Transcript
See also: Transcripts for the Introduction and Panel I.
KENT WEAVER: Okay. If you can take your seats and quiet down, we're about to start on the second panel. I'd like to remind everyone that the slides for the PowerPoint presentation are available on our website and the first two of our policy briefs are also available on our web site. I think everyone here in the room has them, but those who are watching via the live web cast probably have not yet downloaded them. They're available in PDF format.
I'm Kent Weaver. I'm the third co-director of the welfare reform and beyond initiative. I'm the quiet one, letting Belle and Ron do the PowerPoint presentation today.
Up to this point, we talked mostly about TANF and related programs, but not very much in detail about the welfare reform and beyond initiative and what we're going to be doing. So I'm just going to spend a couple of minutes outlining some of our products, and I want you to know that all of this is very much in development, and we want your feedback on things you think that we've missed, things you think that we could be doing better, either particular policy briefs or a broader set of programs that we should be running.
Please let us know on our web site, which is www.brookings.edu/wrb. There is a place where all of our email addresses are listed and we really do want your feedback.
Belle ran the slide at the beginning about the objectives of the welfare reform and beyond initiative. The central objective is trying to take this huge amount of research that's now emerging from a variety of institutions, including many of the ones that are going to be represented on the upcoming panel, and try to make it available in user-friendly formats for policy makers, the public, and for the press.
We're also trying to move beyond TANF reauthorization to focus on a broader set of issues and how we can assist low-income families become more self-sufficient, increase their incomes.
Very important, we think, is trying to foster an informed and civil dialogue on welfare reform. I think most people would agree that the dialogue in 1993 to 1996 was not frequently civil and sometimes uninformed. We want to change that looking both inside and outside the Beltway.
And lastly, provide the media with accurate, balanced information. What specifically are we going to be doing?
Our written products begin with the special issue of Brookings Review that Belle Sawhill is going to be editing. It will be out in about three months. If you look on our web site, you can see the list of authors and articles there, and here is a brief preview of it as well.
We think we have a very balanced and very distinguished set of contributors. The objective of this is to try to foster a dialogue. These are not all people who, let's say, are from the mushy middle. We wanted people who would have a little bit of edge to the debate to begin getting the debate going.
A second set of products that we'll be producing are about 18 to 20 policy briefs. Again, you have the first two of them in your packets, those of you who are here, and you can get them on the web. If you do not, the first two essentially parallel the discussion that Belle and Ron gave this morning. The next set of policy briefs will focus on assessing the record of welfare reform over the last six or seven years and asking questions like is devolution working? What do we need to do to improve outcomes for children?
And after this—these will probably be coming out through about September. Then, they will be followed by a series of policy briefs that will focus on specific issues in the TANF reauthorization debate.
The third component of our written products is the New World of Welfare volume. I think most of you know about that volume. There's going to be a conference on it next week. Brookings will be publishing that volume. We're very proud to be associated with Rebecca Blank and Ron Haskins and the enormous amount of work that they and the Anne E. Casey Foundation have put into that.
There will—I'm going to be writing a brief monograph called "Gaining Ground?" with a question mark, which focuses on implementation of welfare reform at three stages—state decision-making, implementation in welfare offices, and then responses by recipients. Again, the first New World of Welfare is supposed to be quite comprehensive. This is supposed to be much briefer and integrative across stages of the implementation process.
Belle Sawhill and Adam Thomas are working together on a series that essentially is the beyond welfare part of our component on policy options for low income families. There is already one of their papers that's available on our web site and a policy brief on that subject will be available soon. Stay tuned. It is great, I assure you.
In addition to our written products, we're going to have a series of what we call oral products—public briefings and seminars like this one, again both here and outside the Beltway. Most of us are going to Madison next week to talk to welfare administrators—most of us in welfare reform and beyond are going to Madison next week to talk to welfare implementers there and we're going to be doing a series of events around the country.
We're also going to have what we call a stakeholders' seminar, where we're going to bring together a consistent group of people from government, from advocacy groups, from the research community, to try to have an ongoing dialogue, starting early again, an informed and civil dialogue.
A series of press briefings—we're going to be running a program for reporters who are new to the welfare reform beat to get them up to speed before TANF reauthorization begins?a series of legislative briefings, and retreats. Many of you already know about the series that Belle Sawhill and Doug Becher (ph) have run on Capitol Hill. That will be ongoing.
And as I said, lastly, beyond-the-Beltway events for policy makers and the press.
Again, these are works in progress. And we do want your feedback on things that you think that we missed that could help us achieve our goals.
We're going to move right into the second panel so if the speakers could come up, we'll start on the second panel, and get the perspectives of a number of different institutions and individuals who are important contributors to the welfare reform debate.
I'm switching microphones here. Sorry for the logistical complications.
We're happy to have a very distinguished set of panelists to do this from the research, advocacy and intergovernmental communities, groups that we refer to by the generic term stakeholders. In order to allow more time for audience participation, I'm going to keep the introductions to the audience of the panelists extremely brief.
Going from this side to that side, we have Susan Golonka, from the National Governors' Association, Robert Rector from The Heritage Foundation, Alan Weil from The Urban Institution, Jeffrey Johnson from the National Center for Strategic Nonprofit Planning and Community Leadership—which must be one of the longest acronyms in existence—and Bob Greenstein from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, and Judy Gueron from MDRC.
In this panel, we have suggested that our panelists address one or more of three issues relating to TANF reauthorization.
First of all, what do they or their organization see as the most important reauthorization issues?
Secondly, what are their organizations doing to prepare for the TANF reauthorization debate?
And thirdly, what do they think that needs to be done that isn't being done by themselves or others to improve the quality of research, discourse and policy making in the next round of welfare reform?
We've told panelists that how they allocate their brief amount of time among those topics is completely up to them, whichever they want to discuss, one, two or three, but whichever they chose, we've asked them to adhere to very strict time limits.
As you know, the 1996 welfare reform legislation subjects most adult recipients of TANF to five-year time limits. And as Belle Sawhill noted in her discussion, there is a significant debate about whether families receiving TANF will be able to become self-sufficient within five years. And we're not going to be able to resolve that issue today but we hope that we can shed some light on the question—can six welfare policy experts with lots to say meet a five-minute time limit for doing so?
