SECTION: CAPITOL HILL HEARING TESTIMONY

LENGTH: 5254 words

COMMITTEE: HOUSE WAYS AND MEANS

SUBCOMMITTEE: HUMAN RESOURCES

HEADLINE: TESTIMONY WELFARE AND MARRIAGE

TESTIMONY-BY: LAURIE RUBINER, , VICE PRESIDENT

AFFILIATION: NATIONAL PARTNERSHIP FOR WOMEN & FAMILIES

BODY:
May 22, 2001 Statement of Laurie Rubiner, Vice President National Partnership for Women & Families Before the Subcommittee on Human Resources Good afternoon, Chairman Herger, Congressman Cardin, and other distinguished members of the Subcommittee. I am Laurie Rubiner, Vice President for Program & Public Policy at the National Partnership for Women and Families. I am pleased to have the opportunity to present testimony before the House Ways and Means Subcommittee on Human Resources on marriage and welfare reform. The National Partnership for Women & Families is a non-profit advocacy organization that has worked since 1971 to ensure fairness in the workplace, and to help women and men at all income levels balance their work and family obligations. If we are truly committed to helping people out of poverty, then our public policies should be directed at providing real supports to those who are living in poverty. Such assistance should be provided not based upon family composition but rather upon the needs of the family and the adults' willingness to follow the rules we have established for receiving aid. The mission of welfare reform should be to reduce poverty and help people achieve economic independence, not to engage in social engineering or discrimination against families that don't meet a particular ideal about family composition. Nor should welfare reform legislation be used as a vehicle to punish families who fail to conform to our individual views of what a family should or should not be. We should learn from our past welfare policy that attempts to influence family formation can backfire. Legislation to reauthorize the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) program must be grounded in several, central guiding principles: all eligible families in need who follow program rules must be treated fairly and have equal access to assistance; welfare policies must help all types of families move out of poverty; and welfare policies must be designed to provide a wide variety of supports that can promote strong, healthy families. I. Welfare policies must be designed with the goal of providing assistance to all eligible families in need. It is essential that welfare policies are developed with a primary focus on providing assistance and supports to all eligible families in need and not just a favored few. Some have suggested that married couples should be given preferential treatment in the distribution of scarce welfare benefits, under the theory that this will encourage people to get married. Such a policy would be misguided. First, there is no conclusive evidence that links increased marriage rates to increased welfare benefits. Second, to give preference to families solely because they are comprised of a married couple with children discriminates against those who are not married, but are working hard and playing by the rules. Consider the example of Elizabeth Jones in Katherine Boos' recent article about moving from welfare to work in the New Yorker Magazine. (1) Ms. Jones followed the rules of the 1996 welfare reform law. She left welfare and got not one, but two jobs to care for her three children. She sleeps four hours a night. Even with a day job as a D.C. police officer and a night job in private security she still can't make ends meet. Meanwhile, because she can't afford child care, her school-age children are left to care for themselves after school in a rundown apartment in a dangerous D.C. neighborhood. And, while Ms. Jones may be in the "success" column of welfare recipients who have moved into financial independence, it is hard to understand how anyone after reading her story could not agree that scarce welfare resources should be used to help her get the kinds of supports that we know help families like the Joneses, such as quality affordable childcare, health insurance and transportation. In distributing our limited resources we must begin with the reality of who is living in poverty and in need of assistance. The face of poverty in the United States is diverse: Nearly 6.7 million families, consisting of 23.4 million individuals, were living in poverty in 1999 - half were black or Hispanic families; 53% were families headed by single female heads of households; 7% were families headed by single male heads of households, and 40% were married couples; 88% of single-headed households were headed by women; almost 62% of these female- headed families with children living in poverty were headed by black or Hispanic women. (2) While there has been important progress in reducing poverty rates, there clearly is more work to do. There are a wide range of strategies - from ensuring access to quality education and training, to job creation, to increasing Medicaid enrollment and providing affordable health care, to expansion of the Earned Income Tax Credit - that collectively can and should be pursued to help more families achieve economic security. Any serious efforts to develop sound, effective welfare policies must have as their central goal a commitment to serving all eligible families in need. It is particularly crucial to pay special attention to the needs of families facing unique hurdles, such as families stuck at the bottom of the economic ladder, welfare clients with limited English proficiency or disabilities, and clients with multiple barriers to employment. Poverty has deepened for the poorest 20% of female-headed families and many are worse off today than they were six years ago. Recent data, for example, indicates that between 1995 and 1999 the inflation-adjusted disposable income of female-headed families with the lowest incomes actually declined by 4 percent. (3) Many clients with limited English proficiency have been unable to get the services they need because they cannot get accurate information about their program in other languages. (4) Many clients with disabilities have been shut out of training or job opportunities because their disability has not been assessed or adequately accommodated. (5) Still other welfare clients face a combination of employment barriers - limited opportunities to acquire education or build skills, unreliable childcare, mental and physical health problems, and lack of transportation - that together make it even more difficult to leave welfare and achieve some level of economic security. (6) A research study by the University of Michigan of welfare clients in an urban Michigan county found that multiple employment barriers - such as low education, lack of job skills, lack of transportation, health problems, perceived discrimination, and domestic violence - were common: 37% of clients reported having