Living on Almost Nothing in America

TWENTY YEARS AGO, President Bill Clinton promised to “end welfare as we know it” by signing into law the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act, otherwise known as “welfare reform.”

Controversial at the time, the law placed a five-year time limit on government financial assistance to those in need and instituted work requirements for welfare recipients. With two decades of hindsight, there is now sufficient evidence to evaluate its effectiveness, the holes it created in our nation’s social safety net, and what needs to be done to address them.

One of the best examinations of this law’s effects is the insightful book $2.00 a Day: Living on Almost Nothing in America. Scholars Kathryn J. Edin and H. Luke Shaefer note that welfare reform has succeeded in important ways. “Poor single mothers,” they write, “left welfare and went to work in numbers that virtually no one expected. In 1993, 58 percent of low-income single mothers were employed. By 2000, nearly 75 percent were working, an unprecedented increase.” While the Great Recession reversed some of this progress, the employment rates remain “above pre-reform levels.” Child poverty rates also fell after welfare reform’s passage and remain down, though the authors note that additional measures, such as the expansion of the Earned Income Tax Credit and increased government spending on child-care programs, also factor into this decline.

But the outcomes are not universally positive. In the first 15 years after passing welfare reform, the number of people living in “$2-a-day poverty” had more than doubled.

By 2011, 4 percent of U.S. families—3 million children—were mired in an economic reality many mistakenly believe only exists in the developing world. The causes of this poverty are legion and well-rehearsed. The forces of globalization; societal inequalities in education, housing, and transportation; a criminal justice system that emphasizes retribution instead of rehabilitation; medical issues and the affordability of health care; the demands of caring for a family; poor personal decision-making; becoming the victim of exploitation—all these factors and more shape the lives of impoverished Americans.

While few of these issues are new, what has changed is their intensity and the ability of the social safety net (specifically, the availability of cash assistance) to catch those who fall on hard times. The suffering experienced by those living on the economic margins of a materially prosperous society recently led New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof to abandon his previous support of the 1996 welfare reform legislation. “What I’ve found in my reporting over the years,” he writes, “is that welfare ‘reform’ is a misnomer and that cash welfare is essentially dead, leaving some families with children utterly destitute.”

This is the reality that must be faced. It is a moral crisis requiring a response from Christians, who are scripturally and ethically burdened with caring for children in distress.

My own congregation in central Missouri sponsors a food pantry that feeds nearly 1,000 families on a monthly basis. Each week I encounter those resiliently living the struggles described in $2.00 a Day, and I wrestle with stretching our meager resources to respond to their pleas for emergency shelter, utilities assistance, or filling an empty fuel tank.

A problem of this magnitude cannot be addressed by churches and nonprofits alone. This is a public policy issue demanding the attention of our elected leaders who must not be allowed to reduce the human realities of financial hardship to a statistical abstraction. Behind the numbers are real people whose stories and struggles should not be ignored. Refusing to recognize their plight and respond to their needs reveals a moral poverty that also needs to be reformed.