts of the country are experiencing the most dramatic growth in economic need among families with children and where we can expect to see the largest increases in child poverty during 2009.

OVERVIEW OF RESULTS

Children in nine states or jurisdictions are at particularly high risk of poverty in 2009, reflecting a combination of high child poverty in 2008 and very high increases in use of nutrition assistance between 2008 and 2009, according to the state-level data analysis summarized in table 1 and explained further in the body of the brief. All nine lie in the south or southwestern regions of the United States: Alabama, Arizona, Georgia, Mississippi, New Mexico, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, and the District of Columbia (which is hereafter referred to as a state). Public agencies and private charities in these nine states are likely to face significant strain in meeting the economic needs of children and families during the current year and immediate future.

Seven states combine very high growth in SNAP caseloads over the past year with average levels of child poverty in 2008 (between 15 and 20 percent, or relatively close to the national average). These states, located throughout the country, include Florida, Idaho, Maine, Missouri, North Carolina, Nevada, and Oregon. In addition, three states with very high growth in assistance had relatively low child poverty rates (less than 15 percent) last year. The social service systems in these three states – Washington, Wisconsin, and Vermont – may not be prepared to serve an influx of newly poor children.

With families’ incomes falling during the current economic recession, a total of 25 states may face high child poverty rates in 2009, based on high poverty in 2008 and/or large growth in assistance caseloads during the past year. At the other end of the spectrum, there are five states – Connecticut, Minnesota, Nebraska, New Jersey and Wyoming – where child poverty was below 15 percent in 2008, and there was only moderate growth in recipients of SNAP benefits through June 2009. The children in these five states are at less risk of poverty in 2009 than children in the rest of the country. Finally, child poverty is likely to increase in the remaining 21 states, but generally not as high as in to the high levels threatening the states in the pink shaded areas of table 1.

The remainder of this brief provides a review of child poverty rates in 2008, by state, followed by a discussion of how more contemporaneous measures of economic need, specifically SNAP caseloads and unemployment rates, can shed light on expected poverty rates in 2009. I then rank states as having very high, high, or moderately high growth in SNAP recipients and conclude with the combined analysis summarized in table 1.

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The 2010 Reauthorization of Welfare Reform Could Result in Important Changes

Ron Haskins — Fri, 18 Dec 2009 00:00:00 -0500

The welfare reform law of 1996 is widely regarded as one of the most important pieces of social legislation since the enactment of Medicare and Medicaid in the mid-1960s. Although the 1996 law is known primarily for its radical reforms designed to help, cajole, or force welfare mothers to seek self sufficiency through work, there were important changes in several other means-tested programs as well. These included reorganization and expansion of child care programs, termination of Supplemental Security Income (SSI) benefits for drug addicts and alcoholics, tightening of the definition of disability for children on SSI, sweeping reforms in the child support enforcement program, major restrictions on means-tested benefits for noncitizens, creation of an abstinence education program, and others. Most of these provisions of law are scheduled to be reauthorized by Congress in 2010. My purpose here is to discuss, based primarily on interviews with officials, advocates, and scholars who are well acquainted with the politics of welfare reform, what actions Congress seems likely to take during reauthorization. This reauthorization is of great importance because it will be the first reauthorization conducted when Democrats, many of whom were strongly opposed to the 1996 reforms, have control of Congress and the presidency since the reforms were enacted. Thus, many senior Democrats might be expected to try to refashion the welfare reform law they strongly rejected in 1996. Any major provision of the 1996 law that survives the 2010 reauthorization seems likely to continue indefinitely.

