User:Mirandabck/sandbox

Content I will focus on
Sections of the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act (PRWORA) article that I plan to edit:


 * 4Criticism
 * 5Consequences

Other folks in my group are also making some edits to these sections. The focus of my contributions will be on disparities in the impacts of PRWORA by race and gender. In the Criticism section, I will describe critiques that say PRWORA and welfare reform in general do not take these disparities and the structural inequalities behind them into account. In the Consequences section, I will look at specific impacts on single parents, people of color, and other groups. Much of the content presently on the page comes from aggregated data that hide these inequalities.

Causes of poverty
Welfare reform efforts such as PRWORA have been criticized for focusing almost exclusively on individual failure and irresponsibility, especially among people of color, as factors leading to poverty. However, there is no scholarly consensus on the etiology of poverty, and many theories focus instead on structural inequalities such as disparities in pay and hiring discrimination. The concept of "personal responsibility" is further critiqued for its lack of consideration of familial responsibilities, such as caring for children and elderly parents, which are placed more heavily upon mothers.

Impeding access to higher education and employment
(section created by Ji Min, including some content that was already on the page)

Welfare-to-work programs have also been criticized for only offering training for low-wage work. An education-first approach has been proposed as an alternative that could provide welfare recipients with more options for employment. Although the incentivization of financial independence is a goal for both recipients and providers, many TANF enrollees feel disincentivized from finding paid work due to low pay and the instability of this transition.

My additions to Consequences
(in the first paragraph) However, the number of welfare recipients declined much more sharply than the poverty rate, with a national average of 56% reduction in welfare caseloads and 1% reduction in poverty. The number of children living in extreme poverty, defined as a household income below 50% of the poverty line, increased, with a sharper increase among African-American families.

PRWORA redirected the responsibility for service provisions from federal administrations to state administrations, leading to greater inequality between states along with greater flexibility, as one program was replaced by fifty. States were given control over the amount of money dedicated to social safety net programs. States also gained the ability to impose rules and restrictions on how people could access and use services.

My copyedits (bold)
Section: History

1980s and 1990s[edit]
In the 1980s, AFDC came under increasing bipartisan criticism for the program's alleged ineffectiveness. While acknowledging the need for a social safety net, Democrats often invoked the culture of poverty argument.[5] Proponents of the bill argued that welfare recipients were "trapped in a cycle of poverty".[6] Highlighting instances of welfare fraud, conservatives often referred to the system as a "welfare trap" and pledged to "dismantle the welfare state". Ronald Reagan's oft-repeated story of a welfare queen from Chicago's South Side became part of a larger discourse on welfare reform.[7]

Republican governor Tommy Thompson began instituting welfare reform in Wisconsin during his governorship in the late-1980s and early-1990s. In lobbying the federal government to grant states wider latitude for implementing welfare, Thompson wanted a system where "pregnant teen-aged girls from Milwaukee, no matter what their background is or where they live, can pursue careers and chase their dreams."[8] His solution was workfare, whereby poor individuals, typically single mothers, had to be employed in order to receive assistance. Thompson later served as Health and Human Services Secretary under President George W. Bush.

Passage of PRWORA was the culmination of many years of debate in which the merits and flaws of AFDC were argued. Research was used by both sides to make their points, with each side often using the same piece of research to support the opposite view.[5] The political atmosphere at the time of PRWORA's passage included a Republican-controlled House of Representatives and Senate (defined by their Contract with America) and a Democratic president (defined by Bill Clinton's promise to "end welfare as we know it").[9]

2012[edit]
In July 2012, the Department of Health and Human Services released a memo notifying states that they were able to apply for a waiver for the work requirements of the TANF program, but only if they could find other credible ways to increase employment by 20%.[10] The waiver would allow states to provide assistance without having to enforce the work component of the program, which currently states that 50 percent of a state's TANF caseload must meet work requirements.[11] The Obama administration stated that the change was made in order to allow more flexibility in how individual states operate their welfare programs.[12] According to Peter Edelman, the director of the Georgetown Center on Poverty, Inequality and Public Policy, the waivers would reduce  restrictions that increase  the difficulty for states in helping TANF applicants find jobs.[13]

