Mayor Gray’s Budget Would Mean No More Money for Many Critical Needs

As I said yesterday, Mayor Gray’s proposed Fiscal Year 2014 budget provides more money for some, but little more — in some cases, no more — for programs that address low-income residents’ critical needs.

For example …

There will be $700,000 more for permanent supportive housing — reportedly enough to accommodate 45 more chronically homeless individuals and/or families than the program is serving now.

But there probably won’t be money to ensure that homeless families with no place to stay can sleep safely indoors unless it’s freezing cold outside.

Nor will there be money to increase the number of locally-funded housing vouchers they could use to help pay market-rate rents until they can afford the full rent on their own.

This could actually mean fewer of these so-called tenant-based housing vouchers because the DC Housing Authority will get less money for Housing Choice (formerly Section 8) vouchers due to sequestration.

There will be no more money for child care subsidies, though the unreasonably low reimbursement rates providers get account, at least in part, for the fact that parents of some 9,000 infants and toddlers can’t get affordable child care.

In this case, what looks like level-funding — perhaps a small increase even — will mean somewhat over $1.5 million less because sequestration will cut a portion of the District’s federal child care funding.

There will be no more money for adult literacy services — in fact, apparently $734,000 less, though I’m told the budget document may be misleading.

Even without the cut, the District will be investing considerably less than it once did to address a problem that affects not only the job prospects and daily lives of more than a third of adult residents, but the children they’re raising.

Adult literacy programs need more money not only for these “functionally illiterate” residents, but for more proficient high school dropouts, who can get the equivalent of a high school diploma by passing the GED tests.

These tests will get harder next year — and require computer proficiency. Adult literacy programs thus need to invest more in teacher training and equipment to get their students up to speed (literally and figuratively).

One would think that the District’s abysmal 59% GED pass rate would have led the Mayor, who’s so concerned about employment here, to put more money into these programs.

Ditto for adult job training, which the Mayor’s budget would cut by $624,000 — considerably more if measured against what the program will have this year if the DC Council approves his proposed supplement.

There will be no money to protect families in the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program from running up against the five-year time limit in cases where the parents have been excused from regular work activity requirements for compelling reasons, e.g., needs to care for a sick or disabled family member, domestic violence trauma.

There will, however, be money to protect long-term TANF families from further benefits cuts for another year.

This is a further indication that the Department of Human Services doesn’t have the resources it needs for its program revamp. Nor will it in the Mayor’s proposed budget, according to the DC Fiscal Policy Institute’s analysis.

Because even if it completes the remaining 9,000 or so assessments that are supposed to produce suitable work preparation plans for TANF parents, there won’t be enough training slots for them.

For a family of three, the reprieve will mean a continuing cash income of $257 a month, instead of the regular $428 — 23.9% less in real dollars than the year TANF was created.

The Mayor might have considered increasing TANF benefits, as a few states have recently done. All he chose to do was replace “lost” federal dollars, which weren’t really lost, but merely funds the District didn’t have left over, as it did the year before.

I understand that the Mayor has competing interests to balance. He wants to make the city an appealing place for higher-income people to live — good for the local economy, essential adequate revenues.

He’s got to worry about the stability and quality of the District’s own workforce.

And he understands that the city’s future hinges in part on how well it educates the next generation — though apparently not that all the early learning opportunities, libraries, modernized schools and the like can’t compensate for resources parents lack to provide for their kids’ basic needs.

Yet his budget truly is, in many respects, what its title says. It’s investing in tomorrow while ignoring investments needed today.

Needed, at any rate, if the District’s prosperity is going to benefit everyone, as the Mayor rightly says it should.

NPR Reporter Puts Old SSI for Children Myths in New Bottle

No one, I think, was surprised when some Fox News talking heads decided to gin up outrage over former workers who are receiving Social Security Disability Insurance benefits.

But a reporter for NPR’s Planet Money?

True, Chana Joffe-Walt didn’t actually call the workers “moochers” or “takers.”

But her post previewing her This American Life broadcast on SSDI and Supplemental Security Income benefits for children came pretty damn close, though the “takers” in the latter case are very low-income parents of very disabled kids.

I’ve got a lot to say about what she says (and doesn’t). So I’m going to tackle her relatively brief excursion into SSI for children here and deal with her skewed account of SSDI is a separate post.

I’ve written before about the recurrent attacks on SSI for children. Since then, New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof took out after the program on the basis of a couple of stories he’d heard on a trip to a poor town in Appalachia.

Parents, he alleged, wouldn’t let their children participate in early literacy programs because they feared they’d lose their SSI benefits if the kids learned to read.

So, he concluded, Congress should cut funding for the program and and put the money saved into “early childhood initiatives” that promote literacy — and marriage.

Swift, smart responses from policy analysts and advocates who actually know how the program works, including a lengthy memo to the Times Public Editor by attorneys Jonathan Stein and Rebecca Vallas at Community Legal Services in Philadelphia.

And the Public Editor ultimately agreed that Kristof had “made assertions based on too little direct evidence” and over-simple interpretations of “statistical information.”

