American Dream

by Jason DeParle

  Other than her back, Angie was healthy. Jewell was not. After she left welfare, her earnings rose sixfold, to nearly $13,000 a year. But her public aid fell 93 percent—she lost all of her welfare and most of her food stamps after she failed to file the monthly earnings reports required of people who work. While her overall income rose from about $14,700 to $16,600 (a gain of 13 percent), she also lost her health insurance for two years, and Jewell had bleeding ulcers. “I just dealt with that pain,” she said. “I just got a lot of Tums, Rolaids, stuff like that.” In the end, she was hospitalized and her wages were garnished to pay the bill, a circumstance that struck her as nothing unusual. “Anybody that works is gonna get their check garnished,” she said. “Everybody in Milwaukee owes a hospital bill.”

  In going to work, Angie and Jewell didn’t just face new expenses. They also faced new uncertainty. Angie’s income soared for a year, when she bought a car and worked two jobs. Then it crashed for three months after the car was stolen. So the experience registered less like a stable advance than a roller coaster ride. In Jewell’s case, the ride was particularly steep. Her income leaped to $25,000 when she worked in the Alzheimer’s ward, then fell to $8,000 the next year when she lost her job and focused on Ken. On welfare, they had a senile landlady who forgot to collect the rent. Off welfare, Jewell had rent to pay and her nephew Quinten to feed. Angie had Opal and Brierra.

  So did they come out ahead in economic terms? Probably, a bit. And their earnings may grow with time, which wouldn’t happen on welfare. Still, three years after they left the rolls, their material lives - didn’t feel much different. Their economic progress, such as it was, vanished in the noise of living.

  To understand the economics of the postwelfare years, you have to juggle two competing ideas. The first is that most poor single mothers fared better than expected. The second is that they continued to lead terribly straitened lives. Earnings surged, welfare fell, and net incomes inched up—but not necessarily enough to keep the lights on. By national standards, Angie was a great success: she earned 50 percent to 75 percent more than the average woman leaving the rolls. Sifting through the piles of economic data, it’s hard to know what to emphasize most—the amazing ability of poor mothers to work or the questions about what their work will achieve?

  The case for encouragement starts with earnings trends: from 1994 to 2001, the poorest half of single mothers saw their annual earnings double. That universe includes most of the women who left welfare as well as many who might have gone on it absent the new law. (Among the poorest quarter of single mothers, the rise in earnings was proportionally even greater: 150 percent.) Mostly that’s because the women worked more. But the wages of entry-level workers also rose. While it was common to talk of recipients being shoved into minimum-wage jobs, most earned in the range of $7.50 to $8.25 an hour (in today’s terms)—well above the legal minimum.

  Poverty rates brought more good news. Most of the conservatives who backed the law would have been happy to replace welfare with work, even if poverty levels didn’t change. But poverty rates fell sharply—for some groups to record lows. Poverty rates are arbitrary and odd, and they generally undercount need. Crudely devised four decades ago as a multiple of food costs, the formula hasn’t changed other than to grow with inflation. The numbers undercount poverty by ignoring work expenses and the increased costs of housing and health care (which have far outpaced inflation). But they also ignore billions distributed through certain programs like food stamps and tax credits. Their all-or-nothing quality is oblivious to nuance: the year she left welfare, Angie would have been poor with $18,437 and not poor with a dollar more. Nonetheless, the numbers retain an important symbolism, and since the methodology behind them hasn’t changed, they can be useful in tracking trends.

  Poverty rates didn’t just fall; they plunged. And they plunged most among those groups targeted by the bill. America’s child poverty rates, the highest in the industrial world, hadn’t changed in fifteen years. Suddenly they dropped more than 20 percent. Poverty among blacks, Hispanics, and single mothers fell to all-time lows. Nearly half the country’s black children were poor when Clinton first pledged to end welfare. By the time he left office the figure had fallen by more than a third, to 30 percent. The last president to preside over an economic expansion, Ronald Reagan, removed 290,000 Americans from poverty. The Clinton years multiplied that figure 22 times, moving 6.4 million people across the poverty line. More than half lived in families headed by single mothers. “This is the first recovery in three decades where everybody got better at the same time,” Clinton said, just before leaving office. “I just think that’s so important.”

