Human Services News

The Urban Institute:

Individuals no longer have an entitlement to welfare, and states have changed how they administer cash assistance.

Numerous other safety net programs also changed, as the 1996 legislation limited immigrant eligibility for food stamps, scaled back children's eligibility for disability benefits, increased federal money for child care, and placed greater demands on states' child support enforcement systems.

States were given incentives to encourage marriage and the formation of two-parent families and to reduce out-of-wedlock child bearing.

Scholars generally agree that the strong economy, work supports such as the Earned Income Tax Credit, and welfare reform all encouraged a shift from welfare to work, especially among single mothers.

The National Survey of America's Families (NSAF), conducted by the Urban Institute as part of its Assessing the New Federalism project, documented changes in low-income families' circumstances at the national level over the 1996 to 2002 period.

We describe outcomes for three low-income groups: families currently on welfare, families that recently left welfare, and those that never received welfare.

To establish comparability across the three sample groups we limit the sample to low-income families, defined as those with income below 200 percent of the federal poverty level either last year or in the current year and not above 250 percent of the poverty level in either period.1 These income restrictions confine all three sample groups---current welfare recipients, recent welfare leavers, and nonwelfare families---to families with consistently low incomes.