Utopia, you are standing in it!

The share of single mothers without a high school degree with earnings rose from 49 percent to 64 percent between 1995 and 2000 but has since fallen or remained constant almost every year since then. At 55 percent, it’s now just slightly above its level in 1997, the first full year of welfare reform (see first graph).

TANF now serves only 25 of every 100 families with children that live below the poverty line, down from AFDC’s 68 of every 100 such families before the welfare law

Over the last 18 years, the national TANF average monthly caseload has fallen by almost two-thirds — from 4.7 million families in 1996 to 1.7 million families in 2013 — even as poverty and deep poverty have worsened.

The number of families with children in poverty hit a low of 5.2 million in 2000, but has since increased to more than 7 million. Similarly, the number of families with children in deep poverty (with incomes below half of the poverty line) hit a low of about 2 million in 2000, but is now above 3 million.

The employment situation for never-married mothers with a high school or less education — the group of mothers most affected by welfare reform — has changed dramatically over the last several decades.

In the early 1990’s, when states first made major changes to their cash welfare programs, only about half of these mothers worked.

Importantly, there was a very large employment gap between the share of these never-married mothers and single women without children with similar levels of education, suggesting that there was substantial room for these never-married mothers to increase their participation in the labour force.

By 2000, the employment gap between these two groups of women closed, and it has remained so. But in the years since, the employment rate for both groups has fallen considerably.

The employment rate for never-married mothers is now about the same as when welfare reform was enacted 18 years ago. This suggests that the economy and low education levels are now the causes of limited employment among never-married mothers — not the availability of public benefits or anything particular to never-married mothers.

The Centre on Budget and Policy Priorities, who hail clearly from the Left of American politics, scrupulously documented the following:

• Big gains in the employment of single mothers until a setback in the Great Recession but is still much better than in 1996;
• Welfare dependency dropped by two thirds;
• Despite this two third drop in welfare dependency, and earnest predictions of acute poverty and deprivation made in 1996, the number of families in deep poverty has not changed, and the number of families in poverty fell significantly and only rose again with the Great Recession; and
• There was a dramatic increase in the percentage of never married mothers in employment, so much so that there is no difference in the employment rate of single women with no children and never married mothers!

Welfare dependency down by two thirds, employment of never married mothers up to levels no one thought possible, family poverty down, and economic independence is much more widespread and all because of the 1996 US Federal welfare reforms. That sounds like success to me – a great success.

via Chart Book: TANF at 18 | Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.