Transcript
RON HASKINS: Roughly speaking, American policy for poor and low income families is divided into two parts. There are welfare programs, again roughly speaking, for people who don't work, and there are what we now call work support programs, and these are programs that are usually explicitly designed to help low income families who actually work, including some poor families who work usually less than full time. To those of you who may be familiar with this, it is quite surprising that in about the last 20 years or so, social policy has shifted a great deal, so that we spend a lot more money now on programs for low income working families. In the old days, if you were on welfare and left welfare for work, and most people who leave welfare leave for low wage work, you basically lost all your welfare benefits, and that has changed greatly.
This is a very important development, I believe, in American social policy, but as we now know, especially after the 1996 welfare reforms that put a lot of new people into this category of low income working families, including some that were poor, it is still a real problem for a mom and two kids, usually single parent families, to raise children on $15,000 a year. The nation has a problem that ironically welfare reform actually increased somewhat in that we did get a lot of people out of poverty and the poverty rate declined quite dramatically especially as compared with the previous decade or so, but those families are still low wage families. So we have a problem. It is hard to raise a family on that amount of money.
That is what we are here today to discuss — how low income families can do better in America. To further the goal of doing better, the Annie E. Casey Foundation and the Ford Foundation have sponsored the preparation of a documentary on three low wage workers — actually, the one you will see today has three and the national version has four low wage workers — and their struggles to do better. This documentary will be shown nationally on public television on August 29th.
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