Clinton Touts Welfare-to-Work Progress

President Clinton on Tuesday extolled a substantial drop in the nation’s welfare rolls, even as some Democratic critics and policy analysts complained that onetime welfare families are still suffering.

The White House issued statistics showing that 6.7 million fewer people received welfare benefits last March than at the start of Clinton’s first term, a drop of 48%; California saw a 25% decline, from 2.4 million to 1.8 million.

The decline was speeded by landmark welfare-to-work legislation enacted in 1996, the result of a White House compromise with the Republicans in Congress, who had pressed the issue for years. But Clinton views the reform as a major Democratic policy triumph and a centerpiece of his own legacy.

So at a conference here to assess the progress of welfare reform, he urged Republicans in Congress to “finish the job” and not rob state welfare block grants to pay for a proposed $792-billion, 10-year tax cut.

“I think that would be a mistake,” he said. “The welfare rolls have been cut in half; they’re at their lowest level in 32 years. . . . To finish the job, we have to recognize that . . . in every state, there are still people who could move from welfare to work if they had more training, if they had transportation, if they had child care.”

Encouraging employers to hire even more workers from among those on welfare, Clinton said: “In this era of labor shortages, we must not forget that welfare recipients can be a rich pool of untapped talent--people who are good for the bottom line.”

But on the floor of the U.S. Senate, in the think tanks of Washington and, tellingly, here on the streets of Chicago where the impact is being felt, those close to the policy--and practice--of welfare reform cited other statistics.

The drop in people on welfare, said Sen. Paul Wellstone (D-Minn.), is not the central issue. The key, he said, is that “we’ve seen a very teeny reduction in poverty.”

The White House focus on the success of encouraging single mothers off the dole and into the labor market “begs the question of what kind of jobs at what kind of wages,” he said in an interview. “The vast majority of these jobs are barely above minimum wages, and the mothers are still poor.”

“Certainly you can’t call this a success if you say the goal was to allow families to become economically self-sufficient or to say it has led to a dramatic reduction in poverty,” he said. “It hasn’t.”

William Leavy, executive director of Chicago’s Greater West Town Community Development Project, has had firsthand experience watching the efforts to turn welfare recipients into workers.

Many states, including Illinois, are meeting the reduced welfare loads required by the 1996 program “not by increasing the number of people working but by decreasing the number of people” receiving assistance, he said. As a result, he added, former welfare families are still poor.

“There’s been some success, but it’s been exaggerated,” said Leavy, whose community-based program focuses on job training and development.

Clinton’s domestic policy advisor, Bruce Reed, agreed that more needs to be done. “This is not the time to wash our hands of the problem,” he said.

A report issued this week by the Washington-based Urban Institute found that nearly one-third of those who left welfare during the program’s initial years had returned at least once, and that one-fourth of those who left welfare are not working and have no working partner.

It also found that health insurance, which had been provided to welfare recipients through the Medicaid program, was limited: Twenty-three percent of the former welfare recipients who were working reported that they received health insurance coverage from their employers, compared with 55% of all workers.

Overall, the study found, the average annual earnings of families that have left welfare was $13,788, roughly the poverty level for a family of three in 1997.

“A third of former recipient families have had to cut the size of or skip meals in the last year because there wasn’t enough money for food,” the report said.

Based on similar findings earlier this year, the White House launched a public relations campaign to remind those below the poverty level that they are still eligible for food stamps.