(LAUGHTER)
And like many states, we've adopted a progressive series of sanctions beginning with a small "please stop" sign, and moving up to a very large "please stop" sign that we will begin implementing after the five minutes.
So anyway, we discussed many different orders or potential orders of speakers and we finally decided to do it alphabetically. So, being a Weaver, I sympathize with Alan Weil, which means he gets to go last as I always go last. But we're going to begin with Susan Golonka.
SUSAN GOLONKA: Well, I'm delighted to be here. And I have to say I was suffering a little bit of withdrawal because, for these two hours up to this point, I don't think I heard the word governor mentioned at all. And states very rarely. And so I really want to remind you that, in 1996, the governors made an agreement with Congress and the Clinton administration to say that we will take on welfare reform. We will change the system. We'll take a block grant, fixed funding and flexibility and, in exchange, we will transform the system into one that focuses on work and supports families.
And I think we forget that governors took a risk when they did that. I mean, the block grant was fixed. Who knew what the economy was going to be like. And they were also willing to be held accountable with this—a different way of looking at the welfare system. They were going to reduce caseloads, put folks to work, et cetera.
And I really think that, as Ron outlined a little bit earlier, these changes have occurred. For the most part, they have lived up to their initial promises. We have the caseload reduction, the poverty reduction, teen pregnancies continue to decline, child support collection is up to a tremendous amount. So a lot of really positive things have happened because of decisions made by governors and state legislators in the states and implemented at the local level.
And I also want to recall that, as the time—over these three or four years, governors were really operating in a very uncertain environment. Very quickly, we were hearing threats that the TANF block grant was going to be cut. We didn't have regulations for quite a while. So there was a lot of risk that was going on at the time.
Now, I sort of alluded to the successes, and I think the governors clearly recognize that there's a lot more that still needs to be done, and a lot of the issues were raised today in terms of families who are remaining on the caseload who face severe barriers, families who've left the caseload, and who are working but not necessarily in great jobs, and then those that we really have to say that we don't know very much about—those who are left and are not working.
So, as governors review these sort of unfinished missions, I think it's—you know, they are very much feeling they will be critical to the debate. They are, I would say, even a little bit more than stakeholders because, again, they are the ones who implement, set the policies and are ultimately held accountable.
Now, the governors have not really set any policy statement at this point in time and, in some ways, it's a little premature even for me to speculate. But we do know that, in February, when the governors come to Washington and meet, that they will be looking at a general policy statement around welfare reform reauthorization. It may not have a lot of detail. I think what we will see in the course of the year that we're coming into is that the governors and their policy staff will be looking at the record, looking at the research—what does the research tell us about what's worked? What are the changes we really want to push for? But it's somewhat premature.
I think that what I can tell you—and this may not come as a surprise—is that the governors will be supporting continued flexibility and maintenance of the funding. And while I say it's no surprise, and that's often what we expect governors to say, I think it's that the record that they've demonstrated on welfare reform really attests to this is a good direction to continue in.
You now, I think that welfare reform has not been smooth in all areas, and problems have been recognized—one of them being the fact that a number of families were leaving, for example, without Medicaid or food stamps. What we've seen, as research has found, identified problems, studies pointed out these issues, states have made changes. They have made corrections so that families that are leaving will be receiving all the supports that they need.
The flexibility that is in the law has really enabled states and governors to continue to move ahead, to redress the problems that arise, and also to set higher standards. We're not now just looking at reducing caseloads and placing families into work. We're trying to create—move families into better jobs, make sure all the work supports are in place. And all this has been able to happen within the context of the existing TANF block grant, which is tremendously flexible and, hopefully, will continue to be that way.
We know that governors would strongly oppose traditional requirements, set-asides, specifically saying a certain percentage of funding should be spent on a particular area. I think that a lot of the options that Belle has raised, has listed up there, I think, one thing we can remember is that so many of those options can be achieved already within the context of the block grant. But what we would say—these options can be achieved and we don't want to say that a particular state should have to do them, that it should be left up to individual states and localities to decide what they want to do.
Does that mean that governors are entirely happy with the law? And I'd say no. There are a lot of issues. Someone referred to fine-tuning earlier. I think there are very deep concerns about the contingency fund, which is really not a satisfactory fund in terms of tapping into additional dollars should the economy turn down.
We're concerned about the inability to maintain your TANF funds as a rainy day fund within the state. Now, as you know, there was all the pressure on states to spend the dollars, issues raised earlier that states haven't spent enough dollars. I think the latest data actually shows that there's only $2.7 billion left unobligated after four years of funds, which is less than or about 4 percent. Now that we're looking into a possibility of a downturn in the economy, you think maybe 4 percent is not enough. There are 15 states that, in fact, have zero unobligated funds. So clearly, states are spending the money and they're, you know, addressing lots of issues with it. But clearly, if the economy turns down, that will definitely be an issue.
Another thing that governors will be looking at as we move towards reauthorization is—okay.
(LAUGHTER)
It's not just within the TANF program, we will be looking across programs into food stamps, child support, child welfare, Medicaid, workforce—all these systems that are interrelated. TANF alone cannot reduce poverty entirely or eliminate poverty. So many other systems are involved and so many of them need to be working together. So we will be looking at these other systems to try and identify requirements or components that are at cross-purposes with TANF.
So, with that, I will end. But the governors will be engaged and clearly in this debate and clearly feel they have a primary role in the debate.
WEAVER: Thanks very much. I know you're going to say Greenstein comes next in the alphabet, but we do have a special request from Judy Gueron and Bob Greenstein to switch order. So, Judy's going to go next.
JUDY GUERON: I'm a researcher, so obviously, I think that the best policies are those that are formed not only by values, but also by reliable research. So I thought what I would do is refer to a few of the issues that Belle and Ron mentioned where MDRC will be producing new findings over the coming year.
The first is about time limits. We are examining the effects of time limits launched under waivers in Florida, Connecticut and Vermont and in four of our major urban areas. And as I think Ron mentioned, the results so far suggest that, at least in the economic conditions in which they were implemented and where there were resources available, the evidence is that there is not substantial findings of harm to families or children. And it will be important to look over the coming year if those conditions change whether any of that evidence changes. And there will be findings from those studies.