Yet Joffe-Walt virtually replicates Kristoff’s core argument and methods.

Look at all those kids getting SSI benefits — and so many of them with “mental or intellectual problems,” rather than physical disabilities that are obvious to any observer.

Look at this one appealing kid. If he “starts doing better in school, overcomes some of his disabilities,” his family’s livelihood would be threatened.

And here’s this one mother who said she didn’t want her teenager son to work because the family would lose their disability checks.

Thus, “the disability program stands in opposition to all … [the] aims” we’d agree on for poor disabled children and their parents.

Not a whit of evidence that the kids’ parents wouldn’t agree on them too. Not a hint that school performance isn’t the sole measure of a child’s eligibility for SSI — or that the teenager’s earnings might have no effect on his disability benefits, since they’d stay the same unless he earned more than $1,640 a month, assuming he stayed in school.

Ira Glass, who hosts This American Life, has defended Joffe-Walt’s report in a response to a documented point-by-point rebuttal, with documentation, posted by Media Matters.

The report, he told the International Business Times “was fact-checked line by line” by an outsider and the editor, as well as by Joffe-Walt herself.

No one to my knowledge, however, is disputing the specific facts in the part on SSI for children, i.e., that more children are now receiving those benefits than in years past, as we’d expect given, among other things, population growth and the rise in child poverty.

It’s the conclusions — both explicit and implied — that prompted Media Matters to call the portion on children “error-riddled.”

Perhaps in addition to talking to some people in Hale County, Alabama, Joffe-Walt might have thought to talk with some of the experts whose work Media Matters cites — and others whose work on the issues she could readily have found with a Google search.

I rather doubt she’s comfortable with the uses Fox Nation and other right-wing media have made of her report.

But if she’d done her homework, she’d have known that she was perpetrating oft-debunked myths intended to undermine a critical source of support for low and moderate-income families, who struggle to cover the costs of raising children with severe disabilities.

NOTE: NPR also broadcast Joffe-Walt’s report on Planet Money and All Things Considered.

House Republicans Defend Counterproductive TANF Work Rules

House Republicans will again try to block any and all waivers of the work participation requirements in the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program.

They passed a bill to this effect in mid-March. And we find the equivalent tucked into Congressman Paul Ryan’s budget plan as well.

As I’ve written before, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services told states that they could get waivers only if they presented plans that seemed likely to improve employment outcomes, plus measures to track success.

The Republicans are still up in arms. Congressman Dave Camp, who chairs the House Ways and Means Committee, again asserts that the waivers are illegal — and should be because they will undermine the purported success of the TANF program.

The work requirements were central to this success, he says, and thus helped lead to “more work, more earnings, less welfare dependence, and less poverty among low-income Americans.”

No one would argued that the touted reforms haven’t drastically reduced dependence on “welfare.” In 1996, when TANF was created, 68% of poor families with children received cash assistance. In 2010, only 27% did.

Meanwhile, the number of families with children poor enough to fall below the very low poverty thresholds increased by 17%.

For single-mother families — the large majority of those TANF serves — the latest reported poverty rate is 40.7%. These undoubtedly include families in the program, since no state provides cash benefits equal to even 50% of the federal poverty line.

It’s nevertheless true that many single mothers entered the workforce in the late 1990s. Experts give the TANF work requirements some credit for this, but note also the importance of other factors.

Two seem especially important because they help explain not only the sharp uptick in single-mother employment, but the downward slide since, as well as the disproportionately high rate of poverty among single-mother families.

The labor market in the late 1990s was unusually tight. And the demand for low-wage workers in particular was unusually high.

So it was relatively easy for TANF parents to get hired. Generally not for jobs that paid enough to support them and their children, however.

Nor to move up to better-paying jobs that offered some modicum of stability and essential benefits, e.g., paid leave, health insurance.

Which brings us back to the issue of the work participation requirements. They are, indeed, a core part of the TANF program we’ve got.

But they’re also the core of the program’s failure to help poor parents move from welfare to work that ends not only their dependency on, but their need for government benefits — one of the main goals Congress defined when it created TANF.

The work participation requirements fly in the face of a basic good management principle. They hold states accountable for process, not outcomes, as a new brief from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities explains.

Process, in this case, means that states must have set percents of the parents in their caseloads engaged for a set number of hours in one or more of a set of activities defined in the law.

At the same time, states can avoid penalties for failing to hit their required participation rate by reducing their caseloads — in any manner they choose.

Both the “countable” activities limit and the caseload reduction option encourage agencies to push TANF parents into the first job they can find — or to direct their contractors to gear their services to this “work first” approach.

On top of this, the law effectively prevents states from achieving the best long-term employment outcomes because it imposes several different limits on how much they can count participation in education programs as part of work activities. For example:

• They can count hours spent in these programs for only 30% of the parents in their caseloads — and then only for 20 hours a week, counting homework, if supervised.
• Vocational education training is okay, but only for a lifetime total of 12 months.
• Coursework leading to a four-year or advanced degree is not countable at all.

