American Dream by Jason DeParle

Author:Jason DeParle
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2010-03-01T04:30:00+00:00

What happened next astonished everyone. The welfare rolls collapsed. They collapsed in Boston and they collapsed in Phoenix. They collapsed in New York City. They fell fastest in states like Wisconsin and Florida, which made aggressive moves. But they also gave way in Texas and Illinois, which showed little bureaucratic zeal. They plunged where the economy boomed, and they plunged in stretches of the poverty belt, from New Mexico to West Virginia. Historically, the rolls had never fallen more than 8 percent in a year. By the time they leveled off in 2001, they had fallen for seven straight years by a total of 63 percent. Seven states cut the rolls by more than three-quarters. In Wisconsin, a half-dozen counties at some point in the year had a W-2 caseload of zero. Three million families—more than 9 million people—left the rolls nationwide.

Explaining what caused the rolls to vanish is harder than it seems. Certainly, the economy helped. Nationally, the unemployment rate fell to 4.0 percent, its lowest level in thirty years. Shorthanded employers who would have once shunned recipients all but begged them to apply. But previous booms hadn’t cut the rolls. And the correlation between caseloads and state unemployment is faint at best. One study found that states with more unemployment had greater caseload declines, perhaps because they passed tougher laws. The tax-credit expansion also helped reduce welfare: the more work pays, the more people work. But the District of Columbia, with one of the largest local credits, had some of the smallest caseload declines. The auspicious economics surround the story like good weather—necessary, perhaps, for cutting the rolls but not sufficient.

Two prominent economists with contrasting politics—Rebecca M. Blank and June E. O’Neill—separately estimated that policy changes did three times as much to cut the rolls as the economy did. But which policy changes? In general, the places with the toughest sanctions had the steepest declines. But sanctions were tough in Tennessee, moderate in Oregon, and weak in Arkansas, and each cut its rolls similarly. Time limits may have encouraged families to leave welfare and bank their remaining time. But the rolls fell more in Michigan, with no time limits, than in Texas, Virginia, and Connecticut, with short ones. In general, the rolls fell faster under Republicans than Democrats. But they fell nearly as much in two of the most liberal states (California and Vermont) as they did in two conservative ones (Arizona and Tennessee).

Clearly something happened that neither economics nor policy fully explains. Rebecca Blank found that half of the caseload declines came from something her model couldn’t detect. Part of what the era brought was a sudden cultural change, what social scientists sometimes call “message effects.” From the TV news to waiting-room posters came the same strident message: “Get off the rolls!” In Creek County, Oklahoma, the rolls fell 30 percent even as the legislature was still debating the law, a decline officials largely attributed to the mere rumors of what was coming. In its mysteriously powerful convergence of events, the late 1990s can be thought of as a bookend to the 1960s.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.