Where Did All the Welfare Money Go?

We all know that Republican policymakers view Temporary Assistance for Needy Families as a resounding success.

Look, they say, at how caseloads fell after Congress ended welfare as we knew it — and President Clinton signed off on the deal. We should turn more programs into block grants like TANF — Medicaid and SNAP (the food stamp program) for starters.

Caseloads did indeed fall. And they barely rose when the Great Recession set in.

Only 27% of poor parents with children got any TANF cash benefits in 2010 — 41% fewer than the year TANF was born.

And those benefits were woefully paltry — for a family of three, less than 30% of the federal poverty line in all but eight states.

A new analysis by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities tells us why.

It’s not just because Congress has never increased the block grant funds states get as the federal government’s share, thus letting them lose at least 28% of their value.

Nor because Congress cut — and then wiped out — supplemental grants that some states had always received to compensate for ways the block grant formula short-changed them.

It’s because states are spending large chunks of their block grant funds and/or the funds they’ve got to put up as a partial match* on programs that aren’t only — or even mainly — for TANF families.

In other words, because they’re creatively exercising the much-vaunted flexibility that block grants like TANF provide.

Last year, for example, states spent, on average, only 29% of their TANF funds on cash assistance.

Another 9.4% went for services that help move families from welfare to work, e.g., education, job training, transportation assistance.

Child care subsidies accounted for another 17%. They too help move families from welfare to work, but they don’t necessarily go only to TANF and former TANF families.

What about the rest of the money?

Well, some of it paid for states’ refundable Earned Income Tax Credit, some for programs to promote marriage and discourage out-of-wedlock births and some for other legally-authorized purposes, e.g., programs states had spent money on before TANF was created.

The expenditures “authorized under prior law” don’t have to meet any of the goals Congress established for TANF. Many states, for example, claim child welfare spending as part of their match, though their programs rightly address child neglect and abuse at all income levels.

States also, CBPP reports, have claimed spending on their pre-K programs and on higher education grants for students with incomes way above the TANF eligibility level.

Such spending apparently gets lumped into an “other non-assistance” spending category in their reports to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

Child welfare services may get reported this way, as may various other services, e.g., for domestic violence, mental health and substance abuse, payments to third parties for food assistance and/or shelter.

Bottom line is that states have been using TANF funds to replace funds they’d previously budgeted for these diverse purposes — or would have had to budget, using funds from other sources.

This, of course, frees up funds for other programs that have nothing whatever to do with the safety net or helping low-income families toward self-sufficiency.

There’s lots of variation among states, however. CBPP provides summaries for each and the District of Columbia.

So we learn that, in 2011, the District spent:

• No more of its TANF funds on cash assistance than it did 10 years before — $67 million. True level funding, i.e., with adjustments for inflation, would have called for somewhat over $85 million.
• Just $1 million more on work-related activities — again, as compared to 2001. This means about $6.2 million less when we account for inflation.
• $5 million more on child care, but less in inflation adjusted dollars.

Spending in all these categories declined as a percent of the District’s total TANF spending. The biggest drop was for cash assistance — down by 9%.

Contrariwise, both the percent and absolute dollar value of the combined AUPL/non-assistance category jumped — from $4 million (2%) to $39 million (15%).

Sure would like to know where that money went.

* Under federal rules, states may count third-party spending, both cash and in-kind, as part of their maintenance of effort, i.e., their required match. Thirteen states did in 2011, CBPP’s end-year for spending comparisons.

NOTE: I have made a few wording changes in this post to correct for a misinterpretation of CBPP’s figures on the District’s TANF spending.

Not Such a Happy Day for Millions of Single Mothers

An old post of mine on the plight of single mothers gets into my top-10 viewed list week after week. So Mother’s Day seems like a good time to check on how they’re doing.

One thing we know for sure is that there are more of them than there used to be. Much head-shaking — and finger-wagging — from the conservative family values types.

Yet far from all single mothers had their children without benefit of clergy. About 55% are separated, divorced or widowed, according to an update from Legal Momentum.

Still, more women are having children outside of marriage. Some are in committed same-sex relationships who can’t get married in the states they live in. Some are content to live in domestic partnerships with the men they love — at least, for the time being.

Many, I would guess, don’t see marriage as a smart economic move — at any rate, not marriage to the fathers of their children.

Some single mothers are surely doing fine — economically, at least. Juggling household and parental responsibilities with a full-time job is tough, even if income isn’t a problem.

