"Kids grow. Clothes don't."

Years ago, I interviewed over 100 low-income West Virginians about changes to safety net programs for families with kids. They had a lot to say, but one zinger from a mom sticks in my mind today: “Kids grow. Clothes don’t.”

I imagine a lot of West Virginia parents have been thinking the same thing these days, after the governor delayed opening the application period for the clothing voucher program, which helps low-income families buy shoes and clothing for the new school year. Usually it opens on July first, but this year that was delayed to July 20. Before that, there was some question of whether the program would be continued at all.

If that wasn’t enough, the state announced that it would stop accepting applications a week later, claiming that it ran out of funding. In the past, applications were accepted for around a month.

This happened shortly after the governor announced a $370 million surplus. 

Let’s just say the optics aren’t great.

By way of background, this program has been around since the 1990s, when it was enacted by then Republican Governor Cecil Underwood. According to the WV Department of Human Services, the vouchers can be used for “clothing appropriate for school such as pants, shirts, skirts, dresses, shoes, coats, underwear and other basic clothing.” Families that make their own clothing can use them for piece goods. Last year, the benefits were worth $200 per child. 

Last year, more than 57,000 received the vouchers, although the number has been higher in recent years. When this year’s program was shut down, only around 51,000 applied, although at this point it’s not clear how many will be approved.

Some members of the legislature from both parties were not amused. Republican Delegate Evan Worrell of Cabell County, who chairs the House Health Committee, was quoted as saying “We appropriated the funding requested by the governor for the school clothing allowance from TANF funds, so it is difficult to understand why families experienced weeks of delays only to see the program close after one week.”

Kanawha County Democratic Delegate Kayla Young expressed similar concerns: “The delayed voucher funds after only a week tells us that West Virginia families are struggling more than ever to make ends meet. Children deserve dignity at school, and I hope the administration will work with the Legislature to ensure all children are fed and clothed in our state.

Republican State Treasurer Larry Pack also issued a forceful statement, saying “It is outrageous and unacceptable that, as we celebrate millions of dollars in surpluses, we claim we lack the proper funding for programs that protect our most vulnerable children. Providing for these needy children is a fundamental duty of government. With rising costs, we must do more to ensure that needy families have the resources required to give their children a real chance at success.”

When the program was launched nearly 30 years ago, a spokesperson for Governor Underwood said that “Two important aims of the program are to provide adequate clothing for children and to remove the stigma that children often face because of their financial circumstances.”

The pain of stigma for kids facing poverty shaming by peers and adults is a real thing. It can cause low self-respect, anxiety, and depression. Shaming can also lead to bullying, poor academic performance, non-participation in extracurricular activities, acting out, and absenteeism. The consequences can last a lifetime. As social researcher Brene Brown observed, “Shame corrodes the very part of us that believes we are capable of change.”

Decades ago, the psychologist Kenneth Keniston noted that “The psychological pain--and the ethical shame--of American poverty are made greater by the fact that this country possesses the wealth and the energy to raise all children to a minimally decent standard of living.”

Public budgets aren’t just numbers on a page or screen. They’re a reflection of the values that people in power actually hold, not just the ones they profess. 

Jesus said it best: “Where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.”

(This ran as an op-ed in the Charleston Gazette-Mail.)

 

Picking on the poor

This op-ed of mine came out in today's Gazette-Mail. It has a math error I correct at the end. My bad. Forgot to move a decimal point.

In the 1870s, the nation was slammed by one of those periodic depressions that punctuate our economic history. Although largely forgotten today, it was known as “the Long Depression” for its lingering effects. It lasted for 65 consecutive months — longer than the 43-month contraction of the Great Depression of the 1930s.

Around 18,000 businesses failed between 1873 and 1875. Unemployment rose above 8 percent. Millions of Americans were jobless, hungry and homeless. In those days, there was no such thing as unemployment insurance, food assistance programs like SNAP or supports for the elderly like Social Security.

Some might call it a free-market paradise, although those hit by it probably didn’t.

In New York City, thousands of jobless workers, nearly half of them women, turned to one of the only forms of public assistance. They got to sleep in their clothes on hard benches in police station houses. And they had to be out at dawn in search of their next meal.


That’s a big credit to the humanity shown by the NYPD, but there was a catch. The homeless were only allowed to sleep for two nights a month in any one station house. For this reason, they were called “revolvers.”

That sounds like a grim existence, but there were those at the time — who had full bellies, money in their wallets and a roof over their heads — who condemned “the over-generous charity of the city” on the grounds that it “might sap the foundation of that independence of character, and that reliance on one’s own resources.”

