“If the goal was to get rid of poverty, we failed”: the legacy of the 1996 welfare reform Research by Marianne Bitler cited in Vox
Vox, June 20, 2016
Presidents are usually effusive, grandiose, and triumphant when
they sign major legislation that will form a huge part of their
legacy. In 1996, Bill Clinton’s announcement that he’d
sign a bill ending “welfare as we know it” was not that.
Two recent papers by UC Davis’s Marianne Bitler
and UC Berkeley’s Hilary Hoynes broke down how various
programs have affected the “cyclicality” of poverty during the
Great Recession: that is, the degree to which poverty changes in
reaction to changes in unemployment. For instance, SNAP
(food stamps) reduced cyclicality by giving unemployed people
boosts in spending power and helping them get out of poverty.
But TANF, unique among the programs analyzed, increased
cyclicality, especially for those in deep poverty. It made the
deeply poor more vulnerable to changes in the business cycle.
“Those at the very bottom,” Hoynes says. “That’s the safety net
that’s gone.”
Marianne Bitler is a Professor in the Department of Economics at
the University of California, Davis; a Research Associate at the
National Bureau of Economic Research; and a Research Fellow at
IZA. She received her PhD from the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology in 1998. Her research focuses on the effects of the US
social safety net on poverty, income, human capital, and health;
economics of the family; economics of education; and health
economics.
