**
New post on *Fellowship of the Minds*
<http://fellowshipofminds.wordpress.com/author/eowyn2/> Hell freezes over:
Domocrat governor tells welfare recipients to
work<http://fellowshipofminds.wordpress.com/2012/01/14/hell-freezes-over-domocrat-governor-tells-welfare-recipients-to-work/>by
Dr. Eowyn <http://fellowshipofminds.wordpress.com/author/eowyn2/>
When America was awash in money, before the economy tanked in 2008, our
largesse overflowed.
Result: welfare abuses such as this:
Read more about this welfare-abusing single mom
here<http://fellowshipofminds.wordpress.com/2011/12/01/spawn-of-the-welfare-state/>
.
Daniel Weintraub reports for <http://www.healthycal.org/archives/7093>*Healthy
Cal*, Jan. 12, 2012, that faced with state deficits in billions of dollars,
California's Democrat Governor Jerry Brown is doing the unthinkable:
Gov. Jerry Brown is proposing the most far-reaching changes to welfare
since former President Bill Clinton and Congress overhauled the program 15
years ago.
Brown wants to cut $1 billion from the program — nearly one-third of its
general fund budget — by shortening the amount of time recipients can
remain on aid and focusing the state’s cash assistance and child care
subsidies on people who are moving from welfare to work.
His plan has won initial praise from the state’s independent budget
analyst. But advocates for the poor say it would further marginalize the
state’s already struggling underclass. And Democratic leaders in the
Legislature have said they will delay any action on the proposal until
after the governor’s March 1 deadline, in the hopes that state tax revenues
will come in higher than Brown anticipates.
While a common perception of welfare is a program that supports poor,
unproductive people, the program has morphed over the past decade into one
that provides not just cash grants but job training and services to help
people enter the workforce. And more than anything, it is a program that
supports children. More than 1 million of the 1.4 million people helped by
the program are children.
It is also a program which, while never a major part of the state budget,
has shrunk dramatically over the past generation.
In the mid-1990s, when welfare was an entitlement with no work or education
obligations and no time limit, more than 900,000 families were on aid in
California. But in 1996 then-President Clinton and Congress agreed on a
fundamental restructuring of the program. Aid would no longer be
open-ended, and states were required to move a certain percentage of their
cases from welfare to work.
These changes altered the mindset of the program from one of providing
subsistence grants to one that became more of a bridge to employment. In
California, recipients were given a five-year time limit (recently reduced
to four years) and they got more access to education, job training and
child care to help them move into the workforce.
Even the name of the program was changed to reflect the new attitude, from
Aid to Families with Dependent Children to Temporary Assistance for Needy
Families and, finally, to Cal-Works. *[The current name, Cal-Works, of
course is oxymoronic. George Orwell would be so proud of California! -Eowyn]
*
For a time, the changes in the rules and the philosophy seemed to work.
They coincided with a late-1990s economy that was bolstered by the
technology boom, and the number of welfare cases dropped in half, to
460,000 by 2007.
The cases that remained, however, were the toughest: people whose lack of
education, job skills or experience made them very difficult to employ. As
the economy slid into a recession, those people found it nearly impossible
to find jobs, and they were joined on the rolls by more families headed by
newly jobless parents.
The welfare caseload began to grow again. *By next year, if nothing is
done, about 600,000 families will be on welfare in California. The cost of
the program will grow by half a billion dollars.*
[...] Brown has proposed what can only be described as a radical
restructuring of the program.
*His most dramatic proposal is to reduce the time limit from its current 48
months to just 24 months for people who fail to find unsubsidized
employment. The adults would be kicked off aid and denied other services,
but the families would continue to collect assistance for the children.*
People who found jobs within their first two years on welfare but whose
incomes still qualified them for aid would be allowed to remain in the
program for a total of 48 months. And they would be allowed to keep more of
what they earned. For the average family of three, the change would amount
to an increase of $44 a month.
And while those families who remained on welfare with parents working would
continue to be eligible for state-subsidized child care, many other
families would lose this benefit. On one end, Brown would limit eligibility to
just those parents who were meeting the state’s work requirement, leaving
many low-income or penniless families out of child care altogether. On the
other end of the scale, he would reduce the income eligibility threshold
from 70 percent of the state’s median family income to about 62 percent, ending
subsidized child care for families earning anything more than twice the
federal poverty level. This would result in an estimated 62,000 children
losing child care, out of about 296,000 who get it from the state today.
Brown wants the changes in welfare to take effect by October of this year.
While the time limits on aid would apply retroactively, Brown proposes
giving all recipients six months to find work before kicking them off the
rolls. The counties would get $35 million in one-time funds from the state
to help people ready themselves for work and find jobs.
But Brown acknowledges that few of the long-term cases would find work. His
administration estimates that welfare cases would plummet next year from a
projected 597,000 families to just 324,000, a reduction of 44 percent.
Nearly 300,000 would be part of a new, separate program giving limited
assistance, but few services, to the children in families headed by parents
who could not, or refused, to work.
While Brown has proposed asking voters to raise taxes as part of his budget
plan, the changes he suggests in welfare would take place with or without
the tax increase. The state, he said, simply does not have enough money to
do all the things it once did.
Welfare advocates and others say that the cuts will backfire, leaving more
children in poverty and leading to social problems that will cost the state
far more than the cuts would save in the long run. But Brown says he has no
other choice than to propose changes that Democrats would have at one time
would have considered cruel.
“We can’t spend what we don’t have,” he said when he released his budget
proposal in early January. “It’s not nice. We don’t like it. But the
economy and the tax statutes of California make only so much money
available. We have to spend it and make tough choices.”
"We can't spend what we don't have." I wish that message would sink into
the dense (or simply malevolent) noggin of that fraud in the White House.
H/t Stephen Frank's California Political News &
Views<http://capoliticalnews.com/2012/01/13/brown-to-welfare-clients-work-or-else-sounds-like-a-republican/>
.
*~Eowyn*
*Dr. Eowyn <http://fellowshipofminds.wordpress.com/author/eowyn2/>* |
January 14, 2012 at 6:49 am | Tags: Aid to Families with Dependent
Children<http://fellowshipofminds.wordpress.com/?tag=aid-to-families-with-dependent-children>,
Angel Adams <http://fellowshipofminds.wordpress.com/?tag=angel-adams>,
Cal-Works <http://fellowshipofminds.wordpress.com/?tag=cal-works>,
California <http://fellowshipofminds.wordpress.com/?tag=california>, Jerry
Brown <http://fellowshipofminds.wordpress.com/?tag=jerry-brown>,
state-subsidized
child
care<http://fellowshipofminds.wordpress.com/?tag=state-subsidized-child-care>,
welfare reform <http://fellowshipofminds.wordpress.com/?tag=welfare-reform>|
Categories: 2012
Election <http://fellowshipofminds.wordpress.com/?cat=4934384>,
Children<http://fellowshipofminds.wordpress.com/?cat=34928689>,
Culture War <http://fellowshipofminds.wordpress.com/?cat=20812>,
Economy<http://fellowshipofminds.wordpress.com/?cat=17656840>,
Liberals/Democrats <http://fellowshipofminds.wordpress.com/?cat=74187125>,
Taxes <http://fellowshipofminds.wordpress.com/?cat=34919470>, United
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