It reminds me of the saying of Anatole France that “The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread.”

One might hope that over nearly 150 years of bitter experience that that kind of thinking would have been excreted from the body politic. Instead, it’s alive and well and is being promoted in West Virginia by out-of-state groups like the Foundation for Government Accountability, which aims to tighten the screws on poor people, many of whom are presumed to be “fraudsters” living too high on the hog.

Two groups targeted are people receiving TANF (Temporary Assistance for Needy Families), which is often referred to as “welfare,” and those receiving SNAP (formerly food stamp) benefits. There are all kinds of wild misconceptions about both.

People tend to vastly overestimate the number of people receiving welfare cash assistance and the level of benefits. But according to the DHHR, in September 2016, there were only 7,678 cases statewide. Of these, most were child-only cases with no adults in the benefit group, most of whom were kids living with a grandparent or other relative and who received no other support.

The number of adult cases (i.e. parents with kids) receiving cash assistance was only 2,698. That’s down from around 35,000 when “welfare reform” went into effect in the 1990s.

I did the math, dividing 2,698 adults getting TANF by the 2015 West Virginia population estimate of 1,844,128. That amounts to way less than 1 percent of the population. To be exact, it’s 0.001463022089573 percent. Not that anybody seems to be counting.

Damn, now that’s a problem.

As for the high-on-the-hog part, the TANF maximum benefit for a family of three is $340 per month. Or $11 and change per day per family. Or less than $4 per person per day. If that’s high, we’re talking about an extremely short hog. If people think it’s fun to live on that, I’d suggest they try it.

Benefits were actually slashed by $100 per month back in 2004, and the cuts have never been restored.

The typical adult receiving TANF is a single female, with two kids and some or all of a high school education, who might be a survivor of domestic violence and who has to comply with some stringent rules to receive temporary benefits and is subject to serious sanctions for failing to meet requirements.


Sounds like a dangerous fraudster to me.

Maybe we should call in an airstrike ...

Then there’s the SNAP population. According to the USDA, “SNAP continues to have one of the lowest fraud rates for federal programs.”

It’s true that the West Virginia caseload is bigger than TANF, more than 350,000 in 2013. But around two-fifths of these were children and one-fifth were elderly or disabled. Around one-fourth are adults living with children.

Many of the adults who receive SNAP benefits work at jobs that pay so little that people have to depend on this kind of help go get by.

Back to the hog. The average household benefit is $255 per month, which comes down to $126 per person or around $1.40 per meal. Try that for a while.

One might think that the best way to address that problem is to improve job quality, but some find it more fun to mess with poor people by making benefits like this harder to get, even though this would take federal money out of the economy that supports agriculture and retail jobs in grocery stores.


One thing that particularly seems to set some people off is the shocking discovery that some benefits might be spent in multiple states, although you might have that in a state where around half of the counties border other states or where, God forbid, people visit family members who live elsewhere or who are serving in the military.

I guess that could be remedied by putting collars on poor people that give shocks when the borders are crossed, kind of like the invisible fences some people use with dogs. Or by bringing back patrols like those used in the South before and after the Civil War to keep certain populations in line.

Or we could decide that we have better, less petty and more honorable things to do than stomp on people who are already down.

I think I’ve made up my mind.

TANF at 20

Last week marked a major milestone in terms of public policy in the US. August 22 was the 20th anniversary of the signing by President Clinton of the "Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act," generally known as welfare reform.

I remember talking about it at the time with the future Spousal Unit. While nobody could deny that the old Aid to Families with Dependent Children could use some work, we thought that the legislation passed in the wake of the 1994 Republican "revolution" was mean-spirited and would ultimately hurt children and vulnerable families.

The name of the new program said a lot: "Temporary Assistance for Needy Families." Accent on "temporary."

I had no idea at the time that I'd be spending the next few years fighting what I sometimes call the "TANF wars." This was due to the fact that the federal legislation left a lot of decision making power in the hands of states. Some of the battles involved treatment of people with disabilities and their families, access to education and training, time limits, support services, and domestic violence. 

Sometimes these were fought out in the legislature, sometimes in the courts, and sometimes in the court of  public opinion. There were some victories and some defeats at the state level--and plenty of chances to practice.

At the national level, the DC based Center on Budget and Policy Priorities looked back after all these years and here's what they found:

Over time, TANF has provided basic cash assistance to fewer and fewer needy families, even when need has increased.

During the recession and slow recovery, TANF served few families in need.

The amount of cash assistance provided to families has eroded in almost every state, leaving families without sufficient funds to meet their most basic needs.