Republicans intended to use the 1996 law to require as many people as possible to leave welfare programs in search of self sufficiency. Thus, Republicans believed that too many welfare mothers were not doing enough to join the labor force and avoid welfare; that noncitizens who came to America for opportunity should not be allowed to receive welfare until they become citizens except under emergency circumstances; that no able-bodied adults who became addicted to drugs or alcohol should receive public cash benefits specifically because of their addiction; and that too many children were qualifying for SSI with mental conditions that involved little more than acting out in school or having a learning disability. Democrats were opposed to many of the provisions Republicans enacted to achieve their vision of self sufficiency, but once President Bill Clinton agreed to sign the bill in July 1996 there was little they could do to stop the Republican-Clinton train. After Clinton announced he would sign the bill, half the Democrats in the House and Senate voted for the bill and Clinton signed it into law on August 22, 1996. Now, political conditions are reversed. Democrats control the House, Senate, and Presidency and might want to repeal – or at least modify – some of the reforms.

It is impossible to know what will happen during reauthorization, but for politicians, advocates, reporters, and scholars interested in the fate of the 1996 reforms, getting an understanding of the reforms that seem the most likely to be repealed or modified before the reauthorization debate begins will provide the basis for both intellectual and lobbying action for or against the possible changes. Arguably the best way to find out which provisions might be vulnerable is to ask congressional and state staffers, administration officials, advocates, and scholars who are steeped in welfare law, the ebb and flow of congressional and administration activity, and research on welfare what they think might happen during reauthorization.

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Ron Haskins

The Future of Welfare to Work

Ron Haskins — Wed, 09 Dec 2009 10:21:00 -0500

Editor's Note: Ron Haskins testified before the House Committee on the Budget on the issue of how far social policy should go in demanding work. Haskins argued that the current economic situation requires a determination of what changes in federal and state policy would allow states to respond more quickly and completely during the next recession, but without any permanent loosening of the current work requirements.

My goal in this testimony is to clarify one of the most important issues in American social policy. This issue, which has been evolving since passage of the Social Security Act in 1935, has been brought to the forefront by the recession that now plagues us. The issue is who should be expected to work and how far should social policy go in demanding work.

The elderly, the disabled, and children are the easiest to deal with. Hardly anyone expects members of these large demographic groups to work, although even here there are important issues of definition. The definition of the elderly for the purposes of Social Security is being gradually increased from 65 to 67 as a result of recommendations by the Greenspan Commission in 1983. Some policy analysts have recommended that the age of eligibility should be increased still further. There is little or no pressure from the public or major organized groups to change the definition of age for purposes of program eligibility, but it is a good bet that when Congress finally decides to seriously address the nation’s cancerous budget deficit, the definition of elderly will get close scrutiny.

The definition of disability is one of the great conundrums of American social policy. There is a large class of people who have medically established physical disabilities about which there is little or no disagreement, although some people with extensive physical disabilities who could easily qualify for disability payments choose to work. The definition of emotional and behavioral disabilities is more tortured. I recall that during the debate over welfare reform in 1995, a senior analyst at the Congressional Research Service testified that, due to the interaction of unclear statutes and regulations plus confused interpretations of the statutes by the Supreme Count, the definition of childhood disability in the Supplemental Security Income (SSI) program was essentially behaving in an age inappropriate way. Clay Shaw, the subcommittee chairman, immediately remarked that under that definition half the members of Congress were qualified for SSI.

The welfare reform law of 1996 significantly tightened the definition of disability in the SSI program. Before 1996, anyone found to be addicted to drugs or alcohol was entitled to a guaranteed cash benefit and health care coverage. The welfare reform law simply eliminated alcoholics and drug addicts from both the SSI program and the Social Security Disability Insurance program by dropping them from the definition of disability. There may have been negative impacts on addicts who would have been eligible for SSI under the old definitions but are no longer eligible, but if there are no one has demonstrated them in a good study.

These definitional problems with age and disability are relatively modest compared with the lively debate conducted over the years about the eligibility of able-bodied adults – especially mothers – for welfare benefits. Before the 1996 reforms, mothers who met a test of low resources and low income were entitled to cash welfare from the Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) program and their entire family was covered by Medicaid and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP; formerly food stamps). From time to time Congress passed provisions that encouraged able-bodied mothers to work or prepare for work. But these provisions were weak and ineffective. In a typical year before welfare reform passed, data from the Department of Health and Human Services showed that less than 10 percent of AFDC recipients participated in a work program or a program in which they searched for work. Few of these participated full-time. By contrast, nearly 35 percent of the caseload was enrolled in educational activities, although the evidence that these educational experiences led to work was minimal.

