During the endgame of the budget deal last month Arnold Schwarzenegger and the Republicans began trotting out a new claim: that California has unusually high welfare expenditures and recipients – 30% of the nation’s recipients but only 12% of the nation’s population.<\/p>\n
Scott Graves at the California Budget Project points out that although technically true, the context makes all the difference<\/a> – much of those welfare recipients are children<\/strong>:<\/p>\n First, California, unlike most other states, chose to maintain a strong safety net for children after federal welfare reform was enacted in the late 1990s. In response to federal welfare reform, which established the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) block grant, California created the CalWORKs Program, with an emphasis on work and services to help low-income families move toward self-sufficiency. California’s leaders, including Governor Pete Wilson, made a bipartisan commitment to provide ongoing subsistence grants for children in CalWORKs, even if their parents ran afoul of program rules or “timed off” the program. Most other states, in contrast, implemented full-family sanctions and do not provide ongoing assistance for children once their parents reached the lifetime limit on aid.<\/p>\n It’s no surprise that the states that enacted the most restrictive rules saw the steepest declines in their TANF caseloads. Between 1995 and 2008, for example, the number of welfare recipients plummeted by 92 percent in Illinois, by 86 percent in Florida, and by 84 percent in Texas, compared to a 55 percent drop in California. These numbers help to explain why California now has 30 percent of the nation’s welfare recipients. As other states have shredded their safety nets for low-income children – dramatically shrinking their welfare caseloads – California’s share of all TANF recipients has grown proportionately, even as the number of Californians receiving assistance has been cut by more than half.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n In short, California only looked anomalous because we hadn’t made children suffer so that Republicans could slash budgets<\/em>. Of course, the recent budget deal included Republican-inspired attacks on aid to children, from CalWORKS to Healthy Families to education cuts, so children are most definitely going to suffer now thanks to the cuts.<\/p>\n The right-wing wouldn’t want you to know that some of the earliest forms of government cash assistance to private individuals came in the form of payments to low-income families, dating back to the 1910s. The predecessor to TANF, Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) was created in 1935 as part of the New Deal, and as we know Republicans hate anything associated with the New Deal.<\/p>\n Graves also noted that the media has typically been repeating Arnold’s claim about California welfare stats without providing the context. I’d like to say that might change now that the facts are out there…but I am doubtful. The state’s media has been stacking the deck for cuts since 2007<\/a>, and they don’t look to be in any mood to stop now.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" During the endgame of the budget deal last month Arnold Schwarzenegger and the Republicans began trotting out a new claim: that California has unusually high welfare expenditures and recipients – 30% of the nation’s recipients but only 12% of the nation’s population.<\/p>\n Scott Graves at the California Budget Project points out that although technically true, the context makes all the difference<\/a> – much of those welfare recipients are children<\/strong>:<\/p>\n First, California, unlike most other states, chose to maintain a strong safety net for children after federal welfare reform was enacted in the late 1990s. In response to federal welfare reform, which established the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) block grant, California created the CalWORKs Program, with an emphasis on work and services to help low-income families move toward self-sufficiency. California’s leaders, including Governor Pete Wilson, made a bipartisan commitment to provide ongoing subsistence grants for children in CalWORKs, even if their parents ran afoul of program rules or “timed off” the program. Most other states, in contrast, implemented full-family sanctions and do not provide ongoing assistance for children once their parents reached the lifetime limit on aid.<\/p>\n It’s no surprise that the states that enacted the most restrictive rules saw the steepest declines in their TANF caseloads. Between 1995 and 2008, for example, the number of welfare recipients plummeted by 92 percent in Illinois, by 86 percent in Florida, and by 84 percent in Texas, compared to a 55 percent drop in California. These numbers help to explain why California now has 30 percent of the nation’s welfare recipients. As other states have shredded their safety nets for low-income children – dramatically shrinking their welfare caseloads – California’s share of all TANF recipients has grown proportionately, even as the number of Californians receiving assistance has been cut by more than half.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n In short, California only looked anomalous because we hadn’t made children suffer so that Republicans could slash budgets<\/em>. Of course, the recent budget deal included Republican-inspired attacks on aid to children, from CalWORKS to Healthy Families to education cuts, so children are most definitely going to suffer now thanks to the cuts.<\/p>\n The right-wing wouldn’t want you to know that some of the earliest forms of government cash assistance to private individuals came in the form of payments to low-income families, dating back to the 1910s. The predecessor to TANF, Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) was created in 1935 as part of the New Deal, and as we know Republicans hate anything associated with the New Deal.<\/p>\n Graves also noted that the media has typically been repeating Arnold’s claim about California welfare stats without providing the context. I’d like to say that might change now that the facts are out there…but I am doubtful. The state’s media has been stacking the deck for cuts since 2007<\/a>, and they don’t look to be in any mood to stop now.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9805","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack-related-posts":[],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6Pvhz-2y9","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/calitics.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9805","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/calitics.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/calitics.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/calitics.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/calitics.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9805"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/calitics.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9805\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/calitics.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9805"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/calitics.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9805"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/calitics.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9805"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}