American Dream

by Jason DeParle

  285 “first recovery in three decades”: Clinton interview with five reporters from The New York Times, Nov. 30, 2000.

  286 a third held jobs: Acs and Loprest, “ASPE Leavers Study,” Executive Summary and table 3.3.average earnings: $9,000 and $12,000, Acs and Loprest, “ASPE Leavers Study,” table 3.5. (The $9,000 includes an adjustment to account for nonworkers.) $14,500 comes from the same study, table 3.7. All figures expressed in 2003 dollars.

  Wisconsin earnings growth, three-year mean: Maria Cancian and others, “Before and After TANF: The Economic Well-Being of Women Leaving Welfare” (Madison: Institute for Research on Poverty, Special Report, no. 77), May 2000, table 8; figures in 2003 dollars.

  poor people even poorer: The Cancian study examined eight thousand families who left the rolls in late 1995, just before Angie and Jewell. Over the next year, they gained $2,900 in earnings and tax credits but lost $5,500 in cash and food stamps. That reduced their total income from $13,600 on aid to $11,000 off it. (Ibid., fig. 2, in 2003 dollars.) The study appeared six months after W-2 won the Innovations Award and received almost no attention.

  extreme poverty: Sheila R. Zedlewski and others, “Extreme Poverty Rising, Existing Government Programs Could Do More,” Urban Institute, April 1, 2002; they use an alternate definition of poverty that includes food stamps.

  Spending among the very poor: Ron Haskins, “Effects of Welfare Reform,” in Blank and Haskins, The New World of Welfare, 116-19.

  287 about 7 percent grew poorer: Analysis of Census Bureau data by Wendell Primus; Christopher Jencks and Joseph Swingle find the tipping point somewhere between the 5th and 10th percentile in “Without a Net,” The American Prospect, Jan. 3, 2000.basic necessities: Shortages of food, rent, Acs and Loprest, “ASPE Leavers Study,” tables 6.2-3; half uninsured, Bowen Garrett and John Holahan, “Welfare Leavers, Medicaid Coverage, and Private Health Insurance,” The Urban Institute, B-13, March 2000.

  Michigan families: Sheldon Danziger and others, “Does It Pay to Move from Welfare to Work?” Journal of Policy Analysis and Management 21, no. 4 (2002): 671-92.

  depleted cupboards: While I regularly encountered food shortages in my travels in Milwaukee, surveys by the United States Department of Agriculture indicated that food hardships declined in the late 1990s among the broader population, for some groups dramatically. One report found: “the prevalence of children’s hunger declined by about half, from 1.1 percent of all households with children in 1995 to 0.6 percent in 1999.” It’s possible, of course, for both “food insecurity” and outright “hunger” (two different measures) to be declining yet still common among former welfare recipients. Mark Nord and Gary Bickel, “Measuring Children’s Food Insecurity in U.S. Households, 1995-99,” Economic Research Service, USDA, Food Assistance and Nutrition Research Report, Number 24, April 2002, Abstract.

  288 persistence of hardship: Heather Boushey and others, Hardships in America: The Real Story of Working Families (Washington, DC: Economic Policy Institute, 2001), esp. table 4.fewer than one in ten reach twice the poverty line: Maria Cancian and Daniel R. Meyer, “Alternative Measures of Economic Success Among TANF Participants,” July 2003, table 2 (most but not all the of the families they surveyed had left the rolls).

  most never will: Among former AFDC families, the share with incomes above 200 percent of the poverty line was 12 percent in the first year, 27 percent after five years, and 33 percent after ten years. Daniel R. Meyer and Maria Cancian, Journal of Applied Social Sciences 25, no. 1 (Winter/ Fall 2000-2001).

  poverty status of Angie and Jewell: These numbers include food stamps and tax credits, which the official numbers omit. Angie’s peak year rose from 121 percent of the poverty line on welfare to 127 percent off it—hardly any difference. Likewise, Jewell’s rose from 117 percent on welfare to 121 percent off it. She did, however, experience more income fluctuation after leaving welfare. In her first full year off the rolls, when she mostly went jobless, her income fell to a new low of 54 percent of the poverty line.

  289 What Angie really lived on: In her first three years off welfare, Angie’s annual earnings after payroll taxes averaged $14,850 (in 2003 dollars), or $1,238 a month. To show how this fit her 1999 expenses on Brown Street, I converted it into 1999 dollars; that leaves her with monthly take-home pay of $1,121.optional necessity: Angie’s phone had long been cut off, but I had one installed in the summer of 1999, to make it easier to reach her.