At the same time, the work participation requirements constrain states from fully addressing severe, relatively common barriers to work, e.g., mental health and/or substance abuse problems.

Parents with these problems generally can’t perform countable work activities on an ongoing basis — at least not for the average per week hours required.

But their participation in programs designed to help them resolve such problems is countable for only four consecutive weeks and for a total of only six — or in some cases, twelve — weeks a year.

So some states create hurdles to keep these parents out of their programs, as Elizabeth Lower-Basch at CLASP recently testified. States that want to help must pay for separate programs* or risk penalties.

Finally, states get no credit for parents who perform countable work activities for fewer than the required number of hours. This, among other things, punishes them for accommodating limits related to disabilities, as federal law requires.

One result of all these rules and restrictions is that agency staff spend an inordinate amount of their time determining and recording countable hours.

This is time that’s not available to work with TANF parents so that they get — and stay — employed. (Such figures as we have suggest considerably more success in job finding than job keeping.)

No matter, so far as the law is concerned.

As CBPP says, “TANF is the only employment program in which getting participants into paid work is not a key success measure” — or so far as I can tell, a measure states need concern themselves with at all.

This is what House Republicans hope to protect from experiments that could help produce an enlightened reform of welfare reform.

* Some states — apparently not many — also use these programs to support parents in postsecondary education programs.

Panel to Address Poverty in DC and What to Do About It

On Tuesday, March 5, the Fair Budget Coalition will host a panel discussion on poverty in the District of Columbia — “The State of the District’s Poverty: What’s the Story Behind the 600 Kids at DC General?”.

As the online invitation suggests, the Coalition is linking the record-high number of children in DC General — the District’s main shelter for families — to funding cuts in both safety net programs and others that benefit low-income residents.

A look at the District’s poverty rates is surely worthwhile. As I’ve written before, both the overall rate and the child poverty rate are well above the national rates — and considerably higher than the rates in 2007, just before the recession set in.

But, as I’ve also written, the Census Bureau’s poverty thresholds are unrealistically low. For a single mother with two children, for example, the 2011 threshold was just $18,123.

The Wider Opportunities for Women’s Basic Economic Security Tables for the District show that the family would need about $85,680 for basic necessities, child care and taxes, plus some extra for rainy day and retirement savings – if the mother had employer-sponsored health insurance and retirement benefits.

This is higher than the 2011 median income for District households as a whole, but nearly $22,000 lower than the median for households classified as white/non-Hispanic.

One of many indications that the growing economic prosperity Mayor Gray’s recent State of the District address celebrated hasn’t done much for the “have-nots” in the city.

The challenge Fair Budget faces is that no panel can specifically address all the programs that could alleviate hardship — and narrow the huge income gaps here — if the Mayor and the DC Council invested more money in them.

The event can provide a framework for the programs, however, and draw some links among them. Also identify priorities for addressing critical weaknesses.

We know, for example, that the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program aims to prepare parents for work that will, at the very least, reduce their need for safety net benefits.

The District has invested resources in making TANF job training more effective. It’s also launched several initiatives to match job seekers with employers that might hire them.

But many parents won’t be able to work unless they have child care — and a subsidy to make it affordable. Consider, for example, that the average annual market rate local centers charge for infants is $2,400 more than a full-time minimum wage worker earns.

Yet the District’s subsidy program reimburses providers at such low rates that many have gone out of business. The remainder perforce generally limit the number of subsidized children they’ll take.

So there are more than 9,000 infants and toddlers on center waiting lists, according to the Fair Budget invite.

We’ve thus got one program that’s doing more to address barriers to work and another that should, but isn’t because it’s egregiously under-funded.

Similarly, the employment prospects of more than 36% of D.C. adults are extremely limited because they’re functionally illiterate.

Yet local funding for adult education programs was cut in Fiscal Year 2011 and again in Fiscal Year 2012. It’s at its twice-reduced level in the current budget, I’m told. (The budget for the Office of the State Superintendent of Education, where adult ed. is housed, is notoriously opaque.)

Well, I could go on, but point is made, I hope. As with any complex problem, poverty has a lot of inter-related parts. And the District government has a lot of parts that affect it, for good or ill.

If the Mayor truly wants to “improve the quality of life for all,” as his One City Action Plan says, then he should fashion a budget that reflects a comprehensive commitment to both the safety net and poverty reduction.

Like all elected officials, he’ll tend to want what he believes his constituents want seriously enough to consider when election time rolls round.

So a good turnout at the Fair Budget Coalition’s event would send a helpful message. And I expect it to be both informative and a launching pad for this year’s grassroots budget advocacy.

And who wouldn’t be inspired to launch after listening to panelists who know poverty first-hand — and while sitting among some of the families from DC General who’ll be there too?

The hour-long event begins at 3:30 p.m. in Room 412 of the Wilson Building, 1350 Pennsylvania Avenue, NW. You’ll need a photo ID to get past the guards.

And Fair Budget asks that you RSVP to Janelle Treibitz, 202-328-5513 or janelle@fairbudget.org.

UPDATE: The event will be in Room 123 instead of Room 412, as originally planned.