The second area is really the one about funding, the size, the flexibility of resources, the block grants, maintenance of efforts funds, et cetera. And the argument certainly is out there with a 50 percent cut in caseload, why do you need the same resources? And here, what I'm going to refer to are the new findings also alluded to by Ron of the value of providing resources to working families.
And the argument goes as follows: For those with a mind for history, the debate about welfare reform going back to the Elizabethan poor laws or more parochially to the Social Security Act has been about how do you support families without undermining—how do you support children without undermining the incentives for parents to work and support those children?
And really, since the negative income tax experiment of the 1970s, there seemed to be a consensus that, if you provide cash to parents, they work less. And that kiss of death has led welfare reformers to focus on reducing caseloads, reducing dependency and less on reducing poverty out of a concern that it would also reduce work.
The new results that I'm referring to look at programs that provided support to working families. And what they showed was, if you tied support to work, you could both reduce poverty and reduce dependency. I'm not going to go into the details of those programs. But when you did that—when more families worked and they had more income, the surprising result is that consistently, across the four different studies, we saw children doing better in school in terms of measures of school achievement, and also some other impacts none of which were negative, some of which were positive, on the behavior of children and even on the health of children. Astonishingly then, welfare reform, under certain guises could also be a route towards school reform.
This means that that tradeoff that I mentioned in the public's view of how do you support parents and not undermine their work and their responsibilities for their children might be breakable. You could have your cake and eat it, too.
Now, we also looked at how these findings contrast with programs where there is only an emphasis on work—mandatory welfare-to-work programs without incentives. And the positive news there was mothers going to work, even mothers of young children, which had been a big concern when the Family Support Act was passed in 1988, and when mandates extended to mothers with younger children, that mothers working, mothers of poor children working does not seem to hurt children—a finding we've know for a while for mothers of middle class children.
Now, how is this all relevant to TANF? It costs more to support working families than simply to end aid, but I think what is new is we see some clear returns to that outlay, and also from these studies, we ought to be motivated to act in this direction by the continuing information on the depressing levels of various measures for children in disadvantaged families. So this suggests to me that the discussion of TANF reauthorization should focus not just on the potential to save money but how to encourage states to use these funds in positive ways to support working families.
Just briefly, another area MDRC will be looking at relevant to this is also how states are using resources to support families that go to work so that they retain jobs and advance in jobs—another way to have higher incomes, and also policies to assist the hardest to employ.
WEAVER: Bob Greenstein.
ROBERT GREENSTEIN: Thank you. Since my time clock is running, I'll start right into some of the key issues we would hope to see addressed.
The new just-released MDRC study indicates that to improve child well being, one needs to increase income as well as employment. And it seems to us that a key issue of the forthcoming debate should be to broaden beyond caseload reduction and also focus more on poverty reduction for working families. There are some areas of the current law that pose problems in that regard.
For example, most states have expanded earnings disregards to supplement the wages of low-income working families. But under the law, if TANF funds are used for an earnings disregard, even for a family working full time, it counts against the family's time limit. So you have this sort of conundrum. If a family is working most of the time or full time and gets a modest wage supplement, and then a recession hits and the family loses its job, it may be time-limited out.
Now, there's a way around this. States can contort their books to use separate state programs or segregated MOE funds to get around this. But it raises the question why should—if we think this is acceptable, why should states have to contort their books in order to do it? Because of the contortions involved, only about four or five states currently are doing it.
Without contorting their books, states can use TANF funds to supplement wages through a state earned income credit, but may not use TANF funds to supplement wages through earnings disregard. This is just the sort of federal overregulation that doesn't make sense if what we're trying to do is to supplement it—states have the option of supplementing the wages of working families.
Another area needing more focus is enabling more child support to go to custodial parents and providing more employment services for non-custodial parents so more of them are in the workforce and have earnings.
Now, in both of these areas I've just mentioned, you quickly get into a question of funding. We think there are three fundamental funding issues that, hopefully, will be looked at in reauthorization.
One Susan already mentioned, which is a contingency fund, that simply won't work very well when the economy goes down. Of course, if we're concerned enough to talk about $1 to $2 trillion tax cuts in terms of the economy, we certainly ought to be—take a new look at the contingency fund and design one that would work.
But there are two other issues as well. If you believe that the current levels, when you take into account supporting working families with more intensive services—those left on the rolls—the current funding levels are roughly what's needed, then it would be a mistake to simply freeze those for five more years of reauthorization. Inflation takes a toll over time. And we need to at least have an inflation adjustment in there if we don't want to erode the real level of employment-related services and work supports that will be provided year after year. We need to make sure we don't start down the road of the social services block grant and have a frozen funding level for years and years to come.
There is an additional issue which I think is of particular importance and doesn't get enough attention, and that is what about the poorer states with less fiscal capacity? In 2001, the basic TANF grant provides $663 per poor child in the 17 states that qualify for TANF supplemental grants, and $1,778 per poor child in the 33 other states.
Now this is based historically on the low AFDC payment levels in poor, particularly southern states, but again, thinking of what TANF now funds, does it really cost only 40 percent as much to provide child care services or employment services in the South as in northern states? The answer, of course, is no. And over time, what we have here is we're relegating the poorer states to a lesser level of employment-related services and work supports.
Now the problem is even bigger than that. There is a supplemental grant in the current program and it brings from $663 a month to—$663 a year per poor child to $733 the total grant level in a poorer state. Those supplemental grants expire at the end of 2001, not 2002. If they are allowed to expire, those states among that group that are already spending, as some of them are, more than the base TANF grant amount per year may have to cut their services even before we get to reauthorization.
So an immediate issue we're concerned about is the need to extend the supplemental grants through 2002 so we can then look at what to do about the poorer states in a recession—excuse me—what to do with the poorer states as we reauthorize the program. Moving out of funding into a couple of final issues.
Medicaid. Most kids below twice the poverty line are eligible for Medicaid. However, in the typical or median state, a working parent loses Medicaid eligibility when her earnings reach 67 percent of the poverty line. This is fundamentally incompatible with the broader vision of welfare reform.