  291 she earned $7.82: That was her nominal wage in the spring of 1999, her third year off the rolls; the equivalent in 2003 dollars is $8.64.

  292 Michael didn’t know Opal used drugs: Along with notes from previous caseworkers indentifying her drug use, Michael had Opal’s latest assessment test, which identified “substance use” as among her likely “work barriers.” “To be honest, I don’t pay any attention to it,” Michael said. “I’m more interested in my interaction with them.”

  294 nonmarital births: From 1995 to 2002, the share of children born outside marriage dipped among blacks (from 69.9 percent to 68.2 percent), while it rose among Hispanics (from 40.8 percent to 43.5 percent) and whites (from 21.2 percent to 23.0 percent). Because of changes in reporting techniques in California, Michigan, and Texas, it’s impossible to say when the national rate first slowed. The official numbers show a decline between 1994 and 1995, but most researchers think the trend lines changed a few years earlier.

  294 fewer children with lone single mothers: Gregory Acs and Sandi Nelson, “Changes in Family Structure and Child Well-Being: Evidence from the 2002 National Survey of America’s Families” (paper for University of Michigan, National Poverty Center), Aug. 15, 2003, table 3.

  295 more black children with married parents: Wendell E. Primus, “Child Living Arrangements by Race and Income: A Supplementary Analysis,” Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, Nov. 19, 2001, table 5. Since Primus had resigned from the government to protest the welfare bill, his public comment about an earlier version of this paper was widely noted: “In many ways, welfare reform is working better than I thought it would. . . . Whatever we have been doing over the last five years, we ought to keep going.” With his willingness to reexamine a strongly held position in light of new evidence, Primus showed admirable intellectual integrity. (See Blaine Harden, NYT, Aug. 12, 2001.)no obvious policy pattern: While doing little about welfare, the District of Columbia cut the share of children born outside marriage by 18 percent (68.8 percent in 1994 to 56.6 percent eight years later). Over the same years, as Wisconsin led the drive to end welfare, the share of its children born outside marriage rose 10 percent (from 27.2 percent to 30.0 percent). Nationally, the average rose 4.3 percent (from 32.6 percent in 1994 to 34 percent in 2002). (Author’s communication with Stephanie Ventura, National Center for Health Statistics.)

  296 “$8.25 an hour”: The equivalent in 2003 dollars is $9.11.

  18. A SHOT AT THE AMERICAN DREAM: MILWAUKEE, FALL 1999308 William Martin’s performance bonuses: LAB, audit of Employment Solutions, Inc., Feb. 16, 2001, 7.Martin’s total salary: Steve Schultze, MJS, Feb. 28, 2001.

  staff parties to $160,000 in unallowable costs: LAB audit, 2-5, appendix 1.

  “FBI investigation”: Steve Schultze, MJS, June 23, 2001. No charges were filed as a result of the alleged investigation, which the FBI did not publicly confirm.

  “bumbling rather than trickiness”: Steve Schultze, MJS, June 8, 2001. David Mastran, the Maximus CEO, chose nearly the same words when describing the company’s problems to me: “It was clearly ineptness on our part and lack of guidance on the state’s part, rather than any mal intent.” Once heralded as exemplars of efficiency, in other words, the state’s two leading privatized agencies defended themselves by citing their own incompetence.

  311 benefits to younger children: Johannes Bos and others, “How Welfare and Work Policies Affect Children: A Synthesis of Research,” MDRC, March 2001, ES-4.adolescents in Minnesota, Canada, and Florida: Jennifer L. Brooks, Elizabeth C. Hair, and Martha J. Zaslo
w, “Welfare Reform’s Impact on Adolescents: Early Warning Signs,” Child Trends, July 2001.

  “dogs that didn’t bark”: Greg J. Duncan and P. Lindsay Chase-Lansdale, “Welfare Reform and Children’s Well-Being,” in Blank and Haskins, The New World of Welfare, 407.

  “children of current and former recipients”: Kathryn Tout, Juliet Scarpa, and Martha J. Zaslow, “Children of Current and Former Welfare Recipients: Similarly at Risk,” Child Trends, March 2002.

  “environments changed little”: Bruce Fuller and others, “New Lives for Poor Families? Mothers and Young Children Move Through Welfare Reform,” The Growing Up in Poverty Project—Wave 2 Findings, ES, 2.