The change has been questioned by Republicans including Dave Camp, chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee and Orrin Hatch, who requested further details from HHS over concerns that the memo would remove the main focus of PRWORA.[11] Mitt Romney attacked the measure, saying that Obama was "gutting welfare reform". However, PolitiFact stated that Romney's claim was "not accurate" and "inflames old resentments", giving it a "Pants on Fire" rating.[14] CNN also reported that assertions that Obama was "taking the work requirement off the table" was false.[15] In response to Republican criticism, Kathleen Sebelius, the Secretary of Health and Human Services said that states, including some with Republican governors, had previously asked Congress to allow waivers.[16]

Section: Provisions

PRWORA established TANF as AFDC's replacement. The Congressional findings in PRWORA highlighted dependency, out-of-wedlock birth, and intergenerational poverty as the main contributors to a faulty system.[23] In instituting a block grant program, PRWORA granted states the ability to design their own systems, as long as states met a set of basic federal requirements. The bill's primary requirements and effects included the following:


 * Ending welfare as an entitlement program;
 * Requiring recipients to begin working after two years of receiving benefits;
 * Placing a lifetime limit of five years on benefits paid by federal funds;
 * Aiming to encourage two-parent families and discouraging out-of-wedlock births;
 * Enhancing enforcement of child support; and
 * Requiring state professional and occupational licenses to be withheld from undocumented immigrants.[24]

Having been granted wider latitude for designing their own programs, some states have decided to place additional requirements on recipients. Although the law placed a time limit for benefits supported by federal funds of no more than two consecutive years and no more than a collective total of five years over a lifetime, some states have enacted briefer limits. All states, however, allowed exceptions to avoid punishing children because their parents have gone over their respective time limits.[citation needed] Federal requirements have ensured some measure of uniformity across states, but the block grant approach has led individual states to distribute federal money in different ways. Certain states more actively encourage education; others use the money to  help  fund private enterprises helping job seekers.

Section: Provisions > Addressing concerns

The last major effort to reform of PRWORA was in 2002 when the Senate Finance Committee approved a bill to reauthorize legislation to restore some of the benefits stripped by the act. The bill reauthorized federal funds for TANF and healthcare services. The House, however, failed to authorize the bill.[32]

Section: Criticism

Another criticism placed on  the  PRWORA by some scholars is that its transition to work provisions negatively affect the ability of low-income mothers enrolled in the program  ability  to find a job. Single mothers enrolled in TANF tend to have lower rates of literacy, and therefore finding employment that within the time frame of the "workfare" component becomes more difficult, or leads to underemployment. The scholars who make this point also relate the underemployment to lower income rates among single mothers enrolled in TANF, defeating the purpose of the transition to work provisions.[41]

Section: Consequences

Earned Income Tax Credit Effect[edit]
Besides the economic trends occurring during the passing and implementation of PRWORA; researcher's cannot exactly pinpoint  to  the exact factors that led to the decrease in enrollment in AFDC/TANF, even in times of economic downturn. Some labor economists argue that the continuing decline in AFDC/TANF enrollment was not due to improved standard of living but offset by an exponential growth in the Earned Income Tax Credit, which by 2012 was the largest cash-benefit entitlement program in the United States.[50][51]

Dot Com Bubble and Crash of 2008[edit]
The first  real  tests for persistent effects on income and household financial health under PRWORA were the recession caused by the 2001 tech bubble crash and the 2008 economic meltdown caused by the housing bubble and the instability of the financial markets. During these two periods of economic problems, the enrollment in TANF followed a downwards trend. As enrollment in TANF decreased, macroeconomic indicators such as unemployment rate,  the  number of children in poverty and extreme poverty, and number of single-parent households below the poverty line followed an upwards trend with sharp increases during the late 2007-2009 recession. Alleging that enrollment in the program did not track poverty, critics of welfare reform point to this as a failure of the PRWORA.[52][53]

