The difference? Ms. Saunders has a job, and Mr. Constance does not. And therein lies a tale of a profound shift in government support for low-income Americans at a time when stagnating wages and unstable schedules have kept many workers living near or below the poverty line.
Assistance to needy Americans has grown at a gallop since the mid-1980s, giving a hand up to the disabled, the working poor and married couples with children. At the same time, though, government aid directed at the nation’s poorest individuals has shrunk.
“Most observers would think that the government should support those who have the lowest incomes the most, and provide less help to those with higher incomes,” Robert A. Moffitt, an economist at Johns Hopkins University, writes in a forthcoming article in the journal Demography. “But that is not the case.”
Mr. Moffitt found that government assistance for families whose incomes flutter just above the poverty line nearly doubled from 1983 to 2004 after taking inflation into account. The numbers look very different for those scraping along at the bottom, generally unemployed single mothers with children. Their benefits declined in real terms by about one-third.
During the Great Recession, assistance to the poorest briefly expanded but has since fallen back, he said, and there is no indication that the long-run trend is shifting.
“There’s been this emphasis on rewarding workers and people like the elderly or disabled who are considered ‘the deserving poor,’ ” said Mr. Moffitt, referring to a revival in recent decades of age-old attitudes toward those at the bottom of the economic ladder. “If you’re not working, the interpretation is that you’re not trying.”
President Obama’s new proposals for a $500 tax credit for working parents with children, an increase in the minimum wage and paid parental leave are just the latest examples of this trend.
The shift reflects not only a more conservative political climate but also a response to broader economic forces, like globalization, advancing technology and workers’ enfeebled bargaining power, all of which have had a role in eliminating millions of traditional middle-class jobs and holding down wages.
More than 300,000 California workers at big companies like Walmart, for example, qualify for Medi-Cal, the state’s health insurance for the poor, according to a study from the Center for Labor Research and Education at the University of California, Berkeley. And in New York, 40 percent of bank tellers are on some form of public aid like food stamps.
Across the country, working families account for nearly three-quarters of the people enrolled in major public benefits programs and 63 percent of the costs, the Berkeley researchers concluded.
Experts emphasize that they do not want to pit one needy group against another. “The working poor deserve some help; there’s no way I want to cut any of that,” Mr. Moffitt of Johns Hopkins said. “But there’s a group here that’s being left out.”
Distinguishing between people who deserve public generosity and those who don’t dates to colonial times, but the idea has found powerful champions on both sides of the political divide, including Representative Paul D. Ryan of Wisconsin, the influential new Republican chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee.
The move away from giving more aid to those in abject poverty can be traced, in part, to the campaign to “end welfare as we know it,” promoted by President Bill Clinton during his 1992 presidential run and accomplished in 1996 when the system was overhauled.
The program he created, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, imposes time limits and work rules on recipients. And when a state’s allotted budget runs out, poor families are turned away.
“It got rid of welfare cheaters,” Sheldon Danziger, president of the Russell Sage Foundation, said of the Clinton-era changes. “But we forgot about people who want to work but can’t find anybody to hire them.”
Like Mr. Constance. “I couldn’t really find any kind of work or the help that I needed to help raise my son,” said Mr. Constance, 53, who until recently had been living at a homeless shelter in New Orleans with his 9-year old son, Pablo.
A prison record from the 1980s, the result of selling two ounces of marijuana in Texas, has hampered his search for work as a house painter. “That’s why I say it’s been a hard road for me trying to raise my son, with all those ghosts and shadows over my head,” he said.
As he discovered, benefits vary greatly from one state to the next. He applied to the Temporary Assistance program in Miami, he said, but was uncertain about why he never received any. “It wasn’t nothing but problem after problem after problem,” he said.
Last year, he moved with his son to New Orleans, where he said he was offered $123 a month in Temporary Assistance for Needy Families aid in exchange for community service. He tried it, but the time and money spent commuting wasn’t worth it, he said, explaining that he was better off using the time to look for an odd job, a car to wash or a yard to rake.
He said he received $318 a month in food stamps, and that his son received $390 a month from disability payments through his mother, who still lives in Florida.
After months of bouncing around in emergency homeless shelters, the two are now settled in an apartment. The $700 monthly rent is being paid by the Salvation Army for six months, while Mr. Constance searches for a permanent job. “With the light bill and water bill, I don’t have enough to take care of all of that,” he said.
LaDonna Pavetti, the vice president for family income support policy at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a research organization in the nation’s capital, said that without the small cash allotments previously available, “it becomes much trickier to figure out how to make ends meet.”
For Ms. Saunders, a 34-year-old security guard with two young daughters in Washington, government assistance has come in the form of food stamps, a rent subsidy, a tax refund for low-wage earners and a matching grant for budding entrepreneurs.
That aid has helped put food on the table after Ms. Saunders’s weekly $459 paycheck runs out and has given her hope that she might be able to start her own cleaning business.
“I’m very much a go-getter,” Ms. Saunders said. “For a person that doesn’t make much money, it’s definitely a big help.”
She supplements her income as a security guard with $297 a month in food stamps and depends on Medicaid for health insurance. The earned-income tax credit, considered by many advocates to be the best program to help nudge people above the poverty line, brought the family $5,500 in federal and local tax refunds.
One of the lucky few to live in federally subsidized housing, Ms. Saunders pays only $110 a month for her two-bedroom apartment in the northeast section of Washington. “It’s not the best neighborhood,” she said, but it’s cheap.
And by saving $1,000 to put toward her dream of a cleaning service, she is now designated to receive a $4,000 tax-free, no-strings-attached federal subsidy through the Individual Development Accounts program. These accounts, which are financed through public money and private donations, can be used only to help buy a home, pay for college or start a business.
“This is not a handout approach,” said Joseph Leitmann-Santa Cruz, the head of Capital Area Asset Builders, the nonprofit organization that administers development accounts in the region. Earlier this year he insisted on rescheduling a meeting with Ms. Saunders so she could get some sleep after working an 18-hour double shift. “It’s a way for society to co-invest with a poor working family,” he said.
Ms. Saunders also has the advantage of living in the District of Columbia, which offers more generous benefits for low-income families than many states. Mr. Constance in New Orleans knows the difference.
“Not getting any kind of help or anything,” he said, “it’s been very rough.”
Original Article
Source: nytimes.com/
Author: PATRICIA COHEN
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