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How Many Poor Children Is Too Many?

By: lisasimpkins Mood: angry Date: 07/06/2007 Music: None

After nearly a decade of unprecedented economic growth and well into the latest overhaul of the nation's welfare system, one in six American children - over 12 million youngsters - lived in poverty, according to the latest available figures from the Census Bureau. That's the good news, because in 1993, more than one in five children were poor. The bad news is that the nation today is roughly where it was in 1979. And compared to the rest of the industrialized world, this country remains at the bottom of the heap.

Today, as the good times begin to wane and policy makers begin to evaluate what welfare reform has wrought, the question emerges: Is this the best the United States can do? Must so many children in the nation grow up poor?

Some experts are pessimistic, at least in the short run. "Given the relationship between the labor market and government, which is very hands off; given the relationship between the family and the government, which is very hands off; given our ideas about redistribution and individuality, as long as we hold tenaciously to those ideas, my guess is we're going to have quite high child poverty rates, " said Susan E. Mayer, a professor of public policy at the University of Chicago and deputy director of the Joint Center for Poverty Research.

Others are more hopeful. "It's absolutely not the best we can do," said Lawrence Aber, a professor of public health at Columbia University and director of the National Center for Children in Poverty [and a JCPR affiliate]. "We have benefited from a robust economy. But there are other things that affect child poverty. There are a whole bunch of strategies within our economic means. It's a matter of developing the political will."

The question of political will looms large these days as Congress prepares to reauthorize its 1996 overhaul of the welfare system. Already, legislation has been proposed to explicitly link child poverty to welfare reform. Bills introduced by two Democrats - in the Senate by Charles Schumer of New York, in the House of Representatives by Pete Stark of California - would make the reduction of child poverty a stated goal of federal welfare policy, and they would offer financial rewards to states that reduce their number of poor children. Currently, states can reap bonuses for showing that welfare recipients are working and for reducing out-of-wedlock births.

Scholars of the subject point to several factors to explain the rise and fall of child poverty: the share of children growing up in single parent households, the share of low- paying jobs in the economy and the share of a nation's wealth spent on social programs. Which ones they emphasize generally depends on their political persuasion.

But there is general agreement that conditions for poor children have improved since 1993, when childhood poverty was at its highest in a decade. The booming economy has created jobs, and welfare reform has pushed poor, single mothers to fill them, often for the first time. And while many of the new jobs are at the low end of the pay scale, a tax break for the working poor, known as the Earned Income Tax Credit, has enabled them to keep more of what they make.

But if job growth and welfare reform have slashed public assistance caseloads, they have not relieved child poverty to the same degree. Nationally, welfare rolls dropped by nearly 50 percent between 1993 and 1998, but child poverty rates dropped just 17 percent, according to an analysis by Dr. Aber's group. In New York, welfare caseloads shrank by 30 percent, but child poverty fell a mere 7 percent. In Wisconsin, home of the Tommy G. Thompson, the secretary of health and human services, welfare rolls dropped by 80 percent, compared with a 28 percent fall in child poverty. And bear in mind that the official poverty line is just $17,000 for a family of four.

"The good news is yes, economic expansion can improve the economic well-being of children, but there are limits to that," said [JCPR affiliate] Mark Courtney, a professor of social services at the University of Chicago and [Director] at the Chapin Hall Center for Children, a research group. "It begs the question: What is society willing to do to make up the difference?"

That question will dog Congress as it revisits the welfare program. The drive for welfare reform, after all, has always been about spending priorities, as well as poverty, whether of adults or children.

Liberals like Mr. Courtney favor government spending on things like child care, health care and education, and they plan to press for more money for such programs when Congress debates the reauthorization of the welfare block grants to states. They are also likely to urge the government to expand child support measures: proposals have been floated not just to strengthen child support enforcement but to offer government funds that will match a father's child support payments to single mothers.

Immigration is likely to be another area of partisan warfare, said [JCPR affiliate] Rebecca M. Blank, an economist and dean of public policy at the University of Michigan, since children in immigrant families are far more likely to be poor. And immigrant advocates have already begun a push to restore the cuts that Congress made in food stamps and Medicaid for immigrants who came to this country after 1996.

Conservatives, meanwhile, are expected to press for more money for policies that emphasize work and reduce the number of single parent families, whose children are far more likely to be poor. With this in mind, the 1996 welfare law offered states financial incentives to reduce out-of-wedlock births. So far, the results are uncertain.

"The best thing we can do is promote two- parent families," said Ron Haskins, a former Republican aide who helped draft the 1996 law and who is now with the Brookings Institution, a research group in Washington. "For single mothers, we can do a lot more. We can help them stay in the labor force. We can help them advance in the labor force. There's political support to beef up the work support system."

Economists and public policy scholars applaud the bipartisan support for these so-called work supports - tax credits and child care subsidies for wages at the low end of the economy. But precisely because welfare reform has brought so many poor mothers into the work force, any discussion of child poverty, they insist, must now shift to the less popular matter of wages. "You make work pay, you lift people out of poverty," said William Julius Wilson, the Harvard economist.

"The minimum wage is becoming increasingly important for child poverty," said Professor Blank, "because so many low-wage women work at or near the minimum wage."