And even if an employer provides generous paid sick and family leave. As of 2010, only 58% of private-sector employees had access to any paid sick leave at all. Whether they could use their leave to stay home with a sick child or thrash out a day care problem is unclear.

The bigger story, I think, is that a large percent of single mothers aren’t doing fine by any economic measure. In 2010, says Legal Momentum:

• Two-fifths of all single-mother families were poor, according to the very low thresholds the Census Bureau uses.
• The poverty rate for single-mother families was nearly three times greater than for the population as a whole — 42.4%, as compared to 15.1%.
• At any given time, about two-thirds of single mothers were employed outside the home, but only two-fifths of them were employed full time, year round. A quarter were jobless the entire year.
• The median average income for single-mother households was less than $25,000 — actually only $24,487, according to one of the Census Bureau’s many data tables.
• A third of single mothers spent more than half their income for housing — the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development’s standard for a “severe housing cost burden.”
• Not surprisingly then, three-quarters of homeless families were headed by single mothers.

There’s no simple explanation for these sorry figures.

Legal Momentum mentions delinquent child support payments. Only a third of single mothers received any child support in 2010, and for them, the average was $300 a month.

A number of other factors Legal Momentum cites are work-related. They include scarce employment — still the case now — and occupational segregation in low-wage “women’s work,” e.g., home health aides, restaurant wait staff.

Closely related are our very low minimum wage rates, even in the 18 states that have set rates higher than the federal minimum — still a mere $7.25 an hour and losing purchasing power all the time.

Another work-related factor is unaffordable child care, which can eat up a huge chunk of income — more than many single mothers can earn.

Still another factor is our unemployment insurance system, which tends to exclude people who work part-time or intermittently, especially in low-wage jobs.

All these factors reflect public policies — some more directly than others.

Pride of place, for Legal Momentum, is our “restrictive and stingy welfare program,” a.k.a. Temporary Assistance for Needy Families.

I’ve frequently vented about problems built into the TANF law and regulations, often drawing on briefs Legal Momentum has issued.

The single-mother poverty brief I’m using here captures one aspect of ending welfare as we knew it. While about two-thirds of single mothers received food stamps in 2010, barely more than a quarter (27.1%) received cash assistance from TANF.

The cash left them and their children desperately poor. Maximum benefits for a family of three were below 30% of the federal poverty line in all but eight states — and above 50% in none.

About half of all mothers today will spend at least some time as the sole custodial parent. If today is typical, nearly a quarter of all mothers are in this situation.

We could make a happier Mother’s Days for millions of them, if the political will were there.

No further comment necessary, I trust.

DC Fails Homelessness Test

Speak for We blogger Michael Dahl recaps a bit of his experience as a long-time advocate for better homelessness and affordable housing policies in Minnesota.

Over the years, he says, homelessness advocates have given top priority to diverse strategies — prevention, supportive housing, rapid re-housing, etc.

He sees a consistent thread in three elements. They aren’t actually common elements in the strategies, however. They’re questions that policymakers and other stakeholders should ask when they decide what their community needs by way of a homelessness system.

They’re painfully apt here in the District of Columbia as the DC Council considers the Mayor’s proposed Fiscal Year 2013 budget.

So here they are (with some minor edits):

• Do we have enough affordable housing?
• Do we have jobs in the community that pay for housing here?
• Do the supports that we rely on when we fall on hard times, e.g., a job loss, poor health, work for our lowest income residents?

These components, Dahl says, “provide stability and a pretty sturdy safety net.” If they’re all in place, the number of homeless people will be small, and the time they spend homeless will usually be short.

If they’re not in place, then “you need a homeless system to pick up the slack.”

Well, the District surely doesn’t have enough affordable housing.

The DC Fiscal Policy Institute took a close look at the situation two years ago. It found that the market had lost 23,700 low-cost rental units between 2000 and 2007 — more than a third of the stock.

Two in every five households were spending more for housing than they could afford, based on the standard 30% of income. Nearly three in five of poor and near-poor households paid at least half their income for a roof over their heads.

We’ve good reasons to believe that the situation has gotten worse. Rental costs have risen. More affordable units have been converted to upscale rentals or condos. More may have fallen into such disrepair as to be uninhabitable — victims of a combination of forces, including the recession.

The Housing Production Trust Fund — the District’s main tool for supporting affordable housing development and preservation — suffered losses when property sales slowed and prices dropped.

Then the Fund was raided to shore up the Local Rent Supplement Program — the District’s locally-funded voucher program. And now the Mayor proposes another raid, leaving the Fund with enough to support only 170 new units next year.