  312 New Hope had little impact on family life: Hans Bos and others, “New Hope for People with Low Incomes: Two-Year Results of a Program to Reduce Poverty and Reform Welfare,” MDRC, 1999, tables 5.7, 6.1-6.3, 6.6-6.12. The evaluators concluded: “theory envisions that a program such as New Hope might have many more impacts than in fact emerged” (ch. 6, 14). By the five-year follow-up study, the depression rate among New Hope parents had slightly improved. Still, it remained high and was the only one of ten psychosocial measures in which researchers saw any improvement. Once again, they wrote, “the program had few impacts on the well-being of parents and families.” Aletha C. Huston and others, “New Hope for Families and Children: Five-Year Results of a Program to Reduce Poverty and Reform Welfare,” MDRC, June 2003, 89.one outstanding finding: After two years, teachers ranked the New Hope boys as better behaved and more academically skilled than members of a control group, and the boys themselves were more likely to say they expected to attend college. The statistical magnitude was roughly equivalent to adding 100 points to an SAT score (Bos and others, table 7.2). Many of the positive effects for boys continued after five years (Huston and others, 146-59, 169).

  314 Lisa moved back: After four years away, she was startled by the new hassle of getting a welfare check; she gave up and moved in with an old boyfriend, but not before spending two months crowded in at Angie’s and Jewell’s.

  321 earned about $18,500: In 1999, Angie’s nominal earnings were $16,800; the equivalent in 2003 dollars is $18,500.

  EPILOGUE: WASHINGTON AND MILWAUKEE, 1999-2004324 “What does the political scientist”: The 1981 poem by Artur Miedzyzrecki was read by the political scientist Hugh Heclo at a conference at the University of Wisconsin in May 1992.attacks from a jealous man: Donald Crawford described himself as an aspiring minister, but he was also a recovering addict who had been arrested a few years earlier for his role in torturing a man he suspected of stealing his drugs. Twice in the year before Michelle addressed the legislature, he had been led away in handcuffs for striking her; once, she had been arrested for hitting him and threatening him with a knife. DeParle, NYT, April 20 and Dec. 30, 1999.

  Lillie Harden: Bill Clinton met her in Arkansas in 1986, and brought her to speak to the National Governors Association later that year. He retold her story often but didn’t see her again until 1996, when she stood beside him in the Rose Garden as he talked about her inspired son and signed the new law. As he continued to tell the story during the 1996 campaign, the Arkansas Democrat Gazette published a Harden profile. It said Clinton had “bungled the resumes” of her four kids (one, whom Clinton had described as “studying to be a doctor,” was working as a garbage collector); cited Carlton Harden’s teenage imprisonment; and noted that during the years in which Clinton described Harden as an emblem of postwelfare success, she had gone back on welfare several times. (Frank Wolfe, Arkansas Democrat Gazette, Oct. 27, 1996.) In My Life, his memoir, Clinton called the story of Harden and her son “the best argument I’ve ever heard for welfare reform.” He added: “I had been working on welfare reform for more than fifteen years. But I didn’t consider it a Democratic issue. Or even a governors’ issue. Welfare reform was about Lillie Hardin [sic] and her boy” (330).

  When I talked to Harden, she seemed of two minds about whether working mothers have the ability to inspire their kids. She retold the story of Carlton saying, “Mama, I’m so proud of you,” and warned that when mothers “sit around at home and don’t do nothing it takes an effect on children.” But later in the conversation she said, “Most of the time, these kids don’t care about whether you work or scrape to take care of them. They just feel like it’s something you have to do.”