TANF plays much less of a role in reducing poverty than AFDC did — and the provision of less cash assistance has contributed to an increase in deep or extreme poverty.

Although a key focus of welfare reform was on increasing employment among cash assistance recipients, states spend little of their TANF funds to help improve recipients’ employability.
 
Employment among single mothers increased in the 1990s, but welfare reform was only one of several contributing factors — and most of the early gains have been lost. 

That sounds about right to me. 

Good times...not

The WV legislative session is more than half over...which is good...but the Republican leadership has spent most of its time cutting workers' wages, bashing poor people and gays, and pandering to pistol packers...which is not.

Meanwhile, their answer to the state's budget and revenue problems is draconian budget cuts to everything from public safety to K-12 to higher ed. So far, they've shown little interest in common sense solutions that would raise revenues.

Other bad ideas involve spending millions of dollars to tighten benefits and rules for programs that effect low income families and test them for drugs, an expensive policy that has basically turned up next to nothing in other states.

The fun never ends. Once again I say hitting bottom would be nice.

Another day

On the bright side, a major conservative broadcaster in WV came out in opposition to the bogus "Religious Freedom Restoration Act."

Another voice of reason comes from the Beckley Register Herald, which criticizes legislative interference in the public education system.

Meanwhile, food pantries and charities are bracing themselves for increased demand if SNAP and TANF changes are pushed into law.

Finally, if you want to know just how Whack Whack is in WV these days, check out this video in which a legislator from Fayette County discusses our Muslim president and his use of secret hand signs.

What he said

I'm not always on the same page with WV Metro News commentator Hoppy Kercheval, but he nailed it with this commentary on why drug testing TANF (welfare) recipients is a bad idea.

Meanwhile, kudos to WV Senate Minority Leader Jeff Kessler for putting the kibosh (I love that word, although I have no idea about its etymology) on another bad idea, to wit charter schools, which would siphon resources away from public education.

Testing 1 2 3

The latest brilliant idea from the Republican-led WV legislature is pretty predictable: drug testing welfare recipients. There are probably as many myths about people on welfare as there are about the changing of the seasons

People may not realize just how small WV's TANF (Temporary Assistance For Needy Families) program is. In December 2013, it was around 9,800 adults out of a population of 1,850,000 or so.

If you want to be exact, that's 0.0052972972972973 percent of the population, if I read my calculator correctly.

There are also many misconceptions about how much cash assistance TANF recipients get here. The average benefit is $340 for a family of three.

I don't think you can buy a whole lot of welfare Cadillacs with that. Ones that run anyway. And, while I'm no expert on the local drug scene, I kind of doubt you'd be able to buy much of the "good" stuff with that either.

Some such laws have been declared to be unconstitutional, such a Florida's which was struck down by a federal court in Dec. 2014. Even if WV's proposed law survives a legal challenge, odds are the testing won't unmask many users. Six months after passing a drug testing law, Tennessee officials found only 37 users out of over 16,000 applicants.

The proper measure

Random animal picture of Arpad chowing down on some old bones he found in the woods. I wouldn't look too closely at this picture if I was you.

"Pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will" is one of my favorite sayings. It's attributed to the French writer Romaine Rolland and was also a favorite of Antonio Gramsci. I think this combination of apparently opposing attitudes works pretty well in dealing with social problems.

Pessimism of the intellect, as I interpret it anyhow, involves a hard-headed, totally realistic appraisal of the world and the current situation, without any kind of sugar coating. It's a good remedy against naive optimism, which is one crime for which there is no evidence whatsoever to convict me. Optimism of the will means the determination to do something about it, and the belief that one has a chance at some degree of success.

A few years back, I worked on a project that involved interviewing people about hope. In doing background research on the psychological literature, I came across this a book by Ezra Stotland titled The Psychology of Hope. In it, he had a great definition that works for me. Hope, he said, was "an expectation greater than zero of achieving a goal."

Pessimism of the intellect and optimism of the will is a pretty good approach to lots of different situations. It may be particularly appropriate to the current social climate.

A MAJOR FIGHT IS BREWING over the federal budget. Deficit hawks in Congress could imperil economic recovery by slashing human needs spending. Here are some facts about the federal deficit.

NOT BIG ENOUGH. Mark Weisbrot of the Center for Economic and Policy Research argues that failure to pass a big enough stimulus to generate jobs was a fatal mistake that contributed to the results of the recent election.

A BIT MORE AUDACITY might have helped a while back, Krugman argues. It might even help now.

WELFARE TO WHAT. Here's a good review of several recent books on what happened in the wake of welfare reform.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED