Haskins vs. Primus at Welfare Forum

Fall 2002, Volume 24, Number 1

Ron Haskins

A former senior White House advisor and a Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP) scholar exchanged opening salvos in the post-election welfare reform debate in a Nov. 13 forum co-sponsored by IPR.

Ron Haskins, who advised the Bush administration on welfare policy until this past Dec. 1, praised the 1996 reforms for pushing people off the welfare rolls, into work, and out of poverty. Wendell Primus, director of income security at CBPP, agreed there have been important gains in employment, but criticized conservative spending priorities for leaving some behind.

“It made the lives of these families making ten, twelve thousand dollars a year harder,” Primus said. He pointed to a $727 drop in the bottom fifth’s disposable income and said declining benefits offset most of the income gains made by the next fifth.

Haskins highlighted TANF’s work requirements and the abolition of cash entitlements. “Welfare reform did exactly what it was supposed to do. [Welfare recipients] have more money because they earned it,” Haskins said. He also pointed to Congressional Budget Office estimates that work-support programs have increased to $52 billion, versus a projected $5.6 billion absent any reform after 1984. “The idea that we’re cutting spending and starving children will not wash,” he said.

	Wendell Primus (L) and IPR panelists

Primus, a former chief economist for the House Ways & Means Committee, said work-support programs are not keeping pace with inflation and will be hurt by the administration’s tax cuts. He recommended that Congress increase program funding, reduce the focus on marriage, emphasize employment of non-resident fathers, and restore eligibility to immigrants, especially for health needs. “We need to focus on families that have lost ground,” he said.

The debate was conceived by undergraduates Laurie Jaeckel and Dale Vieregge, who proposed the Undergraduate Lecture Series on Race, Poverty and Inequality after a week in the Galbraith Scholar’s Program at the Kennedy School of Government last summer.

“We want other students to engage policymakers and to realize the importance of social policy. ” Vieregge said.

After the debate Haskins and Primus joined a panel discussion with IPR faculty fellows Greg Duncan, director of the Joint Center for Poverty Research; Kathryn Edin, associate professor of sociology; and Dan Lewis, professor of education and social policy.

“Something has gone horribly right in the last five years,” Duncan said. “None of the dire predictions we all made have come to pass.” He said “smaller proportions of blacks and Hispanics are poor today than in our nation’s history, fewer families are food insecure and hungry, and the birth rate for teens is lower than in l5 years. [But] we’ve got a long way to go.” Noting that over 11 million children are poor, he stressed the need for universal health insurance for kids, and a viable safety net for families.

“Some of the success of welfare reform must be attributed to these mothers who wholeheartedly bought into the goals of welfare reform and tried to make it succeed,” Edin said. “But the states have not fulfilled their promises to these new workers.” Results from her ethnographic study of 120 families under TANF indicate that “the implementation of transitional benefits has been an unmitigated disaster,” she said. “These mothers cannot deal with the paperwork and are falling off the rolls through case-closure. To comply with all these rules and regulations is too onorous for those who are trying to be a parent and to hold a job.”

“It will fall to the states, and to the politics within the states, to figure out what to do,” Lewis said.