>From Brad De Long's draft:
``But the 1996 welfare reform of Newt Gingrich, Bob Dole, and Bill Clinton largely dropped the ball. Instead of making a big push on training and job search, it largely gave each state a blank check to spend as it saw fit the money the federal government had formerly spent on welfare. A few states have used their money to do remarkable and innovative things. Rather more have paid lip-service to the goal of reform, and used large chunks of the federal money for programs that the state budget used to pay for, reducing--not increasing--the total amount of money spent. The number of people on welfare has dropped significantly.''
Later in the article you put numbers to individual examples and these numbers give some sense of dimension to the program--make it clear what is going on. But here in the earlier part, there are no numbers. How much money is going into those state blank checks? I don't know. What is the amount for this program for job search contractors, and say earlier fed funding for similar efforts, say for example in the Carter era CEETA(?) program? Some finance detail would help give some relative measure of the EITC in comparison to other programs. How much are the state matching requirements, etc.
Here in California the Dept of Rehab has a job sponsor program that places people coming out of worker compensation programs. DR pays a percentage of their first two years of employment. The dept maintains a list of employers who have signed on to the program. Employers who know about this program get skilled workers on the cheap with no obligation (that I know of) to retain them beyond their sponsorship. The theory is this is OJT.
But my basic critique of all these welfare reform projects is this: what are we doing driving women with kids into the work force, when the people who need jobs above subsistence level incomes are men? The first thing a woman with kids on welfare tries to do, is to find some nice guy with a good job who will stay around. So why not fund that social benefit instead of beating up the motherhood?
Mystified, Chuck Grimes