  The bad news is that while incomes rose, they rose from distressingly low levels. Extrapolating from an hourly wage of $7.50, one would expect to see annual earnings of about $15,600. But most women leaving welfare earned much less. A few found only part-time work. Many more went months between jobs. In her first year and a half off the rolls, Jewell quit one nursing home (too much work), got fired at another (chronic tardiness), and ran through four temp jobs. Even Angie, a much more experienced worker, went jobless for two and a half months after her car was stolen and she fell into a funk. Only about a third of those leaving welfare nationwide held jobs in - every quarter of the following year.

  So what did former recipients really earn? In ballpark terms, if you count everyone leaving welfare (including those without jobs), the average woman earned less than $9,000 in her first year off the rolls. Count workers alone, and the figure grows to about $12,000. Count steady workers (excluding those who go back on welfare), and you can get to $14,500. Their paychecks did grow with time; in Wisconsin, the earnings of the average “leaver” rose 26 percent over three years. Still, their annual earnings over the three-year stretch averaged just $10,400 (even when you exclude those who didn’t work at all). With earnings of $12,700, Jewell was well ahead of the pack. With $16,100 Angie was a star.

  Nationally, most people leaving welfare did come out ahead, at least on paper. But that wasn’t the case in Wisconsin. Maria Cancian and three colleagues at the University of Wisconsin examined the records of eight thousand of the state’s former welfare families. Although their earnings and tax credits surged, their public aid dropped even faster, cutting their total income by about $2,600 in the first year, a loss of 20 percent. Even after three years, a minority of those leaving the rolls—40 percent—had incomes higher than when they were on welfare. Wisconsin had unusually high benefits, so families leaving welfare had more to lose, and in cutting the rolls so deeply the state pushed more marginal cases out the door. The before-after comparison might look different in, say, Chicago. Nonetheless, the Cancian study recorded something of note: the most celebrated welfare program in the world on average left poor people even poorer.

  A focus on averages can leave things out. Even as poverty levels fell, the ranks of single mothers in “extreme poverty”—living below half the poverty line—rose by nearly 20 percent. Nationally, about one welfare mother in five earned nothing after leaving the rolls. How they survived remains unclear. There was no parallel rise in public destitution, no sidealk encampments of homeless families, as Daniel Patrick Moynihan had feared. Spending among the very poor rose, even as their incomes fell, suggesting they had more resources—boyfriends or relatives to take them in—than the Census Bureau - could measure. While reliable data on the very poor are scarce, the best guess is that about 7 percent of single mothers grew poorer in the second half of the 1990s. The worst of them, like Amber Peck in Milwaukee, parceled out their kids, then trudged through the snow to sleep on church floors.

  Opponents of the bill sometimes cite such families as evidence of its failure. But a policy that fails the most marginalized few isn’t necessarily a failure overall, especially if it brings significant improvement to the lives of most others. What’s more surprising is how much hardship persisted among the seeming winners, among workers like Angie and Jewell. By warning, as Senat
or Moynihan did, of “cholera epidemics,” critics set the bar for suffering awfully high. Large numbers of welfare-to-work successes report problems in obtaining basic necessities—fewer problems, perhaps, than when they were on welfare, but not dramatically fewer. Depending how the question is asked, a quarter to a half of former recipients report shortages of food. Similar percentages cite an inability to pay rent and utilities. Half said they lacked health insurance at a given moment, meaning that many more experienced a period without insurance sometime in their first few years off the rolls. Sheldon Danziger and four academic colleagues tracked seven hundred Michigan families for four years. Those who moved from welfare to work had nearly twice the annual income of those who stayed on welfare but “similar levels of material hardship.” They were less likely to go without food or shelter but much more likely to go without needed medical care.