Perhaps the most important single issue in the 1996 welfare reform debate was that Republicans wanted to have tougher work requirements but Democrats were reluctant to put impoverished mothers at risk by penalizing them if they didn’t work. The Family Support Act of 1988 had strengthened work provisions somewhat, but still, as the data just cited demonstrates, the overwhelming majority of adults on AFDC did not work or prepare for work.

That changed with the election of President Bill Clinton in 1992 and the Republican takeover of Congress in the 1994 elections. Clinton campaigned on limiting time on welfare and emphasizing work requirements. Although he did not deliver on this promise in his first two years in office, upon achieving a majority in the 1995-1996 session of Congress, Republicans immediately introduced a bill that backed up work requirements with sanctions and time limits and provided states with a block grant featuring fixed funding that gave them a strong incentive to help adults leave welfare. The Republican bill strictly limited the amount of education that could count as work on the philosophy that only work led to more work. After a bitter Congressional fight that lasted until July 1996, a bill that had tough work requirements backed by sanctions and time limits passed on a bipartisan basis and President Clinton signed the bill in August 1996.

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Ron Haskins

Publication: House Budget Committee

Children and the Elderly: Not Children or the Elderly

Henry J. Aaron — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 13:47:00 -0500

In “Spending on Children and the Elderly: An Issue Brief," Julia Isaacs argues that spending on the elderly is excessive and is crowding out spending on children. This contention is incorrect as a matter of fact and it sets up an either/or contest that can only be destructive to the interests of both children and the elderly. At the same time, it remains true that the United States today leaves unexploited opportunities for investing in children that would yield large returns, boosting economic growth and reducing inequality.

The U.S. ratio of spending on different age groups provides little or no information about the fairness with which public policy treats different age groups. First, the ratio in the United States is not out of line with that in other developed nations. Second, most of the difference between spending between age groups is attributable to health care spending and pensions. Health care spending rises naturally with age, so that equally generous coverage will result in much larger spending on the old than on the young. Third, current retirees on the average have paid payroll taxes that, in present value terms, equal or exceed the value of the pensions they will eventually receive. Furthermore, the economic status of the elderly and of children differs little or not at all, based on poverty measures that take adequate account of out-of-pocket health care spending.

Pitting the interests of the elderly and disabled against those of children is politically short-sighted, because advocates of public outlays for children and for the elderly have long been - and should remain - allies against those who believe that the role of government should be limited to providing for defense and public safety, and little else. Advocates of a restricted role for government remain a sizable and influential group in American politics. In a nation of two-party politics, progress is based on building and sustaining coalitions. If those who share the view that government should intervene actively to promote social welfare - for children, the disabled and poor, and the elderly - engage in fratricide, each of those groups will suffer.

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Henry J. Aaron

Spending on Children and the Elderly

Julia B. Isaacs — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 09:16:00 -0500

SUMMARY

The United States spends 2.4 times as much on the elderly as on children, measured on a per capita basis, with the ratio rising to 7 to 1 if looking just at the federal budget. The tilt toward the elderly is stronger in the United States than in many other countries, although all OECD countries spend more, per capita, on the elderly than on children. Viewed from a life-cycle perspective, it is not unfair to spend more on the elderly than on children because all individuals progress from being children to working-age adults to elderly adults. However, our current system of public expenditures is unfair to younger generations, defined as birth cohorts rather than age groups: the vast and growing size of unfunded health and retirement benefits will require today’s children to bear a heavy tax burden when they grow up to be working-age adults. For our children’s sake, we should restrain growth in elderly benefits and pay our share of taxes.

This issue brief is drawn from a series of three working papers on spending on children and the elderly.

