Plan B Forum

Thursday, January 09, 2014
Poverty and the Laboraties of Democracy
Kevin Drum reports on the latest effort by a Republican to pretend he gives a damn about the poor. Marco Rubio proposes, among other things, the bold new idea of block grants. Drum condemns the proposal, but writes that there have been some advantages from Fedralism. I throw a cow. He wrote "state experimentation, a la welfare reform in the early 90s, could be pretty valuable." "if each of the various state policies were rigorously studied." I comment. Yes indeed. Unfortunately, the two clauses together suggests you imagine that state experiments in welfare reform were rigorously studied back in the 90s. Before going on, let me note my debt to your post "so the costs of welfare reform weren't so low after all" or something, which is one of the main influences on my thoughts most weeks (really). So what have we learned from a state level welfare reform experiment ?Well we now know that welfare reform kills people [/b]http://angrybearblog.com/2013/06/welfar ... kills.html "research of Peter Muennig, Zohn Rosen and Elizabeth Ty Wilde From 1994 to 1999, Florida randomly selected a group of welfare recipients into either the Family Transition Program (FTP), ... or the then-standard Aid for Families with Dependent Children welfare program (AFDC “participants in the experimental group had a 16 percent higher mortality rate than members of the control group (hazard ratio: 1.16; 95% confidence interval: 1.14, 1.19; p < 0.01). This amounts to nine months of life expectancy lost between the ages of thirty and seventy for people in FTP." Odd that this statistically significant result from an actual experiment has had no influence on the debate at all. There is little point having laboratories of democracy if people ignore the experimental results and just go with their prejudices as we do. ... "

Welfare caseloads, which started to fall in
1994, plummeted from 1996 through 2000. By
2001, they were at their lowest level in 30 years,
despite a vastly larger single-mother population.

The caseload decline stopped and caseload
numbers became flat after the early 2000s, as
unemployment started to rise and jobs became
scarcer. However, there was no caseload increase.
Even the strongest supporters of welfare reform
in 1996 would not have dared forecast the steep
declines and continued low levels of welfare
caseloads a decade later.

At the same time as welfare usage fell,
work increased. Among single mothers, labor
force participation rose from 44 to 66 percent between 1994 and 2001—a much faster labor
force participation growth than among any
other group of women over this time period.

Labor force participation tapered off somewhat
in the slower economy of the early 2000s, and
was down to 61 percent by 2004. Yet, it remains
well above where it was in the early 1990s.

Finally, incomes rose, and earnings increases
were larger than welfare benefit declines. The
average income for single moms was around
$18,000 from the mid-1980s through the mid-
1990s. Between 1995 and 2001, it rose to nearly
$23,000. Poverty rates among single-mother
households fell to historically low levels by the
late 1990s.

While they have ticked up slightly in
the past four years, they still remain well below
where they were in the early 1990s.