Since 1995, as families have moved from welfare to work, the proportion of working poor parents covered by Medicaid has fallen sharply. The proportion that are uninsured has risen, and nearly half of all working poor parents are now without coverage throughout the entire year.
About 20 states have extended coverage more broadly to working parents, largely through Medicaid. Those again are primarily states with greater fiscal capacity. The lesson of CHIP, where states could have covered more children before CHIP under Medicaid, but the poorer states were largely unable to do so until they got the enhanced match that CHIP provided, suggests we need to expand CHIP, with its enhanced matching structure to enable states to cover more working poor parents. This is something states are increasingly expressing interest in. But again, we have an immediate problem here, not well recognized, the CHIP block grant funding level falls after this year, before reauthorization, from $4.2 billion this year to $3 billion in 2002. So we're about to cut CHIP funding at the very time that states are saying that a part of welfare reform is to cover more parents.
Other issues which I'm out of time and won't mention include food stamps and immigrants.
WEAVER: Thanks. As I said, everyone has a lot to say. Jeffrey Johnson is next.
JEFFREY JOHNSON: OK. First of all, let me just thank Brookings for having this important meeting.
And let me describe myself in a couple of ways. The last panel talked about arguments don't change but new people to make them. I would put myself in that category, and I think that's true for the whole issue of how we address the issue of non-custodial fathers, particularly as a debate discussion as far as TANF reauthorization goes.
I will also describe myself as a practitioner informed by research, as opposed to a researcher informed by practice. I think there's a big difference, and I think that, as it relates to the work that NPCL is doing, particularly around our partners for fragile families project, which is a 10-site demonstration program that has three objectives. One is to increase the long-term involvement of low-income fathers—non-custodial fathers—in the lives of children, particular those children who are TANF recipients.
The second is to see whether that we can raise the wage earnings of these fathers over time.
And three is to look at the whole issue of systems reform and the whole issue of how child support interfaces with communities around issues of paternity establishment and, as a consequence, increased child support collection.
Secondly, another national demonstration program called Fathers at Work, which is looking at potentially how employment training organizations, which have historically been unsuccessful in working with low-income men, how with partnership with child support, and also with a strong focus on fatherhood, with an intended emphasis on wage growth, whether or not this will have some impact on improved child well being.
And so I think that these studies, and these research projects that we're undertaking, while they're new, they will give us much. And I think that before we really get to the serious discussions about welfare reauthorization, particularly with regards to the fourth goal of welfare, and that is the formation and maintenance of two-parent families—I think that both of those demonstration projects will give us much.
But let me say from the beginning that we are aware of these increasing deliberations around marriage in the discussion of reauthorization, of the personal responsibility act. Let me assure you, even though I'm going to share some things with you that may not sound like it—I want to assure you that I'm a product of married biological parents, the father of two children, and the husband of one wife for 21 years.
I believe in the institution of marriage, and I think that it's important to also acknowledge that the NPCL supports marriage and acknowledges that children have better outcomes on an array of variables when they are raised by married biological parents in a loving, safe, nurturing home with adequate resources. And we have a policy that states as such.
Under the best of circumstances, marriage is hard work. But I would also say that the real challenge that we have, particularly in trying to maybe change or think about different ways in which the formation and maintenance of two-parent families might impact the quality of children's lives, I think it's very important to understand that, as it relates to the issue of marriage, you simply cannot legislate cupid.
(LAUGHTER)
It's important, you know, in thinking about marriage, you know, think about marriage as ideal, and in many instances the best situation for raising healthy, confident children. For many of the men who enter our 10 demonstration sites around the country, marriage may have never been a serious consideration. Yet, some 20 percent say they want to marry the mother of their children when they first enter these programs.
Many of these women who are the mothers of the children of these men say that they want to marry these men, but don't want to marry the man unless they have a good relationship with this man, and they want to also make sure he has a job and a job with a wage trajectory—not just a job, a job that has career growth. Too often, these men don't fit the bill.
You should know that the most often asked question or the often stated reason for why these young fathers come to these programs is that they're looking for a job. And what we find is that what these fathers need is they want to be understood for the circumstances that they're in. And Ron, I would describe them as the fathers of those mothers probably of that bottom fifth of the income distribution who are really still being challenged by some of the successes that we've experienced in the TANF program thus far.
What we find through a lot of our case management efforts is that many of these fathers have substance abuse problems. Many of these fathers have dropped out of high school. Many of these fathers have never worked. Some research that was done by The Urban Institute found that many of these fathers really would like to pay child support if they didn't marry the mom. But many of them do. But many of these fathers are not in a position to even support themselves, let alone make a child support payment.
The statistic that they gave was that many of these fathers, if they did work, earned probably less than $6,000 last year as a wage. But that was because, for the most part, the jobs that they had were probably jobs that were paying minimum wage or jobs that were—or they were in and out of jobs and didn't hold a full-time job for that year.
One of the things that we also find in the programs is a way to really get at this whole marriage issue. I guess another way to look at it is to think about it in the context that we have to recognize that 70 percent of African-American children are born out of wedlock. And so, in the fact that a lot of these fathers come to our programs and are not in a position to marry the moms and the circumstances and the relationships are so varied, we find that a better option is to focus not on marriage for those fathers, but what we call co-parenting. And we have had some splendid results with our co-parenting program thus far.
There is a practitioner in the room named Joe Jones that I hope, before today is over, we'll have an opportunity to see how effective these team parenting project is as a way of responding to these fathers.
I guess another thing I would suggest is that, in addressing the issue of marriage, we believe that the best institution to do that is not a lot of our programs, but the partners of these programs, and these partners would be our faith partners, who are also challenged to work with these men even though there are options available to them that's been provided as part of the whole charitable choice provision.
I guess the last thing I would say in terms of what we would like to contribute to in this whole debate around TANF reauthorization is that we believe that the elements of the Child Support and Distribution Act of 2000 as presented in the Senate in the closing days of the 106th Congress needs to be enacted, particularly, states should have the option to pass-through all child support collected with federal financial participation.
We also believe that states should have the option to support—excuse me—that the national demonstration programs, the fatherhood programs, should be passed into law, and also that we feel that the child support clearly should be limited to collection efforts that are for ordered child support only.
