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Mon, 26 Nov 2007
What you didn't know about welfare.
[From the Woonsocket Call and Pawtucket Times, etc.]
The Governor made it clear last week that he wants to include discussions about welfare in the debates over the state budget crisis, again. Fair enough, I suppose. No budget item is sacred. But let's make sure we know the facts first.
How much don't you know about welfare? Like many people you might have heard that Rhode Island is a "welfare magnet," attracting welfare recipients from other states by our lax rules. Did you know that the actual data show exactly the opposite?
Did you also know that the cash benefits to welfare recipients haven't gone up since 1989? How about that about a third of welfare recipients leave the program each year for work? Or that by every measure, the cost of the program has gone down dramatically since 1997, though the savings have been put into child care and other non-cash benefits. In other words, the Department of Human Services' annual report about the "Family Independence Program" (FIP) is a fascinating read, mostly for the contrast between what it shows and what is widely believed. (Don't take my word for it; it's readily available at www.dhs.ri.gov.)
I read the report this morning, and learned that in 1996, 1225 families joined the program when they moved here from other states. In 2006, the number was 721. These data are self-reported, on the welfare application, so perhaps are not terribly reliable. However, there are three reasons to believe them. First, there are no penalties either way, so there is no incentive to lie on the application. Second, the data was collected precisely the same way in 1996 as in 2006. Third, there are no other data on the subject.
What's more, since 2001, more welfare recipients have moved away from Rhode Island each year than new ones arrived. Despite this, you hear this "welfare magnet" thing all the time, on the editorial pages of newspapers, on talk radio, and in speeches by politicians, including Governor Carcieri (an example). But it's not just that the balance of facts don't support it; no facts support it. When I asked him the source of his assertion when he cited the cost of our kindness in a column, Ed Achorn, the Providence Journal columnist, told me only, "I am citing common sense there." But I know of no definition of common sense that implies I'm supposed to believe things uninformed people made up just because they assume them to be true.
Besides, we're not even all that kind. This part of the welfare magnet fiction is only empty self-congratulation. Welfare benefits here are skimpy and the rules restrictive, just like in other states. Even with the non-cash benefits like food stamps and rent vouchers, this is not a program you can use to support a family for long -- and people don't.
In December 2006, there were 10,755 families on welfare (down from 19,000 in 1997) but this is only an end-of-year snapshot. During the year, there were 6,885 families that joined the program and about 7,855 left it. A bit under half of them left because they got a job. The others moved, or were cut off. Also, notice that there were a thousand fewer people getting assistance in 2006 than at the same time in 2005, and this was before the latest round of "welfare reform", enacted last year with the 2007 budget.
As we look forward once again to balancing the budget by denying help to our friends, neighbors and relatives who need it, let's remember the purpose of welfare: it's to help people with children out of a bad situation. It's a program for temporary assistance, and the evidence shows that people use it temporarily. Remember, three quarters of the people who were receiving welfare in December 2005 stopped getting it in the next twelve months.
Here's another widely ignored fact, worth remembering in a week of Thanksgiving. Even for people in the middle of some family crisis, welfare is a choice. This means there's a limit to how restrictive you can make the program if you truly want it to be useful. No one is forced to apply for welfare benefits. That is, you can always eat dog food. And it's fairly dry under most of our bridges. Or you could just decide to stay with the abusive husband. The point of having a program like FIP is to prevent parents and children from having to face situations like these. If the program doesn't prevent that, then what's the point of even pretending to help?
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