MDJOnline

Five years on, welfare reform a clear success

When a Republican Congress led by Speaker Newt Gingrich of east Cobb passed welfare reform in 1996 and a reluctant President Clinton said, well, OK, we’ll do this thing, some were aghast to the point of resigning from administration positions, and many were quick to forecast resulting horrors. A million additional children would be thrown into the ranks of poverty, we were warned by what seemed a million genuinely fearful critics.

Five years later, though, the facts are rolling in, and not only are they crushing the gloomy predictions, they are making it appear as if the reform is achieving what could be the most significant advance for poor Americans in decades: the revival of the two-parent family. Based on Census data from the years 1995 to 2000, an analysis by the Washington-based Center for Budget and Policy Priorities shows a “statistically significant” 8 percent drop in children under 18 who were living with a single mother. Black children in homes with two married parents, meanwhile, went up from 34.8 to 38.9 percent, according to the study. Overall in Georgia, the number of welfare caseloads has dropped nearly 60 percent since the inception of the reform process. A good economy has helped to accomplish these walks down the aisle, as has a movement aimed at getting fathers to take responsibility for their children, it is noted in published reports on this study released in June. But few appear to doubt that welfare reform has been the major factor. A variety of its provisions served to encourage marriage. So did the measure’s central feature, a five-year benefit limit. This reversal of the multi-decades trend toward single-parent homes is hugely important, as Patrick F. Fagan, a senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation, will tell you. He has pointed out that children in married-couple families are better off on average than children in single-parent families by almost any measure: They are healthier, more likely to do well in school, less likely to commit crimes, less likely to be poor. His is a viewpoint widely shared by experts of all ideological stripes. Some of the critics are beginning to change their minds about welfare reform. A co-author of this latest study is Wendell Primus, who was a Health and Human Services official in the Clinton years and one of those who resigned in protest when the president signed the bill. He has been quoted as saying he does not now think the reform was so awful. Of course, few, if any, would make the case that poverty is now done for or even that the reform measure itself will need no revisions when it comes up for reauthorization next year. But there is ample reason for cheer at the moment, and there is a lesson here about the negative consequences of making long-term dependence on government too easy.

-- Anonymous, August 31, 2001