The feds dipped their toes in this approach for a long time before adopting a major welfare reform law under President Bill Clinton. Under it, Ohio limited cash assistance to three years, except in special hardship cases.
Now the federal government may hit Ohio with a financial penalty of $136 million — to be subtracted from federal aid — for not having enough recipients on the path to taking care of themselves.
The feds’ point is not basically that welfare recipients aren’t finding jobs. It is not that the three-year limit on getting benefits is being exceeded. It’s that the state and counties aren’t ensuring that 50 percent of recipients are either in some sort of job while receiving benefits or in job training, or in some other way preparing for self-sufficiency.
The statewide average is more like 25 percent.
Counties complain they don’t have the money to meet the goals, and that placing aid recipients into jobs simultaneously has become harder. The Great Recession is at work, increasing the number of people out of work while hurting budgets.
And yet Ohio is one of only three states that failed to meet the federal requirements for three consecutive years, according to federal figures reported by The Columbus Dispatch. The others were California and Maine.
Everybody knows about California’s extraordinary budget problems. But the feds have a right to ask what’s special about Ohio.
The economy does not seem to be the entire answer. The state failed to meet the standard even in 2007 and 2008, before the recession really hit.
The feds are talking more about effort and focus than anything. And the official position of the Ohio Department of Job and Family Services is that the state and counties have to get better at administering welfare reform.
Nobody will be surprised to learn that the Kasich administration is not saying that the problem is that the counties don’t get enough money.
A department spokesman says the numbers of people in the right tracks have been improving since December; but they’re still in the neighborhood of 25 percent.
By all accounts, much is wrong. Said Joel Potts, executive director of the Ohio Job and Family Services Directors Association, “People can come on the system and go off without getting any assistance finding a job or stabilizing their lives.”
Given that reality, some say that welfare reform is simply a failure. But is this failure of reform or simply a rejection of it?
Welfare departments should not be reduced to the old function of simply getting distressed people from day to day. And the punitive aspect of welfare reform — the limit on benefits — should not be the only aspect of the changes to survive.
Ohio and Washington need to figure out why Ohio hasn’t kept to the plan if other places have.
Cox News Service