Peer Review - Jon Gunasti
Hi Miranda,

I really enjoyed reading your group’s comments and edits to the Wikipedia article for PRWORA! I think that your group chose an article that is especially relevant given our class material and could benefit from some comprehensive editing. Here are some of my suggestions and observations:

From the introduction section, I still don’t really know what the act did. I’m sure this section would make sense to someone with an extensive background in American politics or someone who already is familiar with this act. Specifically, I think that the introduction might also benefit from a brief summary of some of the effectsof these changes, not just the names of the policies themselves. Because I’m unfamiliar with TANF, AFDC, and JOBS, I’m not really sure why changes in these programs were important. I would focus on the importance of the act here, and then later dive into more details about the specific policy changes that were vehicles for its specific impacts. Additionally, the opening statement is phrased in a way that suggests that a debate exists with regards to whether all consider PRWORA a major welfare reform. I might rephrase this sentence to be definitive and state that it was a major reform, or I would add another clause that describes the other major perspective on the act.

I noticed that most of your edits so far are copyediting corrections. I think that the article could also benefit from some restructuring and streamlining. For example, one of my main observations from reading the entire Wikipedia article is that it is very long and comprehensive, and I think that it might be beneficial to streamline the material that it needs to include. I admit that it might be difficult to reduce the length of this article, but I think that it might be worthwhile to discuss whether some of the less-developed sections are totally necessary. As someone reading the article to casually understand what exactly PRWORA changed about welfare and what its long-lasting impacts are, I found the article to be fairly long and dry. It might be a good idea to split the article into several smaller articles with different titles or to move some of the content to other related articles.

With respect to structural changes, I really like the paragraph that addresses feminist criticisms. I think that this section might warrant its own header and be moved to an earlier section of the article; I think it would be beneficial to address criticisms before diving into political details that likely do not interest casual readers. I also agree with your comments on the “addressing concerns” section of the article. I think a better header might be “concerns,” because this section doesn’t really address how anyone addresses current concerns. With respect to your comments on the “Impact on Crime” section, I agree that this section in its current state does not add much value to the article. I think that an “Impact on Single Parents” section would be more relevant and informative. Perhaps one sentence in this section could suggest that a relationship might exist between crime and public assistance.

In addition, the end of my group’s article for Queer Ecology has a section at the bottom entitled “Additional Resources,” and I think a section like this might be helpful for this article. You could add links to helpful (not necessarily academic resources) for describing and understanding the impacts of the act. Perhaps some of these links could alleviate the need to have some earlier sections in the article.

I found the following article to be helpful and informative, although it is also a bit longer than necessary for casual readers: https://www.vox.com/2016/6/20/11789988/clintons-welfare-reform. It might be important to discuss in more detail PRWORA’s impact (and Hillary Clinton’s involvement with the act) on the 2016 presidential election, which the Vox article addresses in its final sections.

Let me know if you have any questions about this feedback! I think you all make very important points in your annotations of the article and support all of your changes you have made so far! Best of luck with the rest of the project!

Jonathan

Sources (alphabetical)
Banerjee, Maheswata M. "Voicing Realities and Recommending Reform in PRWORA." Social Work, vol. 47, no. 3, Jul. 2002, pp. 315-328. Academic Search Premier.

Bruch, Sarah K., et al. "The Consequences of Decentralization: Inequality of Safety Net Provision in the Post-Welfare Reform Era." Social Service Review, vol. 92, no. 1, Mar. 2018, pp. 3-35. Academic Search Premier.

Lindhorst, Taryn, and Ron Mancoske. "Race, Gender and Class Inequities in Welfare Reform." Race, Gender & Class, vol. 10, no. 2, Apr. 2003. ProQuest.

The Status of Women in the States, 2002. District of Columbia: Institute for Women's Policy Research, 2002. Women and Social Movements in the United States, 1600-2000 Database.

What is "deep poverty"? UC Davis Center for Poverty Research, 16 Jan. 2018. Accessed 18 Apr. 2019.