What Is the Welfare Reform Act?

Video Transcript

"Hi, this is Bill Scher will LiberalOasis.com. What is the Welfare Reform Act? Well, that that is the colloquial name for the 1996 bill that changed the anti-poverty program aid for families with dependent children and turned it into temporary assistance for needy families. The key change was that aid for families with dependent children was what is known as an entitlement program. If you met certain criteria, you had a low enough income and you had dependent children, you were entitled to certain benefits to ensure that you would not fall below the poverty line, would be able to take care of your family. The change in the program stripped away the entitlement nature of the program and made it a temporary program, temporary assistance for needy families put a time limit on how long you could access anti-poverty assistance when you had dependent children and that was a finite number regardless of when you accessed it. I believe it was a five year period. If you did it one year here and one year there and one year there, that would all accumulate to your overall time limit. This was generally seen as a success during the 90s because the economy was growing and people were able to find work even if it wasn't necessarily well paying work or sustainable work with a lot of long term upward mobility. In the current decade, we're in 2009 right now, where employment is declining, there are a lot of questions whether this program is making a lot of sense because if you run out of aid, anti-poverty aid, but jobs aren't available, you are left without much recourse to actually take care of your family, so it's possible that there might be another round of reform in the wake of the current economic crisis."