  In my own travels through postwelfare life, I was struck by how many working families complained about facing depleted cupboards—or about just plain going hungry. I spent some time with Michelle Crawford, the Milwaukee woman Tommy Thompson featured in his legislative address. (“I want to run for president,” she remembered him telling her, “and I want you on my team.”) While her pride in landing a job was real, so were her struggles to buy a commodity as basic as milk. To fool the kids, she sweetened a powdered mix and hid it in store-bought jugs. “Then we ran out of sugar,” she said. Food - wasn’t on my mind when I stopped by Pulaski High School to talk to some students with welfare-to-work moms. But it was on the minds of the kids, who commandeered the conversation with macabre jokes about Ramen noodles and generic cereal. When I asked how many had recently gone to bed hungry, four out of five raised their hands. “Go to my house, look in the refrigerator—you’ll be lucky if there’s a gallon of milk,” said a senior named Tiffany Fiegel. Then she burst into tears.

  The persistence of so much hardship poses a paradox. If incomes were rising, and poverty falling, why did so many people skip meals and fall behind on the rent? The answer is that the near poor live only slightly better than the poor. The Economic Policy Institute, a Washington research and advocacy group, examined two databases that measure hardships like shortages of food or medical care. Material deprivation did fall once families crossed the poverty line. But it only fell a bit. Real freedom from grinding need didn’t occur until families reached twice the poverty line—until a woman like Angie, with four kids, had an income of nearly $40,000. In Wisconsin, fewer than one former recipient in ten had an income of twice the poverty line the year after leaving the rolls. If past trends hold true, most never will: a decade after leaving AFDC, two-thirds of former welfare families still hadn’t gotten that far.

  One can quibble about the math, but the basic point is clear: there’s a threshold that families have to cross to feel their lives have changed. And most haven’t crossed it. Angie went from 103 percent of the poverty line during her last four years on welfare to 114 percent during her first three years as a worker. With an extra mouth to feed in Quinten, Jewell went the other way, from 98 percent of the poverty line on welfare to 93 percent off it. “How well am I doing?” Angie said one day. “I ain’t gonna call me poor—but I am poor.” The Census Bureau couldn’t have put it any better.

  To say that Angie lived on $25,000 makes her life sound more forgiving than it was. The tax money came just once a year and went mostly to big-ticket items—cars, refrigerators, bedroom sets. Food stamps went to food. Marcus pitched in, but his help was erratic and typically in-kind—a package of pork chops, a new coat—as opposed to something Angie could count on for the bills. (Help from Opal was similarly sporadic.) What Angie really lived on was her take-home pay, about $1,120 a month. The result was come-and-go economics: what comes, goes.

  Nearly 60 percent went to shelter costs: $450 to rent and $200 to utilities.

  Seventy-five dollars went to Walgreen’s for items, like toothpaste and toilet paper, that food stamps wouldn’t buy.

  Seventy-five dollars went to Jewel-Osco, for groceries when the food stamps ran out.

  Fifty dollars went to the Lorillard Tobacco Company, since Angie’s body wouldn’t function without a pack of Newports every other day.

  What was left was about $270 a month, or $9 a day. With that, Angie had to buy the remaining stuff of her life: bus fare, haircuts, gerbil food, video games, winter coats, check-cashing fees, doctors’ bills, Colt 45s, Halloween candy, Christmas presents, Kesha’s color-guard uniform, Redd’s rap discs, Von’s basketball shoes, Darrell’s birthday party at Chuck E. Cheese, and the occasional pizza supreme. It was a budget with no room for error. And a life with lots of error. “Cash money in my hands?” Angie said. “It’s like the wind blows and it’s gone.”

  The biweekly pay cycle had a rhythm all its own: two weeks of anticipation followed by the realization that the money had been spoken for twice. As a rule, food came before rent, and rent before utilities, which Angie relegated to the lower-order status of optional necessity. “If you ain’t got no place to stay, all the gas and the lights in the world - wouldn’t make no difference,” she said. In her first six months on Brown Street, she paid on the light bill once. “Paid on” is how she put it, since the bill was never fully paid. She owed more than $1,400, but with Kesha using a nebulizer the power company was slow to disconnect. The week after the fight with Marcus, Angie picked up a $490 paycheck, hoping to treat herself to an outfit and a plastic plant. Once she paid the rent and bought a bus pass, she had $23 and 12 days to go. Among Angie’s coping skills was a healthy dose of denial: she refused to open the bills. “If I ain’t got the money, I ain’t got the money,” she said. “No need to be worrying myself to death.”

