You get 60 months of TANF in a lifetime.
After 24 months of TANF you must be employed.
The expanded EITC, intended to replace AFDC as a work-pegged income supplement, hasn't been updated since 1993.
The federal minimum wage was only modestly increased in 2009. It's something like 20% below the 1980 wage in real dollars.
Because since 96 TANF is administered in block grants to states and can't be court-challenged, most families living in poverty today don't receive cash assistance.
36 percent of families in poverty receive cash assistance in 2013, down from 68 percent before reform.
Welfare rolls are down from 14 to 4 million.
Meanwhile, number of families living in poverty, and in extreme poverty, is still rising.
3 million children live in extreme poverty (less than $2/day).
45.3 million Americans are poor, as defined by income, per the 2014 Census; 14.5 percent of the population.
(Measurements. You can measure the poverty rate another way, putting it closer to 18, and in that measurement it's the rich world's highest.)
The hard left nominally carries the responsibility of looking out for everybody, not just the most visibly downtrodden. It will always reserve a special soft spot for the most invisibly downtrodden.
The classic example of this group is the people living in extreme poverty, and children, in particular, among those. Why children? Children are blameless, I guess. They don't vote and don't know what country they live in. And everyone likes them. Just like Loving America is a condition of entry to the debate on Congressional policies, caring about children (or 'child welfare' to put it in like policy prescriptivist terms) is a condition of entry to the debate on capitalism and the future of human civilization.
[[ During the Clinton administration the hard left carried academic and philosophical debate to greater and greater heights of abstruseness.
One product was a yuppie class who got bored of these questions and thrived under technocracy. Obama worked ok for them and they saw a path to becoming rich and respectable.
Another, later product was a socially engaged identitarian class who found public consequences to 'doing theory'.
Obama was a hollow compromise for them and they could never become respectable, and probably not rich. ]]
The hard left was always against the Clintons.
It seems like the difference before and after this election is that now there's kind of a visible common coalition of the hard left, personified in Bernie Sanders and visible at his fun and uplifting rallies.
It's generally accepted by the contributors that the Clintons made their jump to the main current of political sentiment in America by saluting the Reagan vision of entrepreneur-driven prosperity, and maybe more cynically, the idea that folks don't want to feel shamed for getting or being rich. (I guess
---It's worth noting that the Bernie movement is also a creative triangulation, and a historically significant one....
Did it come together? Did it unite the old Young Socialist-IWW Verso Port Huron New Left Review left with the new Oberlin BLM gender-non-conforming meme left? The book spends a lot of time pleading for less emphasis of Sanders' old white male identity
Could you measure the success of the Bernie movement in terms of his mobilization for Clinton in the final determination?
The first essay, on Clinton's belated populism, nicely lays out the objection to same.
The Clintons' many apologists would likely shrug their shoulders at Bill and Hillary's deep ties to the global financial elite. They'd insist there is no alternative to Clinton-style neoliberalism and that resistance is both childish and futile. The only changes we can make, they'd argue, are incremental ones -- nudges and tweaks. And even enacting those requires the endless stroking and appeasement of the 1 percent, who after all have the power and the money not only to buy elections, but also to destroy, or at least seriously enfeeble, and proposed reforms (the crippling of the Dodd-Frank financial regulations being a recent case in point). The best hope for human progress, then, lies in sitting back and letting political elites slavishly cultivate moneyed interests, who then might deign to let us enact a few micro-initiatives. Midnight basketball for everyone!
"Ending Poverty as We Know It"
HRC talks a good game on poverty and families (geez even the word "families" is like a piece of policy verbiage) but owns a ragged record on welfare protection: so goes the hard left construal, at least, which relies on eg insider reportage to reconstruct her own views on her husband's legislation in the 90s.
Meanwhile. The Sanders platform calls for full employment as the solution to poverty.
The authors have objections ranging from functional to economic/systemic to moral to philosophical.
Functional objections to a policy of full employment:
Employers hate it. Even in the 1940s, at the political zenith of organized labor, it was defeated.
Very tight labor markets improve standards of living for those at the bottom. The skilled industrial workers of the 40s were able to live in houses. In the 90s, everybody got a car, a tv, a computer. (Even today -- people might not have cars but everybody has a little web terminal in their fucking pocket.)
