This Week in Poverty: Welfare Reform—From Bad to Worse

hvactec

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Greg Kaufmann on March 9, 2012 - 9:54 AM ET

A stunning report released by the University of Michigan’s National Poverty Center reveals that the number of US households living on less than $2 per person per day—a standard used by the World Bank to measure poverty in developing nations—rose by 130 percent between 1996 and 2011, from 636,000 to 1.46 million. The number of children living in these extreme conditions also doubled, from 1.4 million to 2.8 million.

The reason? In short: welfare reform, 1996—still touted by both parties as a smashing success.

The report concludes that the growth in extreme poverty “has been concentrated among those groups that were most affected by the 1996 welfare reform.” The law created the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) block grant, replacing Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC), which had guaranteed cash assistance to eligible families since 1935. Prior to welfare reform, 68 of every 100 poor families with children received cash assistance through AFDC. By 2010, just 27 of every 100 poor families received TANF assistance.

read more This Week in Poverty: Welfare Reform
 
WELFARE TO WORKFARE reform worked pretty well as long as the jobs lasted.

But most welfare people who got jobs though that system got jobs that are easily replaced by AI programs and other business model and techological efficiencies.

For a while, back in the 90s, it seemed to me that at least half the bank tellers I knew had been former WELFARE recipients.

Very few of those gals are still working in those banks I still use today..

Now that may be because bank telling isn't a highly paid job, but also those banks tend to use less tellers today than they used 10-15 years back, too.

Bottom line?

Human labor is becoming increasingly less economically viable.

That problem does not bode well for full employment in the near or far future.

In fact, I suspect that the percentage of people working for a living will continue to decline over our entire lifetimes.

Most of the unemployed and under employed just do not have the right job skills to get a decent job that won't sooner rather than later, become REDUNDANT.

And there's very little point reducating people for jobs that won't last very long before they too are replaced by techological efficiencies.

Sorry for the same old rant, folks, but this social problem is just is NOT going to go away.
 
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