Welfare rolls inch up in some states
Published 9:00 pm Wednesday, September 5, 2001
Herald news services
WASHINGTON — The number of families on welfare has increased in one of every three states, including Washington state, the government said Wednesday, offering new evidence that the remarkable decline in welfare rolls is nearing an end.
In Washington, 55,020 families were on welfare in March 2001, compared with 53,809 families in September 2000 — an increase of 2.3 percent.
Nationwide, caseloads still were falling, albeit slowly. They dropped 3 percent between 2000 and 2001, when a little more than 2.1 million poor families were getting monthly checks, the Department of Health and Human Services said.
Since 1994, when the welfare rolls peaked, the number of people on assistance has fallen by 58 percent, much further than anyone had predicted. Every state has seen its caseloads drop.
Experts credit a combination of the strong economy during the mid- to late 1990s and tough new rules that required virtually everyone to work. With the economy slowing and many of those most able to make it on their own gone from the rolls, analysts have anticipated the numbers would stabilize.
Between September and March, the number of families on welfare increased in 18 states, in some cases by just a fraction and in others by more than 10 percent. They were: Washington, Oregon, Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, Colorado, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Michigan, Nebraska, Nevada, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Tennessee, West Virginia and Wisconsin.
The numbers on welfare dropped in all other states.
HHS Secretary Tommy Thompson, who pioneered welfare changes as governor of Wisconsin, focused on the positive changes under new welfare rules.
"While the caseload numbers are encouraging, the real news is that welfare reform is moving more people into work so that they can support themselves and their families," Thompson said. "Welfare reform has helped an unprecedented number of people on welfare to become self-supporting."
Shawn Fremstad, a Washington, D.C.-based welfare analyst, said the slowdown in the shrinking of welfare rolls should come as no surprise. On top of a softening economy, "many of those left on the rolls probably have greater barriers to employment, such as mental health problems or learning disabilities that were not apparent at first," said Fremstad, an official of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.
"The tremendous caseload declines of the late 1990s simply could not be expected to continue," he said. "What’s left is a tougher, harder-to-serve (welfare) population."
