Learn From Our Mistakes? Here’s a New Law!

I was one of many who vehemently protested implementation of the 1996 Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA), the welfare bill scathingly referred to as “homelessness creation” by those of us working with families and adults we knew would inevitably fall through the cracks. Skeptical of welfare changes fueled by the “one-size-fits-all, get a job, hoist your bootstraps” mentality, we knew when the boom’s inevitable crash occurred people on the bottom would get crushed.

Recent reports of rising family homelessness rates sadly validate our position.

To no surprise, Forbes just published an article confirming our worst fears. In addition to the downward-spiraling job market, states facing budget shortfalls are slashing expenditures

—ripping the safety net’s last shreds from those who need it most. Families—and single adults of all ages and ilks—stand to lose what little access they had access to employment opportunities, medical care, nutrition, child care, transportation, housing and more as the dark cloud of economic turmoil dumps on our ill-prepared nation.

Unfortunately, I fear policymakers and welfare nay-sayers don’t understand the human effects of these losses on, well, real people.

I’d welcome discussion if dissenters spent time with some of the millions of overlooked households coping with financial hardship. Stop, look and listen to those who know poverty best—those who live it—before writing them off.

My theory—most nay-sayers may be too far removed from hand-to-mouth living to know/remember what it’s like to worry about feeding screaming children or to squeeze a dollar until it screams so you can pay the electric bill.

And, redefining “audacity,” the same people who picked our pockets while they guided our financial institutions into destruction now assert that they deserve record compensation—with our money!! “We need to be able to pay our people,” pointed out a Goldman Sachs’ spokesperson. Not being an economist, but possessing a tad of common sense, this reeks of more than audacity. It keeps us distracted and it keeps Team Obama busy, perhaps too busy to comprehensively address issues like poverty?

Flying into Westchester County (NY) Airport last week, I glimpsed mega-estates and country clubs that comfort and entertain people far removed from destitution. The super-rich 1% of Americans, as columnist Mark Harris notes, own 43% of all stock. He opines, “All the hopeful chatter from the Wall Street types in the Treasury Department who now command the President's ear will only go so far. A mobilized, grass-roots labor movement fighting for the right to organize the unorganized and for more jobs and better working conditions and economic relief for distressed homeowners would do far more to move the country forward to the better future we all deserve.”

Seems to me that we should enact a revised PRWORA, the Personal Responsibility With Our Resources Act of 2009. The irresponsible ultra-rich, those who made money by doing nothing, should lavishly support human needs of families who tried to play by the “responsibility” welfare rules but came up short. That’s my kind of justice.

photos by the author