two or three different employment barriers, 24% reported having four to six barriers, and 3% reported having 7 or more barriers. (7) And increasingly many low- income fathers are struggling to acquire new skills and find and retain jobs. All of these clients have unique needs that require focused, targeted strategies - such as offering English as a Second Language classes, or training programs for non- traditional, higher-paying careers. Most importantly, it is critical that we do not create policies that pit different groups against each other to compete for much-needed services. Low- income mothers and low-income fathers who are underemployed or unemployed both need access to education and training - and we should take steps to make sure that both can have access to the services they need. II. We must concentrate on developing policies that support and promote strong, healthy families. A. Coercive policies that promote certain types of families ultimately will do more harm than good. Coercive policies designed to promote certain types of family structures at the expense of others, particularly children, will do more to undermine families than strengthen them. We ought not to desecrate the ideal of marriage by "paying people to get married," nor should we endorse policies that penalize families that are most in need because they do not conform to a preferred family structure. If marriage were only about economics, and the road out of poverty were as simple as a walk down the aisle then policies that provide financial incentives to people to get married would be appropriate. But a successful marriage is a much more complicated equation, with more than one variable, and a marriage license is not a winning lottery ticket. Kathryn Edin's study of marriage among low-income women reveals that they look for the same things the rest of us look for in a mate. (8) Yes, they want someone with a stable income, but they also want kindness, partnership, respect, emotional support, and a good father for their children. It should come as no surprise that low- income women want the same kinds of marriages that we want for ourselves and our children and that they prefer to remain single than enter into an unstable, unsuitable, or abusive marriage. Rather than simply promoting marriage as a "quick-fix" economic solution, we ought to be focused on helping individuals make sound, reasonable, responsible decisions about their relationships and their lives, so that if they do choose to get married the marriage will be stable and will be less likely to end in divorce. Helping to equip individuals to make the right choices ultimately can help strengthen both marriages and families. If our sole focus is on making a family look the way we want it to look, then we risk ignoring important pieces of the equation that can impact whether families grow together and get stronger or fall apart. Most importantly, marriage should not be used as a band-aid to cure other, more complicated problems. Many clients have turned to TANF as a source of critical support as they try to address difficult problems such as domestic violence or a family health crisis. Several different research studies have found, for example, that significant percentages of welfare clients are victims of domestic violence. A study of a scientific sampling of 734 female welfare clients in Massachusetts found that 19.5% reported current physical violence and 64% reported experiencing domestic violence at some point as an adult. (9) Similar research involving 846 female welfare clients in Passaic County, New Jersey found that nearly 14.6% reported current physical abuse, 25% reported verbal or emotional abuse, and 57.3% reported physical abuse at some point during adulthood. (10) Women who have been in abusive relationships and who need TANF assistance to be able to escape their abusers should not be penalized for trying to take control of their lives and create a safer and emotionally sound environment for their children. Forcing them to get married will only exacerbate their problems. To promote policies that put women, or any low-income individual, in the position of having to choose between financial support for their children or remaining in an abusive or destructive situation is wrong and not good policy. And it will do little to create the strong, healthy families that we claim to support. In the long term, helping to equip individuals with the skills and judgment needed to make the right decisions about their families, and effectively manage their work and family responsibilities is the best strategy for fostering strong/healthy families, strong/healthy marriages, and strong/healthy relationships. In crafting policies, there a number of factors to keep in mind: Protections for victims of domestic violence, child abuse, or other forms of abuse. Clients should not be forced or coerced into remaining in unhealthy, abusive relationships because they are unable to receive TANF assistance. Clients who face these types of problems should be able to get TANF assistance and other supports, and they should not be excluded from certain types of benefits because they are not married. Privacy protections are essential to ensure that clients can share sensitive information without fear of putting themselves and their families at risk, but also to ensure that clients are not forced to navigate cumbersome requirements to establish that they are victims of domestic violence or other forms of abuse. Education and counseling on responsible decision-making and sustaining healthy relationships. Education programs, primarily targeted at youth, that focus on making responsible choices, entering into healthy relationships, and understanding the family situations that offer the best chance for children's growth and success can help clients to be informed and thoughtful about the choices they make and the consequences of those choices. Efforts to remove penalties to marriage - individuals should not be paid to get married, but they should not be penalized if they get married. Welfare policies should be neutral on the subject of family formation and instead target resources where they are most needed. Voluntary participants. Clients must not be forced to marry as a condition to receive benefits; clients must not be coerced into special "marriage incentive programs" by dangling the promise of basic benefits that are critical to their family's survival. B. Providing Supports to Help Strengthen Low-Income Families One priority in developing new welfare policies must be to provide support and promote strong, healthy families in all their different forms. Clearly, we should support strong marriages and married couples, and remove impediments to marriage that discourage individuals who want to marry. But we ought to create these types of policies with our eyes open and not shut to the realities facing many families. Rather