I guess the final thing I would say is that there should also be some additional tools to allow low-income fathers, even if they are nonresident, to acquire assets sufficient to lift themselves and their families out of poverty, and we would support the concept of family development counts for these families.
And so with that, I hope that before we leave, I'll get an opportunity to answer some more specific questions about how we might work with non-custodial fathers.
WEAVER: Thanks very much.
Next up is Robert Rector, who we'd like to give a special thanks to because he rose out of his sick bed. He called Ron Haskins last night and said, "I don't think I'm going to be able to make it." But we really appreciate your coming.
ROBERT RECTOR: Okay. If I were to summarize what I see as the next two directions in welfare reform, it would be in two words: work and marriage.
Work is rather simple. Under the existing law, we have a performance standard that says that states must reduce their caseloads by 50 percent or have 50 percent of the caseload engage in some sort of work activity or any combination of those two things. That has worked very successfully and has motivated states to bring dependency down. I would raise that level over the next five years to 90 percent. There's no reason to have any significant portion of the remaining TANF caseload idle on the rolls. They should all be engaged in constructive activities leading towards self-sufficiency.
We don't have good data on this anymore, but as near as I can see, it's very important to understand that about half of the TANF recipients that are currently on TANF are actually sitting there doing nothing at any given point in time. I think that would be a shock to the average taxpayer, and we can do much better than that. That's a simple thing.
The second thing is marriage and that's much more difficult. When we passed TANF, we set three goals. The first was a traditional goal to reduce poverty. The second goal was to reduce dependence. The third goal is to reduce illegitimacy and strengthen marriage.
On the first two goals, we've done very well. Child poverty, particularly black and single parent child poverty, is now at an all-time historic low. The caseloads have been cut in half. On the third goal, we have done virtually nothing whatsoever. In fact, very often, state officials said to me, "Well, we simply don't care about that goal." So we ignored it completely. In other words, we have total contempt for the law.
After spending some hundred billion dollars over four years on TANF, I can find only about $4 million in the entire nation having been spent on the third and, in fact, the most debated goal of the reform, which was to strengthen marriage and reduce illegitimacy.
There are, in fact, no more than a half a dozen governors in the United States who will even mention the word marriage, and to those of us who believe that marriage is essential to a successful society, we find this circumstance quite alarming.
The simple fact of the matter is that 80 percent of the child poverty in the United States today occurs in never-married or some type of broken family. The collapse of marriage is the cause of poverty. We do not have a child poverty problem in the United States except to the extent that we have a broken institution of marriage.
The welfare system in its entirety, when you look at it, basically funds two groups of people. It funds the indigent elderly, and it funds single parents. And that applies not merely to TANF, but to public housing, to food stamps, to EITC, and to everything else. The welfare system is a subsidy system for single parents to compensate for the collapse of the institution of marriage.
Last year, the United States spent about $150 billion in cash, food and housing, medical assistance to subsidizing single parenthood. But we spent about $150 million on a very small number of programs to try to increase marriage and reduce the number of single parents. So as a nation, we spend $1,000 to subsidize single parenthood for every $1 that we spend trying to sustain marriage.
In fact, I would say that almost the entire dialogue in welfare is a neurotic dialogue because it goes to great lengths specifically to try to avoid discussing why the welfare system exists in the first place, which is because of the collapse of marriage, and why the underclass exists, which again is largely because of the collapse of marriage.
So what can we do about marriage? Well, the first thing I would recommend is that, because states have been unwilling to act on this issue in the last five years, we should set 5 percent of all future TANF funds aside for a variety of specific pro-marriage activities. These would include providing pro-marriage education in high schools for at-risk communities, providing mentoring to strengthen fragile marriages in at-risk communities, experimenting with programs for at-risk individuals that reward them for getting married, bearing children inside wedlock, and remaining married, going into at-risk communities and providing pro-marriage mentoring in TANF offices and Medicaid offices and food stamps offices.
But let me just give one anecdote of the opportunities that exist that we are currently ignoring in every community in the United States. Most out-of-wedlock child-bearing in the United States does not occur to teenage girls in high school. It occurs to young adult women in their early 20s. In nearly half of the cases, those women are cohabiting with the father at the time the child is born, and these fathers are, for the most part, employed and there are clearly couples that 10 or 20 years ago would have been married at this time.
In no community in the United States, even though that woman when she's going to give that birth out of wedlock, it's going to be paid for by Medicaid, she's already on the Medicaid system at the time she's pregnant, do we give even a single brochure or a single comment or anything to suggest to that young mother and father that it would be best for the child, for the mother and for the father and for the society if they got married.
It's a great opportunity. In fact, it's a form of abuse that we don't try to help these young people become better parents through marriage.
WEAVER: Okay. Thanks very much.
I'd like to remind people who are watching on the live web cast that you can submit questions and comments to the panelists by sending your questions via email to communications@brookings.edu. And meanwhile, Alan Weil is going to bat cleanup.
ALAN WEIL: Knowing that I would go last, I didn't spend a lot of time thinking that I would add to the list of issues to be discussed. But make just one comment about the issues, which is that it is important, as I think most of us would agree that it is, that the TANF reauthorization debate include issues of work and poverty and child well-being and broaden beyond just cash assistance. It's also important that we not let welfare and the debate over welfare dominate our thinking about the broader issues of work and poverty and family well-being.
Welfare and cash assistance is only one lens through which to look at these issues. Many of the families that are confronting challenges around work and poverty are not and never have been associated with the welfare system, the cash welfare system. And the funding in these programs was never designed to address all of these broad social problems.
And so, as we look at TANF and broaden the issue, we also need to remember, as we look at issues like work and poverty, that TANF is not the only program and is not the only lever for addressing those concerns.
I'm here to tell you a little bit about the Assessing the New Federalism project at The Urban Institute, which is the national project funded by 18 foundations, many of which are supporting this event here today as well. I want to be clear that the New Federalism Project began before welfare reform was enacted, and was not designed as a welfare reform evaluation. But that said, we have, I think, a lot to offer to the debate about welfare reauthorization.
And then let me highlight five items in that regard.
First of all, the national survey of America's families, which is a part of the federalism project at The Urban Institute, is a tremendous resource of data on the well-being of America's families. It was conducted in 1997 and again in 1999. And so it provides a very current and very rich set of information. It allows us to look at a national sample of people on welfare, people who've left welfare, people who left and came back, people who never were on welfare.
