WELFARE REFORM

Legal and Ethical Issues concerning Welfare Reform

Abstract

In 1996 the United States passed a major reform of welfare, the federal and state program that had provided and continues to provide money to poor, mostly single mothers since 1935. The reform was called the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA), and it changed one of welfare's longstanding features. It had been that a mother could receive welfare so long as one of her children was younger than 18 years old; after PRWORA the government capped this time period at no more than five years regardless of her children's age. The story begins with policymakers creating welfare primarily for a target population of mothers either widowed or with disabled husbands. While welfare mostly went to mothers with these characteristics in the beginning, by the 1970s it was mostly separated, divorced, and never-married mothers who received it. In this paper, we try to focus on the legal and ethical issues concerning welfare reform.

Legal and Ethical Issues concerning Welfare Reform

Introduction

Despite welfare reform being almost a decade in our past, there are two important reasons for us to continue researching it. First, the federal government will have to eventually reauthorize PRWORA, and its success or failure should matter to that debate. The first seeks to understand why the welfare case load has fallen so dramatically since reform. Recognizing that a booming economy accompanied this fall in case loads, this line of research wants to know what portion of the fall can be attributed to welfare reform and what portion to the economy.

Another strategy, embodied in Blank and Haskins (2001), is to look at individuals' outcomes before and after welfare reform to see if they are better off. While this information in both cases may be worth knowing, it does not address the political aspects of welfare reform. The second reason to continue researching welfare reform is that it is likely that other programs will undergo similar caseload evolutions which may damage their respective popularities. Understanding the importance of caseload characteristics will help policymakers better design their programs in anticipation of and in response to such changes.

Background

Welfare started as a patchwork of state programs early in the 20th century. It was one result of a child welfare movement that sought better care for America's poor children. Its supporters argued that children of destitute families were better off when raised by their birth mothers rather than by orphanages (DeParle 2004) and that providing home-based support was cheaper than institutional care for the government (Bell 1965).

What they proposed instead were mothers' pensions4 whereby the state provided money to poor mothers so they could raise their children without having to work. The movement was remarkably successful. Between 1911 and 1935—the year the federal government started providing welfare—all but two states had enacted mothers' pensions (Skocpol 1992). Welfare became a semi-federal program in 1935 when the U.S. government created Aid to Dependent Children (ADC) as an element of the Social Security Act ...