Labor & Employment Law

Billions for Millionaires, Zilch for Neediest Families

By James Parks

Not only did Congress give zillionaires billions of dollars in tax breaks, they also told the people at the bottom of the economic ladder, “tough luck.”  With unemployment at nearly 10 percent and 19 million Americans currently living in “deep poverty”  (below half the poverty line),  federal funds for the Temporary Assistance For Needy Families (TANF) program, the federal program that replaced welfare, have entirely dried up for the first time since 1996.

That leaves states, whose budgets are already overburdened, with an average of 15 percent less federal funding for the coming year to help an ever-increasing number of needy families.

Writing in Huffington Post, Laura Bassett. says TANF provides a lifeline for families and workers who have exhausted all of their unemployment benefits. According to a new report by the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities, (CBPP)  the lack of funds means more homeless families will go without shelter, fewer low-wage workers will receive help with child care expenses, and fewer families involved with the child welfare system will receive preventive services.

Congress passed legislation that will end funding for the TANF Contingency Fund in 2011. Congress also failed to reauthorize an emergency fund for a subsidized job program that would have allowed states to provide emergency help to needy families and place low-income people in subsidized jobs.

Without additional federal funding, states will now have a much harder time meeting the increased demand for assistance at a time when unemployment remains high and poverty continues to climb, say the report?s authors Liz Schott and LaDonna Pavetti.

In fact, several states are considering cutting the already-low amount of assistance they provide to very poor families with children, tightening eligibility rules so as to reduce or eliminate benefits for some groups of needy families with children, and cutting other services, such as child care, that are funded in part or in whole with state or federal TANF dollars.

Schott and Pavetti say:

This is not what Congress intended when it reformed the welfare system in 1996. Helping welfare recipients find work in this economy requires more help from the federal government, not less.

Full post as published by AFL-CIO NOW BLOG on December 20, 2010 (boomark / email).