  By the spring, the tax money was gone; Michael was cutting Opal’s check; and Marcus lost his job when the corner grocery closed. To cap it off, a bureaucratic screwup cost Angie her food stamps. Angie was too proud to say that anyone in the house went hungry—“We survive! Ain’t nobody starving in there!”—but it wasn’t unusual at the end of the month to find the refrigerator reduced to a box of fish sticks and a bottle of ketchup. Half the household fights, it seemed, revolved around a shortage of food. Opal was supposed to help stock the fridge, but she sold some of her stamps for spending money and kept a cache of snacks locked in her room. One morning, after she beat Darrell to the last drop of milk for the cereal, the five-year-old flung himself to the floor.

  “What you crying for, boy?” she said.

  “I ain’t got nothing to eat! I’m hungry!” he said.

  “You need a good butt-whipping, Darrell!” Opal said.

  Darrell wasn’t the only one missing a meal. Called in to work on her thirty-third birthday, Angie was broke and didn’t eat all day. The loss of her food stamps left her incensed. The program required an eligibility review every three months. Arriving for her most recent appointment, she discovered her caseworker had gone on a leave of absence. In welfare jargon, that had left Angie in a “vacant zone”; she no longer had a designated worker but could see whomever was free. No one was. A few weeks later, Angie got a notice saying she had been cut off for failing to complete the review.

  “QUESTIONS: Ask your Worker,” it said.

  “Worker Name: VACANT.”

  It took two months of calling to get another appointment. When she did, the bus broke down, she got there late, and no one would see her again. Having worked until midnight the previous night, Angie was out of patience; she responded with an off-color tirade that nearly got her thrown out of the office. A supervisor calmed her down, but she still had to come back the following day, when ten minutes of paper pushing restored her stamps. The foul-ups had cost her $500, but she arrived home trying to pretend she didn’t care. “Hell no, because I work!” she said. “I done got over all that, waiting on food stamps! I hate to be bothered with them. I wish I had a job that paid $10, $11 an hour—I wouldn’t have to be bothered with them.”

  “That still ain’t enough,” Opal said.

>   “You could make it,” Angie said. “You just have to budget.”

  But Angie didn’t earn $11 an hour. She earned $7.82, and while her income placed her in the postwelfare elite, it still didn’t pay the bills. She needed a pool job to make more money, and she needed a car to work the pool. With some of her friends moonlighting as home health aides, Angie put in an application. “I need two jobs to get me what I need!” she said. “One job ain’t gonna make it.”

  A job was the last thing on Opal’s mind. She hadn’t slept in two days. She feared toothaches more than childbirth. Her head was exploding in pain. Pull ’em, she said. The dentist said her gums were infected. The infection could travel to her heart. The worst-case scenario, however remote, included the risk of death. Take an antibiotic; come back in a week. “Let’s do it right,” he said. Opal pleaded: “Pull ’em!”

  The pain must have been extraordinary to lure her to a dentist’s chair, a place she avoided even more than Motivation Class. She had been leaving her teeth in food for years, the latest in an Easter egg. She had tried aspirin, Chloroseptic, perfume, and Tanqueray; she had been sent home by the emergency room. There are thirty-two teeth in the human mouth. With a practice focused on indigent care, Dr. Celestino Perez had once pulled twenty-eight. Opal needed only ten teeth pulled. “You can take it awhile longer,” he said. Blinking away silent tears, Opal disagreed. She was starting to sign a waiver, absolving him of liability if the procedure went awry, when I threw my thin influence behind the antibiotics, promising to rush her back if the pain didn’t ebb. She climbed down from the chair and dragged herself home, a perfect portrait of wretchedness. If years of tooth rot couldn’t get her attention, I wondered how W-2 stood a chance.