  325 the story someone could tell: As too-tidy symbols of success, Crawford and Harden were scarcely unique. I was driving across Wisconsin with Jason Turner one day when he began raving about a woman named Jackie Muriel. As one of the first people off W-2, Muriel was the subject of a long profile in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel that noted a moment in which she had run short on toilet paper. In the past, she had just resorted to theft, but this time she demurred, and Turner attributed the decision to the morally uplifting powers of work. “I was high on life for a week after I read that,” Turner said. “It showed you that the system had the capability of transforming someone’s life.” A few months later, Muriel was in jail, and she went on to lose her kids. (Joel Dresang and Crocker Stephenson, MJS, May 18 and Sept. 28, 1997.) Another Journal Sentinel story making the rounds relied on a few Milwaukee bus drivers to argue that “a startling change” was under way in the city’s poor neighborhoods. “I see more people with kids early in the morning,” said one driver, William Love. Another, Pearlie Duncan, said, “You can look into their eyes; they’re happy. The eyes tell no lies.” A gift from the quote gods if ever there was one, “the eyes tell no lies” appeared in Thompson’s application for the Harvard-Ford Foundation award, and Clinton cited the bus story in a radio address. Though I missed Duncan, I spent a morning riding the bus with William Love, whose fame as a social critic was news to him. As we rode around the central city, he said, “I can’t say I see a noticeable change” from the welfare years. Then he thought of one: he owned some inner-city houses and had more tenants behind on their rent. (Michele Derus, MJS, June 28, 1998.)For another cautionary welfare-to-work tale, see Peter Boyer’s article in The New Yorker about the six-year-old Flint, Michigan, boy who took a gun to school and shot and killed a five-year-old girl. In the deluge of coverage, some noted that the little girl’s mother, Veronica McQueen, was a welfare-to-work success. But so was the mother of the six-year-old gunman. Tamarla Owens was working not one but two jobs, and gone ten hours a day. Despite her long hours, she had gotten evicted, and sent her son to live with her drug-dealing brother, where he found the loaded gun. (Peter Boyer, The New Yorker, July 3, 2000.) In the recent literature of the ghetto, there is one role-model mother who stands out above the others, propelling her son to the Ivy League. But as Ron Suskind tells the story in his book A Hope in the Unseen, the moral isn’t as clean as it might appear. When explaining what helped her son succeed, Barbara Jennings partly credited a decision she made when her son, Cedric, was two: she quit her job and went on welfare, so they could spend more time together. She lost income but gained time, and they spent it at church, libraries, and museums. In the preschool years, she explained, “a child either gets the love he needs or he doesn’t.” Then she went back to work. (New York: Broadway Books, 1998, 31.)

  325 incomes of disadvantaged single mothers: Jared Bernstein of the Economic Policy Institute examined the incomes of all single mothers below twice the poverty threshold. From 1994 to 2000, their incomes rose 17 percent to $16,300, before surrendering 2 percent of the gains over the next two years. Bernstein, “Single Mothers Lose Ground in Weak Labor Market,” EPI Web site, May 19, 2004. When I talked to Clinton, he, too, noted that the recession’s effect on poor single mothers had been milder than feared: “The assumption was that since the welfare people were hired during the expansion, when the economy turned down, they’d be the first ones laid off, and that’s not necessarily what’s happened.”

  325 child poverty rates: Analysis by Gary Burtless of the Brookings Institution (presented at a briefing, Sept. 26, 2003).employment of high school dropouts: Jared Bernstein and Law
rence Mishel, “Labor Markets Left Behind,” Economic Policy Institute, Briefing Paper, Sept. 2003, 8-10.

  unemployment rose: From 4.0 percent in 2000 to 6.0 percent in 2003.

  326 “works despite itself ”: Gardner, who has spent more than two decades living and working in the central city of Milwaukee, said of W-2: “It is demonstrably, radically, unequivocally better than the old AFDC system, because it doesn’t pay you not to work. And it’s been implemented as badly as is humanly possible. . . . The moral is the right thing done badly is much better than the wrong thing, even when done well. . . . It is just staggering to me how many uneducated poor folks who I really didn’t expect to work, are working.”

  327 “compassionate conservative”: In noting that George W. Bush took pains “to say that he wasn’t a racist,” Clinton added: “Based on his appointments in Texas and his appointments in the White House, he’s not. The only really unforgivably racist thing he’s done is let his people call the white voters in South Carolina in the primary and tell them John McCain had a black baby. . . . But he has governed, at least, without apparent racial discrimination.” The reference was to a phone campaign by anonymous Bush supporters, who spread the rumor that McCain’s adopted Bangladeshi daughter was his illegitimate black child. The Bush campaign said it had nothing to do with the calls.rising inequality: Data are from CBO, “Effective Federal Tax Rates, 1997-2000,” Aug. 2003, table B1-C.

  tax-cutting frenzy: The Wall Street Journal editorial page went as far as calling women like Angie and Jewell—people too poor to pay income taxes—“lucky duckies.” Grover Norquist, Washington’s leading antitax operative, told Terry Gross of the public radio show Fresh Air that inheritance taxes reflected the “morality of the Holocaust.” (WSJ, Nov. 20, 2002; Fresh Air, Oct. 2, 2003.)