Because it's a large survey, it allows us to look at groups of immigrants. It allows us to look at issues by race and ethnicity and it provides one of really the very few sources of data nationally and with some—in some states to look at these issues.
Second of all, we are a central resource for data on the policies that have been adopted. For all of the devolution that's occurred, very little energy has gone into simply documenting the choices that states have made. And we are the host of the Welfare Rules Database, which offers a tremendously rich set of data on the choices that every single state has made in defining their welfare programs and it's a resource that we think people other than ourselves have been using, and we hope you'll continue to use.
Third, there's a lot of talk about looking at the breadth of the safety net and the supports for going to work. In my limited time, let me touch on some areas where, again, I think we have something to offer. We're a source of data on use of food stamps and the enrollment in the food stamps program for people leaving welfare, people still on welfare, and people who have never been on welfare.
Child care, again a topic much discussed, we have information on spending, on the types of arrangements that families use. Again, we can break these things out between families associated with the welfare system and not.
There's been a good discussion of child support, and the discussion of non-custodial parents, most of whom are fathers. The National Survey of America's Families has a very rich roster to allow us to look at family structure, the earning capacity of absent fathers, of the engagement that they have in their children's lives, whether they're spending time with those kids—a lot of questions that go beyond the simple question of the effectiveness of the child support financing system.
A great deal of data on Medicaid and children's health, allowing us to look at whether eligible families are receiving those benefits, looking at the relationship between the cash welfare system and the child welfare system, which is child protection and meeting the needs of children at risk of abuse and neglect, looking at tax policies—the earned income tax credit has been discussed, but we've also done some interesting work on state tax policies, which have a tremendous effect on the financial well-being of low-income families. Sometimes the variation across states in their tax policies can be a greater difference than the variation across states in their cash grant policies. And so looking at state taxes is a part of what we're doing.
And finally, an issue that is raised periodically is the broad issue of child well-being. We're looking a lot at money and work, but how are children faring? We have very rich measures of the well-being of children.
The fourth topic where we have something to offer is the issue of federalism. I think this is a topic that needs some attention independent of the individual programs that are being discussed. How much variation is there in state policies? Can we correlate those variations with differences in the well-being of families?
Fifth, an issue that again comes up, but I think we have a tremendous source of data, is to not just look at program designs and rules but to look at eligibility and participation. With the sophisticated data in our survey, it is possible for us to model who is eligible and whether or not people who are eligible are actually gaining the benefits to which they are entitled or for which they are eligible. And so looking not just at rules and not just at well-being, but actually participation and outreach and enrollment and re-enrollment.
Our project, because we have been underway for five years, we already have more than 80 policy briefs published, a similar number of papers. Our materials are in the peer review literature as well.
So let me just close by saying I want to emphasize that our project also views our role as going beyond welfare. I think, for all of the good work that's going into the TANF reauthorization debate, many of the hardest issues about what happens in an economic downturn, how we help the hardest to serve, the longer-term effects of time limits, are issues that we will know the least about when it's time to do reauthorization.
So continuing these analyses well beyond the reauthorization debate is important in our project and this one as well will seek to do that.
WEAVER: Okay. Thanks very much.
Resisting the temptation to comment, since our audience has been so patient, I want to open up for a few questions. But I did promise a preliminary report on the capacity of our panelists to meet the time limits. And I will report that all six of them went right up to the time limit, but five out of six responded to the first sanction and stopped, and I didn't have to go to the second level of cards. Let me remind you that you can send your questions by email to communications@ brookings.edu if you're watching via live web cast. But now we want to take a few audience questions.
There's one.
Q: Good morning. I'm Joe Jones, president and chief executive officer for the Center for Fathers, Families and Workforce Development in Baltimore, Maryland.
I would also like to preface my comment-question by saying that I'm also a person who injected heroine and cocaine for 17 years and I had a child out of wedlock. And in 1986 was fortunate enough to go into long-term residential treatment, turn my life around, meet a young lady who I married, and we now, together, have a nine-year-old little boy. And my work is focused in the hardest and toughest neighborhoods in Baltimore City.
And this whole issue about fatherlessness, which clearly needs to be in our debate and our discourse around reauthorization, also has tremendous implications that I don't think we truly understand in that many of the men who we are talking about who are in the programs described by Dr. Johnson are living in a subculture who we can't even reach.
We don't even know the true number of them that exist. And I wanted to give you a story about a couple who we encountered. A young lady in one of our partners organization was pregnant and recruited through the Healthy Start/Infant Mortality Reduction Program. Her boyfriend wanted nothing to do with the fatherhood program. We repeatedly went out to get him—10, 11 times. And finally, we were able to engage him because he saw one of his peers in our van as we went to pick him up.
Over time, we were able to convince both of them, who were long-term substance abusers to go into drug treatment that we paid for. After going into treatment—and keep in mind, they had six children together during this whole hellacious period of substance abuse and just going through life. Finally, after two years, they came to me and said—Joe, I want to get married. We want to get married at the center.
And I'm like—Well, what the heck does that mean? Sat down with them on a Monday night during Monday night football and didn't leave until Monday night football was over, so you know how long I was there.
(LAUGHTER)
And I said—You know, we can support you getting married at the center. However, I'm not sure we're the best positioned organization to do it. I think, first, what you should do is go seek counseling from a faith of your understanding, right? And then let us talk and see if it's still applicable to you all. They went. The found a pastor. I talked with the pastor. He gave them premarital counseling. They have a schedule of support post their marriage, where they will continue to receive counseling. Two weeks ago they got married at the center. Together, they are raising these six children. In addition, the young man has gotten his other daughter from a previous relationship that he's now trying to get custody of so he can have all of his children.
So there's a set of services and outreach that goes to the heart of dealing with this. I think we can have marriage as an ideal. But I think if we leave it as the only option, we will cut off a tremendous number of individuals who are out there who would not be a part of our service delivery and child poverty will continue to be in place.
And I would ask that either Mr. Rector or Mr. Johnson to respond to—can we accept a centrist view of marriage as an ideal with a set of services underneath, including co-parenting, that will allow us to deal with some of this marriage formation issues.
