Ten Years after Welfare Reform, It's Time to Make Work Work for Families
From Center for Law and Social Policy:
Along with a strong economy, expansion of the Earned Income Tax Credit and children's health care coverage, more money to help low-income families pay for child care and improved child support enforcement during the 1990's, welfare changes helped welfare recipients gain employment and contributed to increases in the real incomes of some working families.
Structural changes in our economy mean that millions of low-income workers, including former welfare recipients, are working at wages that are too low, and at jobs that are too unstable, to allow them to escape poverty.
A poorly designed, underfunded child welfare system leaves hundreds of thousands of children abandoned -- more than 350,000 children receive no services-- not even foster care -- after child welfare agencies determine they have been abused or neglected and hundreds of thousands more children linger in foster care waiting for a permanent home.
CLASP believes that this anniversary is a time to look to the future and begin a national conversation about the policies that are needed to truly help all low-income children and their families succeed.
Evelyn Ganzglass, Director of Workforce Development at the Center for Law and Social Policy, said today, "We need to move beyond TANF, a program that serves an ever smaller share of low-income families and talk about what we as a nation can do to help all people find work that allows them to support themselves and their families and provide them with necessary supports to help their children grow and develop into healthy adults.
Child support systems that strengthen families, increase family income, and promote personal responsibility.
If welfare reform was about strengthening work ethic, today's discussions should be about the ethics of work---the dignity of adequate wages and family supports."
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