November 19, 2001
IN AMERICA
The Vanishing Act
By BOB HERBERT
The U.S. unemployment rate rose sharply in October, to 5.4 percent,
the biggest jump in five years.
In New York, which is suffering the effects of a terrorist attack
in the midst of an economic downturn, some 80,000 jobs were lost in October, a
stunning decline in a month that can usually be counted upon for job growth.
Worse is to come. We will soon be hearing about the terrible
difficulties jobless men and women will encounter when, after tumbling out of
the labor market, they look around for a helping hand that is not there.
Seldom in the last half-century has the U.S. been so poorly
prepared to assist individuals and families struggling with the effects of a
recession. Example: the unemployment insurance system, which was established to
ease the pain of temporary joblessness, covers less than 40 percent of the
people who are out of work. Example: the food stamp program, which was supposed
to slam the door on hunger in the world's greatest nation (and which once
served 90 percent of eligible families), now serves just 60 percent of the
poverty- stricken folks who qualify for help.
And then there's welfare. In the summer of 1996 Bill Clinton
signed the so-called reform bill ending "welfare as we know it."
Among other things, it imposed a five-year lifetime limit on welfare assistance
to needy families.
The potentially tragic consequences of that legislation were
concealed for a while by the extraordinary economic boom in the last half of
the decade. But Daniel Patrick Moynihan and others had warned all along of the
dire implications of ending the guarantee of federal help to the nation's
poorest families. Marian Wright Edelman of the Children's Defense Fund noted
that supporters of the welfare bill assumed there would be "no recession
in the next decade, which is unprecedented."
Now, with the good times behind us, we are about to see what
happens when you remove the safety net that was designed to protect families
doing an economic high-wire act. For an awful lot of distressed families, the
end of welfare is coinciding with an economic recession exacerbated by acts of
terror.
In an appearance at the National Press Club in Washington last
week, Deepak Bhargava, director of a coalition of groups known as the National
Campaign for Jobs and Income Support, said, "We now have a welfare system
in which time limits will be hitting in a majority of states at precisely the
time when the labor markets are the weakest and when families are in the most
trouble."
More than 120,000 families have already lost their benefits or had
them reduced because of time limits on welfare. The lifetime limits kick in at
different times in different states. Between now and next July we'll see
welfare benefits exhausted for large numbers of families in at least 26 states.
Mr. Bhargava, whose coalition was formed by more than 1,000
organizations fighting on behalf of poor and working families in 40 states,
said that by early next year the U.S. will be faced with huge numbers of
families in desperate trouble because their welfare benefits have been cut off
and there is no work for them.
Government officials who expect poor and working families to sort
of roll over and quietly accept their dismal economic fate may get surprised
this time around. There is a growing sense of militancy among struggling
families in the United States. Pushing people to their limits will produce
that.
Groups representing poor and working families are better organized
and can be expected to make a lot more noise than they made in the mid-90's
when welfare reform became a mantra. The federal welfare law has to be re-authorized
next year and a big fight over its most onerous elements is all but guaranteed.
Policy makers can also expect long and sometimes bitter fights at both the
federal and state level over proposals to increase the minimum wage, to
establish "living wages," to expand health insurance coverage, and to
extend unemployment benefits to low-wage, part-time, temporary and other
workers who don't presently qualify for them.
The cynicism that resulted in millionaire senators cheering the
passage of welfare reform is now being confronted by the cold reality of a
take-no-prisoners recession that threatens to leave millions of American
families jobless, and all but helpless as well.