WEAVER: Robert, you want to start.
RECTOR: Well, the first thing you have to recognize is that there aren't any pro-marriage activities in the U.S. today to speak of. Oklahoma has just started this. Arizona has a tiny, tiny bit. So, before we talk about whether we ought to have something in addition to marriage, I would have to say—Why don't we have marriage? Because we don't have any funding for that at all now, no such programs.
The other thing that's important is to—let's look at it this way. One out of three children are born out of wedlock. And about another half of children will undergo a divorce before the child turns 18. So there's an awful lot of family disruption, which in turn results in welfare dependence and a whole lot of other problems.
It's very much erroneous then to think about, for example, out-of-wedlock child-bearing in terms of the least marriageable people in our country. The overwhelming bulk of these young men and women who are having kids out of wedlock and not getting married don't have drug problems, don't have five years of unemployment and multiple crime records and things like that.
So I'm very sympathetic and I want to deal with those groups as well, but it's very important not to picture the marriage issue solely in those terms. For the most part, you just have a lot of people in their early 20s who, when the girl is getting pregnancy, they no longer see marriage as an important part of raising a child, and they don't see having a commitment to one another as something that should precede bringing a child into the world.
So if I were to have a strong pro-marriage policy, I would start with the area where people are most marriageable. Okay? I wouldn't ignore the others, but there's an awful lot of people who are very —quite marriageable right now if society simply went in and, instead of saying if you're not married, we'll give you Medicaid, we'll give you TANF, we'll give you this, we'll give you all these subsidies; if you are married, we'll cut those subsidies off for the most part, and we're not going to say a single affirmative thing about marriage to you.
Eighty-five percent of the out-of-wedlock births in the United States are paid for by Medicaid. And in every singe case, the government should be in there with that woman when she's pregnancy out of wedlock and say—where's the father? Have the two of you thought about marriage? And in most cases, they have. Can we provide you with counseling services through a faith-based organization or something else to help you? And then, not leave it. At that point, if they get married, continue to provide them with counseling services to help that marriage stay together. And we could do those things. Marriages and relationships fall apart for very concrete reasons, and they are correctable.
We can also reduce the divorce rate in the United States. We spend so much emphasis on saying—let's collect a lot of child support. Why don't we take 3 percent of what we spend on collecting child support and allocate it to reducing the divorce rate?
WEAVER: We've got three other panelists who want to make quick comments on this.
JOHNSON: I would just say that my response would be that it's not an either/or situation. It's both. But I would approach it from a client-centered perspective. I think that we cannot give up on those men who have been disconnected and who society has said they are unplaceable guys. These were once guys who worked in the factories, who demonstrated great work ethics, individuals who were responsible to their families.
I would agree that marriage is a solid foundation in the African-American community. But I think that, at the same time, I would have to recognize that over the last 30 years, that because of changes in our economy, because of the welfare system to a degree, I really do think that a lot of our guys are disconnected and have somehow ended up in the heap of those men who are not seen as marriageable.
And so I would say that it's very important to keep it client-centered. If the clients come in, like they do in these demonstration programs so far that we are seeing, you know, if they need marriage counseling, make sure they get that. And I'd also say that faith part is the best professional to deal with that and not necessarily some of the practitioners who have been working with CBO organizations on fatherhood thus far.
WEAVER: Dr. Greenstein.
GREENSTEIN: In the question and the comments on the panel so far, we've really heard a strong case for various kinds of intensive services for some of these fathers, employment services—and your own experience suggests that promoting employment is compatible with promoting more marriage among them.
Robert talks about counseling services. My point is simply, if you want to do these things, again, you have to have adequate funding in the TANF block grant in order to do them so they don't compete with things like child care or employment services for the mothers. Think about how you would try to fit these services in in those states with less fiscal capacity that are only getting $600, $700, $800 per poor child in a grant. This is part of why we have to look at funding.
One last thought on this front—I mentioned that, for those 17 states, the funding level goes down in 2002 under current law, and the CHIP block grant goes down under current law. Simply maintaining that, so it doesn't drop in 2002 costs $1.6 billion. That is one one-hundredth of 1 percent of the tax cut that the president has proposed, and less than 1 percent of the portion of the tax cut that would go to the wealthiest 1 percent of the people in the country.
So if we're serious and we have compassion about helping these families, we ought to be able to find the funds to do it.
WEAVER: Quickly.
GUERON: Quickly. There are some intriguing findings from a study that we conducted in Minnesota, which—where the state provided added support to working families, that there was a modest increase in marriage, a sharper reduction in family dissolution in two-parent families, and a quite striking reduction in domestic abuse.
I call this yet intriguing but not yet proven because it's one site, but this is the kind of study where we should be looking at whether providing additional income to working families can have such effects.
WEAVER: Very quick by Susan and then we're going to take another question.
GOLONKA: You know, Robert, you sort of criticize the states for not doing a lot around marriage. I think, first of all, we have to acknowledge that states and governors have done quite a lot around fatherhood and they were creating fatherhood initiatives even prior to TANF's creation.
I think the other thing—there is an incredible lack of consensus and, frankly, a lot of discomfort about what should be the government role in terms of promoting marriage. And we don't really know a lot about what works. And I think one of the things that would be very helpful would be that HHS or some other foundations fund and evaluate various—and continue and expand their activities to fund and evaluate programs that support fathers and marriage so that we have a sense of what works.
I mean, governors, frankly, are reluctant to embark in areas where there's not, you know, where there's very little evidence about what works, particularly if it's such a controversial area where there's a lack of consensus. So, you know, I don't know that state officials were routinely dismissing the goal, but really frustrated about what it meant, and how to proceed with it.
But there are a lot of fatherhood initiatives. There are a lot—there is a lot of focus on non-custodial parents, getting them into employment programs. So I don't think we should—you know, I don't think it's a clear picture if we just say states aren't doing anything in that area.
WEAVER: Okay. Another question from the audience. Over here.
Q: I'm Walter Shapiro, columnist for USA Today, and just trying to emphasize the note of humility that has hung over the discussion today. I'd just like to ask the panel to briefly—each of them—indicate what about this entire topic of welfare reform have they been the wrongest on in the last 10 years? And why?
