I wonder what Ms. Murillo’s boyfriend will think if he ever sees the following printed in the pages of the New York Times:
Esmeralda Murillo, a 21-year-old mother of two, lost her welfare check, landed in a shelter and then returned to a boyfriend whose violent temper had driven her away. “You don’t know who to turn to,” she said.
I figure he’ll beat her up or throw her out. Or, maybe, first the one and then the other. Maybe she will then join the many women struggling to feed their kids by shoplifting, selling their food stamps and relying on school lunches to feed their kids, donating pint after pint of blood, diving in dumpsters, or just going hungry.
What’s the conservatives’ answer for Ms. Murillo? That she should have chosen better boyfriends or a more reliable husband? What if something bad happens to her or her kids? Are they going to wish they’d let her collect some aid so she could keep her family safe? Are they going to say “tough luck, she and her kids got what they deserved”?
Is this what they want? Women shacking up with abusive men just to get their kids off the street?
Because this is the kind of thing that is happening all over this country. People are being forced into dangerous situations. They are resorting to crime. And, in fairness, this all started with Bill Clinton:
Critics of the stringent system say stories like these vindicate warnings they made in 1996 when President Bill Clinton fulfilled his pledge to “end welfare as we know it”: the revamped law encourages states to withhold aid, especially when the economy turns bad.
The old program, Aid to Families with Dependent Children, dates from the New Deal; it gave states unlimited matching funds and offered poor families extensive rights, with few requirements and no time limits. The new program, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, created time limits and work rules, capped federal spending and allowed states to turn poor families away.
“My take on it was the states would push people off and not let them back on, and that’s just what they did,” said Peter B. Edelman, a law professor at Georgetown University who resigned from the Clinton administration to protest the law. “It’s been even worse than I thought it would be.”
I’m not arguing that Aid to Families with Dependent Children didn’t need an overhaul. It needed to fix its incentive system and focus more on getting people back to work. But, as might be expected when dealing with Newt Gingrich’s Republicans, no decent and humane bill was on offer. Clinton vetoed the worst bills and signed the best one he could get. Then he told us he would fix the biggest problems with the bill later. That still has not happened.
Welfare Reform looked like it was working surprisingly well for a long time because the economy boomed in the years immediately after the law was enacted. Everyone patted themselves on the back. But you can’t judge anti-poverty measures by how they work in boom times. You have to see how they work when unemployment is high and the federal and state governments are feeling a budget pinch. And, right now, we have a lot of people who are just destitute. And there are millions of kids who are paying the price for an ethic of tough love.