Economic objections:
-Wages are low today, even while "labor force participation rate for adults is at its lowest level since the 1970s." Existing jobs will keep disappearing and new ones will not be created as fast.
(I guess I buy this. There is much more creativity and reward going to those who create shareholder value, compared to those who create jobs. Anyway, 'creating jobs' always sorta sounds like bullshit. Creating them out of what? For whom?)
Systemic objections:
-The 'Global South' will send more migrants this way, and they will want jobs too.
(The hard left has to remember to invoke the 'global south' in economic and climate forecasting, as well as in surveys of poverty and suffering, not to mention reckonings with imperialism in its many historical guises.)
-People don't necessarily want more hours. They want more predictable schedules, more leave to care for children, parents, and sick family, and flexibility to go to school. They want better part-time work, in many cases. (They don't want to lose their job if they get sick, and they also want freedom to get trained for a better job.)
Moral objections:
-Full employment relies on Growth Growth Growth and that keeps us dependent on oil and stuff.
(I guess you could frame this as a systemic objection if you could demonstrate once and for all that growth leads inexorably to climate change leads inexorably to worse economic futures.)
Philosophical objections:
-Full employment sucks. Work sucks. The hard left has taken its eye off the ball.
For me, this nails it.
And this was after all the original critique of Third Way liberalism, articulated in The Baffler by Ivy Leaguers and in grunge music by good old American nihilist burn-outs: work sucks.
The argument in Sherrod Brown's recent Times ed, that paid labor can 'lose its dignity' when elites don't pay it the proper respect, is a dumb conservative nostrum masquerading as a populist call to action. "Over the past 40 years, as people have worked harder for less pay and fewer benefits, the value of their work has eroded. When we devalue work, we threaten the pride and dignity that come from it."
(When you write about politics you have to use words like 'nostrum' to show you're clued-in.)
Are Sen Brown's constituents aware that no one can make you feel inferior without your consent. Maybe they're just getting hip to the hard math of the Democratic Leadership Council: we can't fight the globalized neoliberal future, so we might as well court it. Surely Trump knew he was lying about bringing back manufacturing jobs. And Clinton wasn't going to take the rhetorical position of that Weekly Standard guy, or whoever it was, who said Rust Belters should just finish committing suicide and overdosing on opiates and neither party should defer to them. But how long can you muddy the issue, and what to do you actually legislate? Higher wages at Taco Bell? If you've seen Roger and Me you know there's no dignity at Taco Bell.
Is there any dignity in life?
Is there any dignity in living in a country where people gotta work at Taco Bell?
Sometimes you just want to get a taco at Taco Bell, and the hell with it. Or you want to get something nice but you're tired and you're broke or whatever so you might as well just get a taco at Taco Bell. It's not a dignified choice. Still, you don't have to be rude to the counter guy! You smile at him and talk about how cold or warm it is outside.
The authors make the case for 'wealth transfer' payments: essentially, direct cash payments to the poor. They point to the example of free housing for homeless veterans, one example of throwing cash at poverty which seems to work pretty well. Though -- veterans are a specially protected category of what we might as well call 'undeserving' poor, and most Americans feel obliged to help them out. Not so with our old friend the Welfare Queen. Authors acknowledge the problem is one of "political will." Under the old Aid to Families with Dependent Children, direct cash payments along with higher wages seemed to keep most families from dire poverty, but the Clinton welfare reforms restructured cash payments and tied them to work incentives to avoid fostering a culture of 'dependency.'
Wealth transfer programs in the developing world have worked pretty well, the authors argue, and are tied to easy incentives like making sure recipient families send their children to school and to health check-ups. (The authors ignore the subtext here -- the African, Asian and Latin American governments funding these anti-poverty measures have been enriched by global free trade agreements, and their eventual goal is to create a globally competitive workforce, which is why the Clintons and the Robert Rubins of the world's developed economies have encouraged them.)
The broader philosophical issue is still relevant.
Why should a basic income depend on the labor market?
If there are only bad jobs on the market, ought citizens to suffer for their recalcitrance until they knuckle under?
Bill Clinton thrived on stories of former welfare recipients 'empowered' by work. He enjoyed trotting out these folks at rallies, where they could preach about their newfound dignity. To whom were they preaching?