This second fund shift to LRSP would cover the projected costs of all existing vouchers, but no additional vouchers for people who are homeless — or may become homeless in months to come.

Whether the District will be able to renew all federally-funded vouchers is anybody’s guess.

The District does have jobs that pay for local housing, but not nearly all residents have them.

The local unemployment rate seems stuck at 9.8% — and that’s only residents who are actively looking for work. The latest rates for Wards 7 and 8 are 16.3% and 24.3%.

The average income of the poorest fifth of D.C. households was just $9,100 in 2010 — about $4,770 less than the annual rental cost of a modest efficiency unit then.

Even if the District prepares more residents for living wage jobs — and cracks down on enforcement of its living wage law — housing will remain unaffordable for a substantial number of workers.

At the current living wage rate, they’d have to pay more than half their income for rent on that efficiency, assuming they work full-time, year round.

Our safety net is far from sturdy for our lowest income residents.

They can get health care through Medicaid or the DC HealthCare Alliance, though those in the latter might lose essential services if the Council goes along with the Mayor’s savings plan.

Unemployment benefits are available for some, though far from all residents who lose their jobs. But they’ll be cut off sooner due to changes in federal law.

For families with children, we have the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families Program. But cash benefits are way too low to cover the cost of unsubsidized housing. The maximum cash benefit for a family of three — currently $428 a month — is less than 37% of what the efficiency unit costs.

This is true, however, only for a family that’s been in the program for less than 60 months. For a family that’s been in longer, the benefit is only $257 a month. And the Mayor’s proposed budget would reinstate further cuts that the Council wisely deferred last year.

So it would seem that we truly do need a robust homeless services program. Under the Mayor’s budget, it would have $7 million less than last year.

And it already lacks funds to provide homeless families with shelter or other housing now that the winter season is officially over.

In short, the District fails Dahl’s test on both counts. Not enough stability or safety net support. Not enough in homeless services to pick up the slack either.

DC Council Makes Bad TANF Benefits Cut Worse

Talk about robbing Peter to pay Paul!

DC Council Chairman Vincent Gray has pushed through a budget gap-closing plan for this fiscal year that takes cash assistance away from families in the District’s Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program to fund adult job training — maybe some other things as well.

I say pushed through because Councilmembers didn’t get the final plan until the wee small hours of the morning the vote was scheduled. No time for them — or the public — to work through the details or come up with vote-ready alternatives.

I, for one, am feeling hampered by the lack of a clear account of the total package. But the stepped-up raid on TANF is clear enough.

As I previously wrote, Mayor Fenty seized on Councilmember Marion Barry’s now-repudiated proposal to impose a five-year lifetime limit on TANF benefits for poor D.C. families.

Under his gap-closing plan, maximum benefits would have been cut by 20% for all families who’d been in the program for more than five years, whether consecutive or occasionally over a long period of time.

Gray’s version adopts this cut for the current fiscal year, then increases it by 20% each year so that post-five year benefits are fully phased out in Fiscal Year 2015.

No circuit breaker if the planned improvements in the TANF program don’t get fully implemented on schedule or deliver sufficient results. No exemption for victims of domestic violence or other singular hardships, though the District could still have used federal funds to support many, if not all of them.

Half the money saved will be invested in job training programs that target TANF recipients. Maybe Gray used some of the rest to restore the mayor’s proposed cuts to the adult job training programs operated by the Department of Employment Services.

But it’s hard to know how funds freed up in one area have been shifted to undo or mitigate proposed cuts in another.

Not hard at all to know that the phase-out of TANF benefits will work extraordinary hardships on for families who, for various reasons, can’t achieve sustained self-sufficiency. Or to know that it would never have materialized if Gray had decided to balance the budget by a reasonable mix of spending cuts and revenue raisers.

By the time of the vote, Councilmembers had a range of revenue-raising proposals in hand. Councilmembers Michael Brown and Jim Graham reportedly favored the single new top income tax bracket advocated by a large number of local organizations.

Councilmember Tommy Wells had a new income tax reform plan that would have created three new top tax brackets, the first beginning with a minimal increase at $75,000.

Councilmember Barry wanted to revive last year’s proposed expansion of the sales tax — anathema to the health club crowd, but still, I think, a good idea.

He’d also picked up on Councilmember Graham’s thoughts about increasing the tax on commercial parking fees. To these, added an increase in the District’s egregiously low minimum franchise tax.

But Gray decided to postpone any consideration of any sort of tax increase until next spring, when he has to produce his proposed budget for Fiscal Year 2012.

Fat lot of good that will do the TANF families who’ll be pushed out of the safety net.