than focusing merely on getting individuals married regardless of whether there is a solid foundation, our focus ought to be on what it takes to make marriages work. To the extent that we want to assist low-income married couples who receive welfare, or are recent welfare leavers, we should concentrate on addressing the real problems that they face, such as removing TANF provisions that place additional burdens on married couples, and increasing the availability of transitional childcare, family and medical leave, affordable health care, and affordable housing. But we cannot limit our support only to married couple families who represent only a portion of all families. We have to promote strong, healthy families in whatever way they are constructed. Very few would disagree that having two parents in the home working together to provide a healthy and nurturing environment can be an ideal setting for children. But it is not the reality for many children. And, given that, we cannot conclude that it is the only environment in which children can prosper and grow. We must be willing to take a variety of steps to support low-income families headed by single parents to give their children the best chance to succeed. In addition, there are many families where grandparents, other relatives, and family friends are struggling to keep families together. We ought to do everything we can to strengthen those bonds and help those families stay intact and survive. III. Welfare policies must be designed to address the problems of families as they are and not only as we would like them to be. As we craft new welfare policies, we ought not to operate in a vacuum. Targeting benefits only at married couples will leave millions of hard-working single-parent families without adequate resources, exacerbating their already difficult circumstances. The stark reality is that married couple families are on the decline. If the Congress wants to try to reverse this trend through non-punitive, non-discriminatory policies, it should do so. But those policies should not be a substitute for providing supports to the families who have immediate needs that must be met. The most recent Census Bureau statistics reveal significant shifts in the different types of families in our country. (11) Less than a quarter of American households - 23.5% - are composed of traditional, "nuclear" families with two married parents living at home with children. The number of single-parent families is growing at a faster rate than married couple families. These numbers only confirm that family arrangements are becoming increasingly complex and the concept of what constitutes a family is changing. It is in this context that we must develop welfare policies that are responsive to the needs of different types of families living in poverty. Our efforts should be informed by an accurate, comprehensive understanding of the families being served, and by what we have learned about policies that work and policies that do not work. We already know from history that we have to exercise care in constructing policies that may impact how families compose themselves. Some have criticized the prior Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) system because there were marriage disincentives. To the extent that the old AFDC law may have had incentives that discouraged certain types of families, we ought not to repeat those same mistakes. Nor should we penalize families now because they followed the old rules by changing those rules in the middle of the game. One lesson that we should have learned from the past is that we must proceed with caution when crafting policies that affect families when they are at their most vulnerable. If we want to move families out of poverty, then we first have to be willing to understand the reality of their lives and develop policies that enable them to become economically secure, whatever their structure. We ought not to have disincentives to marriage, but we ought not to coerce individuals into getting married either. Equally important, we must not endorse policies that discriminate against certain types of families, nor should we oversimplify the problems of families living in poverty. The vast majority of single-parent families receiving TANF are headed by women, and they would be affected disproportionately by any policy that relegates them to "second-class family" status. Adopting policies that have the effect of discriminating against female-headed families in favor of married couples is unfair, unwise, and unnecessary. Denying supports to the families who often are most in need not only hurts families, but also ultimately will lead to more long-term costs as these families struggle to survive. More fundamentally, we cannot assume that the problems facing single-headed households living in poverty - whether headed by women or by men - will be solved simply by getting married. Marriage is not a panacea: there are a multitude of factors that lead to poverty in this country, we ought not to oversimplify them or ignore their complexities. If two parents are unemployed and have limited job skills, marriage alone may do little to solve that problem. In fact, such a marriage will undergo significant stress and is much more likely to dissolve. If we are committed to the goal of helping families move out of poverty, then first and foremost we have to be willing to provide concrete supports that can help make that dream a reality. A report released by the National Campaign for Jobs and Income, for example, revealed that many states have significant TANF surpluses even though many welfare clients cannot access much- needed supports like childcare. (12) It is critical that states provide basic supports to low-income families, and make investments in important strategies like the creation of livable wage jobs, so that families can have a realistic chance of achieving economic independence. And these basic supports should not be ignored in favor of largely unproven policies - such as paying clients to get married - that may not even scratch the surface of the underlying problems that clients confront on a daily basis. Conclusion These cautionary words about marriage formation policies in the context of welfare reform are not a condemnation of marriage, or an effort to discourage individuals who want to get married. It is precisely out of respect for what the institution of marriage should be that I reject outdated notions about which people are more deserving of support, and resist efforts to use marriage as the solution to other, more complicated problems. But most importantly, I urge you not to allow a discussion about marriage to divert attention from the task at hand - adopting concrete, comprehensive policies to provide all families in need with the supports they need to make a permanent transition from welfare to economic security.

LOAD-DATE: May 24, 2001, Thursday