WEAVER: Okay. Well, I suspect this will be brief responses.
(LAUGHTER)
Who wants to start? Judy.
GUERON: I think we've been wrongest on the expectation on the capacity of people to work. I don't think any of us predicted the decline in the welfare caseload that has been seen and the expansion of work among single mothers that Ron Haskins put up on the chart teaches us something.
WEAVER: Okay. Anyone else been wrong about anything?
(LAUGHTER)
GREENSTEIN: Well, I certainly wrote some things talking about the potential for a race to the bottom in benefits. Now, to be fair to myself, I would submit ...
(LAUGHTER)
What we actually said was not that it would simply occur but that there was a significant risk it would occur in a recession when resources were tight.
We were also wrong on the degree of caseload decline. And I think the caseload decline has been so great that, even in a recession now, there probably wouldn't be the fiscal pressure we had thought there would be to cut those benefits.
Having said that, I think the other place where things came out in a less favorable manner than I had thought is the degree of decline among eligible families no longer on welfare in Medicaid receipt and in food stamp receipt significantly exceeded anything anybody predicted—us, the Congressional Budget Office, OMB—and that's clearly now—if the race to the bottom is less of a source of concern, the decline in participation among eligible working families of Medicaid and food stamps is more a source of concern.
WEAVER: I think we have time for two quick mea culpas and then another—one last question.
WEIL: First would have to be Judy's—the percentage of the caseload at the time that was able to move into employment was, I think, larger than—and there's an economic context component to that as well, but it really was striking.
But I have to raise another place which is out of my background before I was at The Urban Institute. I worked in state government, and for a governor who was a—not a proponent of the block grants, but certainly in favor of flexibility and the kinds of things that governors talk about. And I think what I was most wrong about was how few states were really going to fundamentally rethink their social support system, as opposed to marginally increase a large number of programs that already exist.
And I think the latter is overwhelmingly what we've seen—incremental expansions and modifications and changing of incentives and disregards, but very little fundamental starting over and saying—what do we want supports for low-income families with children to look like? And I expected states, given this flexibility that they were calling for, to do that. And they overwhelmingly have not.
WEAVER: Robert?
RECTOR: I would say two things. One is I think conservatives expected a greater reduction in out-of-wedlock child-bearing in reaction to the work requirements, and that really doesn't seem to have occurred. The other thing I would say is that I was probably the strongest proponent of the effectiveness of workfare in reducing dependency in the country back in 1995 and '96, and I grossly underestimated the effectiveness of workfare in doing that.
JOHNSON: Let me just say, I would say—I would turn the question around and just say that I'm still shocked that our welfare system does not treat men, who share a similar needs profile, as mothers—the fathers of those children—in the same fundamental ways in which it works with the mother.
I think that that's one of the great mysteries, given the fact that, in a time in the welfare system, it would seem to me, that in those cases where fathers and mothers don't marry, that the surest safety net would be the child support that that father provides to that child. But in the face of that, we still fundamentally don't have a policy in this country that addresses the needs of low-skilled, low-income me, and that I very well could be one of those individuals.
WEAVER: Last question. Okay. Last question of the audience. Yes, in the back.
WEAVER: Does anyone want to comment on the question?
RECTOR: Sure. Well, I think you just heard it there very clearly and I think that there are millions and millions of children across the country that suffer greatly because of the very politically correct attitude that you just saw.
The fact of the matter—or you just heard—the fact of the matter is that the welfare system overwhelmingly rewards non-marriage and has for over 30 years penalized the very active marriage by saying, as long as you remain single and there's not a working husband in the household, you get all this stuff. You get Medicaid, you get food stamps, you get TANF, and you lose most of those things when you do become married. And we can't exactly eliminate that bias against marriage, but we can begin to mitigate it somewhat.
And the fact of the matter is that, when you look at blacks in urban areas, or when you look at low-income whites, in every respect, in every social problem that we face in the United States-whether it's child poverty, whether it's welfare dependence, whether it's crime, which is four times more likely for a boy who's raised without an adult male in the home than one who has a father in the home, from psychological disturbance to smoking, to any problem you can mention, those problems are greatly exacerbated if not predominantly caused by the erosion of marriage.
I think it's about time that we stop behaving like ostriches with our heads in the sand, that we raise up—and incidentally, most of these people—these young people who have children out of wedlock and are at risk of this, actually have much more favorable attitudes toward marriage implicitly than what you just heard from the audience.
They are waiting for society to tell them a better way to live, and not to coerce them but to give them the skills and the values to try to create a better environment to raise their children in and I think we owe them that.
WEAVER: Okay. Bob Greenstein wants the last word.
GREENSTEIN: Well, I think the approach we want to take here is certainly not to reduce supports for children in single-parent families. One thing we've heard across the panel here—someone used the word humility—is the degree to which we really don't know what works very effectively in promoting marriage.
It seems to me it is not at all incompatible to do better in providing work supports to single parents with children, to also do more to provide employment and other services to the dads, and in addition, to do better in services for low-income two-parent working families—reducing the marriage penalty in the earned income credit, enabling more of the two-parent working families to get Medicaid coverage. That's who a lot of those families are.
When you expand coverage for working families at 100 or 150 or 170 percent of poverty. It shouldn't be incompatible to pursue those things at the same time.
That's all.
WEAVER: Okay. Thanks very much. I think that we can...
(APPLAUSE)
I think that we can all agree that not all the issues around low-income families were resolved in the 1996 legislation, that there's plenty left to do.
(APPLAUSE)
I think we can also agree that there's not a consensus on what to do, that there remain substantial disagreements. And that's what we're going to be working on over the next couple of years.
I want to briefly acknowledge the generosity of our funders for this panel—the Anne E. Casey Foundation, the Foundation for Child Development, the Joyce Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, the Packard Foundation, the help of all our panelists here today. We appreciate your being patient here in the audience and those of you out there in cyberspace.
And lastly, we want to invite the feedback of all of you—panelists, live audience and audience listening on the web cast.
The welfare reform and beyond initiate is in its formative stages. We invite your feedback on what you think the important issues that we should be addressing are, and we hope you'll be in continuing contact with us and staying tuned for future events.
Thanks.
[APPLAUSE AND END OF EVENT.]