Do we need costly welfare programs to fight poverty in the United States? Tevi Troy‘s latest column for Conservative Home suggests the answer is no.
The new face of poverty has created its own formula for fighting it, one laid out by my former White House colleague Ron Haskins and his coauthor Isabelle Sawhill in their book, Creating an Opportunity Society. According to an article Haskins and Sawhill wrote in the Washington Post summarizing their research: “if you want to avoid poverty and join the middle class in the United States, you need to complete high school (at a minimum), work full time and marry before you have children.” As Haskins and Sawhill put it, “If you do all three, your chances of being poor fall from 12 percent to 2 percent, and your chances of joining the middle class or above rise from 56 to 74 percent.”
Transfer payments may have been the Democrats’ bailiwick, but these recommendations, — work, finish school, and don’t have children out of wedlock – are more in the Republicans’ ballpark. Welfare reform is one example of how Republicans, with Bill Clinton’s eventual assistance, employed the conservative principle of work requirements to help encourage employment among populations that too often lacked work incentives. While some critics warned that welfare reform would drive people to homelessness and despair, the program has been a success. As Haskins wrote in a 2006 article: “Between 1994 and 2004, the caseload declined about 60 percent, a decline that is without precedent.”
