It’s the one year anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, which has been covered in achingly emotional detail by Spike Lee and The Span (forget CNN and MSNBC’s professional pundits - HBO and Cspan are giving us the real story from the victims and the people in the trenches).

It’s also the 10th anniversary of the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act a.k.a welfare reform.

Ten years ago, in a strategic display of bipartisanship, President Bill Clinton worked with a Republican Congress to overhaul our welfare system. Progressives everywhere were alarmed at the prospect of welfare recipients without a safety net. Here it is, however, ten years on and the results have been reported as “one of the most successful policy changes in our nation’s history” reducing both federal spending and welfare caseloads.

As always, we need to take a deeper and more serious look at this Conservative “I-told-you-so” moment. It is true that welfare roles and federal spending have been reduced and that more poor women are working now then were working 10 years ago. It’s also true, however, that the minimum wage jobs employing the majority of the “Welfare-to-Work” recipients cannot support one person let alone a family of 2, 3, or 4. The requirement for those with children to support and without a High School diploma or work skills to “get to work or else” is a trap. In other words, work this low-wage job without any chance for advancement that eats into the time you need to invest in a GED or advanced job skills training, or else.

Then there are also those that are truly incapable of working 9 to 5 due to a physical or mental illness. They need a more nuanced system, not the inflexible federally-mandated welfare policies currently in place.

Other issues that still need to be addressed by Congress include the minimum wage, reliable child-care, and health-insurance benefits, all of which negatively affect the valiant working-poor struggling to take care of their families.

Rachel Gragg and Margy Waller, who served as advisors on welfare policy to Senator Paul Wellstone and President Bill Clinton respectively, offer up a “what’s next?” moment pointing out that federal policymakers should “stop basking in their own ’success’ and instead catch up to state and local officials who have been focusing on “turning low-wage jobs into better jobs with higher wages and employment benefits.”

It might be a good time, Mr. President, to have a welfare policy advisor in the White House once again as it’s painfully clear that welfare reform is an important work in progress.

“From Welfare To Poverty”, by Randy Albelda and Heather Boushey (TomPaine.com)
“Welfare reform, 10 years later,” By Rachel Gragg and Margy Waller (Boston Globe)
“Helping the Poor: From Welfare to Workfare,” The Economist

This post was written by Mary Mancini