The first, How Much Do We Spend on Children and the Elderly?, is descriptive in nature and provides estimates of public spending on children and the elderly, as well as information on private support for these two age groups.
The second, A Comparative Perspective on Public Spending on Children, investigates whether the United States invests less in children than other rich countries and whether there is a common cross-national pattern of spending more on elderly than on children.
The third, Public Spending on Children and the Elderly from a Life-Cycle Perspective, tackles a challenging question raised by the observed spending patterns in the earlier papers, namely: does it make sense for our country to be spending so much less on children than on the elderly? While such a question sometimes raises issues of intergenerational warfare, the paper addresses it through a life-cycle framework.

The issue brief summarizes the three papers, which provide further detail and references for the information.

The author of the series, Julia B. Isaacs, is the Child and Family Policy Fellow at the Brookings Institution. The papers benefited from the excellent research assistance of Emily Monea and the helpful comments of Isabel Sawhill and Ron Haskins.

Comments by Henry Aaron, Senior Fellow, Economic Studies

Children and The Elderly: Not Children or the Elderly

Julia Isaacs argues in the four papers referenced on this site that spending on the elderly is excessive and is crowding out spending on children. I hold that this contention is incorrect as a matter of fact and that it sets up an either/or contest that can only be destructive to the interests of both children and the elderly. At the same time, it remains true that the United States today leaves unexploited opportunities for investing in children that would yield large returns, boosting economic growth and reducing inequality.

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Comments by Eugene Steuerle, Institute Fellow, Urban Institute

Read Eugene Steuerle's complete commentary »

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Julia B. Isaacs

California’s Work-to-Welfare Policy

Ron Haskins — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 14:38:00 -0400

California’s decision to allow a substantial number of their welfare recipients to avoid work requirements could represent the leading edge of a national movement with dangerous consequences. Whether other states are implementing regressive California-like welfare policy is not clear, but given the desperate financial condition of many states, it would be surprising if they were not.

Before more states take California’s descending path out of their fiscal problem, now is the time to clarify two serious difficulties with this regressive policy for saving money. The first is that in large part because of the strong work requirements of the 1996 federal welfare reforms, states and the federal government have developed the most successful anti-poverty policy for children in the nation’s history. The 1996 reforms required mothers to work or lose their welfare benefits. Something on the order of 1.5 million mothers previously on welfare found jobs and the resulting historically high work rate among poorly educated single mothers has remained high, although both the recession of 2000 and the current recession reduced their work rate somewhat. When poor mothers enter the workforce, almost always in low-wage jobs, their income is supplemented by a host of government benefits – including cash, child care, health insurance, and others – that boost their income far beyond the income provided by welfare alone.

It has been the combination of income from earnings and government-provided work supports that has lowered poverty among single mothers. Even through 2008 and the onset of the current recession, poverty among households headed by single mothers is around 20 percent lower than in 1993 before welfare reform. There is simply no prospect of a policy that will be as effective as the combination of work and work support for bringing these mothers into the mainstream and for reducing the child poverty rate.

An equally serious problem with the California path is that the work habit introduced to millions of poor mothers by the 1996 reforms could be reversed. The social services culture of insisting on work and demanding self sufficiency that now characterizes most state welfare programs could be damaged. Whether states will be able to recapture their aggressive orientation to work following several years of flabby work requirements is questionable. Following California’s lead will reverse nearly a decade and a half of hard-won progress against parental idleness and child poverty. No state should follow California’s lead. As Larry Temple, the head of the Texas Workforce Commission points out, mothers on welfare need job assistance “now more than ever.”

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Ron Haskins

Brookings: Topics - Welfare

Confronting Suburban Poverty in America

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Alan Berube

Elizabeth Kneebone

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The 2010 Reauthorization of Welfare Reform Could Result in Important Changes

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The Future of Welfare to Work

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Children and the Elderly: Not Children or the Elderly

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Spending on Children and the Elderly

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California’s Work-to-Welfare Policy

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