A Look Back at Welfare Reform
Kay S. Hymowitz, writing for City Journal, has an eye-opening (and long) piece on the celebration of the tenth anniversary of the welfare reform bill and it's striking success., It's a surprise to most everyone, supporters and detractors alike. Hymowitz discusses not only why so many of the predictions were way off-base but how they were wrong.
She begins her essay by recalling the outcries from skeptics on the left about how the welfare reform bill, or Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), would further the downfall of America's poor and needy i.e. "children begging for food." She discusses the four chief concerns of what would happen to women and children once they left the welfare roles and the problems left unsolved by reform.
Some of the outcomes Hymowitz presents are over powering. For example, she writes:
The most striking outcome has been the staggering decline in the welfare rolls, so large it has left even reform enthusiasts agog. At their peak in 1994-the rolls began to shrink before 1996, because many states had already instituted experimental reform programs-there were 5.1 million families on Aid to Families with Dependent Children, the old program. Almost immediately, the numbers went into free fall, and by 2004 they were down by 60 percent, to fewer than 2 million...
So much for the doomsayers out there who were against reform! What'cha got to say now Ted Kennedy?
Here's some more good news: the rapid decline of people on the dole allowed federal money, normally spent on welfare benefits, to be used for "work support-transportation, child care and the like." That's a win-win situation folks! I also think it's a better method for getting people moving onto better lives than to have them just sitting around collecting a check.
One thing sorely lacking in lower income families is the sense of personal responsibility. Children, and in turn adults, are not being taught self-reliance, especially when there's no father around and Uncle ‘Sugar" is there to provide.
Hymowitz hits upon what is the most leading aspect of prosperous living when she says, "Human beings tend to do pretty much what they are expected to do. When the culture expects self-sufficiency, people will try to achieve it." Amen! That's the gospel truth ladies gentlemen, boys and girls. Set low standards and exceptions and people will, unfailingly, meet them. The opposite thought also stands true. Expect more for people and raise the bar and they will, with some support, rise to meet it. In fact this principle displayed throughout the Bible.
Man, a noble creature, created in the image of God, fell to a level below that for which he was made as a result of his disobedience. God, in His infinite mercy and love, held out to man a standard, an expectation of what He meant man to be (see the Ten Commandments). Knowing that man could not meet this high standard in his fallen state, God sent One who could. That One is Christ Jesus. Through Christ's death, burial and resurrection we now have the ability, through Christ, to meet that standard. And that's the Gospel truth!
What other Bloggers are saying:
