Scott Winship and Kevin Corinth assess ongoing debates about the effectiveness of welfare reform.
Welfare reform replaced Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) with Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) 30 years ago this month. At the time, opponents warned that child poverty would surge as time limits and work requirements curbed reliance on welfare benefits. In reality, as noted by our colleague, Matt Weidinger, falling dependency was accompanied by surging employment among single mothers and declining child poverty.
However, protecting these gains proved challenging in the face of progressives’ denial of welfare reform’s success. They created a revisionist history of the post-AFDC era and promoted the view that providing benefits with no strings attached, as AFDC largely did, is what’s best for low-income families. While conservatives have largely fended off these efforts, the events of the past 10 years show that preserving the gains of welfare reform requires vigilance and responsiveness.
As Weidinger describes, the early evidence of welfare reform’s success was so strong a 2002 New York Times editorial called it “obvious.” The welfare reform debate quieted down for much of the next decade-and-a-half, with Congress never making more than modest changes to TANF.
However, in the wake of the Great Recession, voices on the left increasingly claimed that welfare reform had been harmful. While some families had been able to adjust to the new work-oriented safety net, a sizable minority fell into “extreme poverty.” The solution to this problem was for the United States to enact a child allowance — universal per-child benefits (perhaps becoming less generous for upper-income families) that didn’t depend on whether parents worked or not. In other words, policymakers should provide unconditional cash aid to low-income families without a work requirement attached, just as AFDC had done. …
… However, the campaign to reverse the harms supposedly done by welfare reform rested on flawed evidence.
First, the Edin and Shaefer extreme poverty research was quickly debunked, first by one of us (Winship) and then by Bruce Meyer and his colleagues.
