Dollars & Sense: Bail Out the Safety Net

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Bail Out the Safety Net
By Randy Albelda


Even before the financial crisis and the recession, a substantial proportion of working families were not making it in America. In 2007, 20% of the population in a family with a breadwinner—that’s 41 million people —did not have enough income, including any Food Stamps, Medicaid, housing and child care subsidies, or other public support they received, to pay their basic living expenses.

The good news for this bottom 20%: in the current crisis, their plight of working hard but not making enough to pay the bills is becoming much more common, so the pressure to address this problem should be growing too. The bad news, of course, is the recession itself. The hardships these families face are growing by the day. More and more households are falling toward the social safety net.

And what about that safety net? In the 1990s, the Clinton administration ended “welfare as we know it,” but at the same time promised work supports as low-wage workers moved up the ladder. Since then, employment rates for poor and low-income mothers have indeed soared, and so has the demand for affordable housing and child care assistance. But funding for them has not, with long waiting lists for both. As a result, by the early 2000s, these government work supports helped only 10% of the population in working families that couldn’t meet their basic needs to actually meet them. Despite expansions in the Earned Income Tax Credit and public health insurance for children in the 1990s, the public support programs for low-income families provide inadequate help,and even that to only a fraction of those who need it. And for workers who lose their jobs, only about a third of all unemployed workers receive unemployment benefits today.

The safety net is not only tattered; it is nearly obsolete. .......(more)

The complete piece is at: http://dollarsandsense.org/archives/2009/0109albelda.html