Requiring work requires child care

The Senate voted yesterday -- 78 to 20 -- to add more than $1 billion a year over the next five years to funding for child care for TANF recipients.

That overwhelming vote in the Republican-controlled Senate in the face of opposition from a Republican White House justifies the headline of yesterday's report by Robert Pear in The New York Times: "Defying Bush, Senate Increases Child Care Funds for the Poor."

The Bush administration objected to the increase in child care money, saying it was not needed. ...

Despite the White House objections, 31 Republicans, including the Senate majority leader, Bill Frist of Tennessee, joined 46 Democrats and one independent in voting for the child care proposal, offered by Senators Olympia J. Snowe, Republican of Maine, and Christopher J. Dodd, Democrat of Connecticut, as part of a bill to update the 1996 law.

Members of both parties said they voted for the increase because Congress could not require welfare recipients to work longer hours without more child care.

"If the aim of welfare reform is to move people off the welfare rolls and onto payrolls, if we want families to leave welfare and to stay off welfare, we have to provide them with affordable child care," Ms. Snowe said. "Only one in 7, or 15 percent, of eligible children are now receiving assistance with the cost of day care."

Mr. Dodd said, "You can't get from welfare to work without child care."

Snowe and Dodd are correct. TANF recipients are, by definition, women who have sole care of their children. If we require these women to leave home for work, we need also to provide someone to look after these children in their mothers' absence.

All of this highlights one of the stranger aspects of the work requirements arising from the 1996 welfare reforms. One way of satisfying these work requirements is to get a job in child care. This is a fairly common path for many of the women "moving from welfare to work" in accord with the new requirements. What this means of course is that caring for another woman's child during the day qualifies as "work," but caring for your own child does not.

(Imagine two young widows, next-door neighbors, each with two children. In 1996, they would both be eligible to receive AFDC, and both women could stay at home to care for their own children. In 1997, under TANF, these women would be required to work, and so each opens an in-home day care center and they swap kids for the day. The former situation is condemned as lazy dependency. The latter is praised as bootstrap entrepreneurship.)

Senator Orrin G. Hatch, Republican of Utah, said the extra money for child care "goes hand in hand with an increase in the work requirements."

Yes it does. Without such funding, the work requirements ask these women to make bricks without straw, they would "tie up heavy burdens, hard to bear, and lay them on the shoulders of others."

Note, however, that the House version of this bill includes a much smaller amount of funding for child care. Despite the overwhelming 78-20 vote, Senate amendments have a history of being stripped away in committee, particularly when they face White House opposition. I'll reserve my applause for Hatch and Frist until I see what the final version looks like coming out of committee.

Comments

[The Navigator]

Fred,
Don't be in any rush to commend these people. The Republican proposals in general are extremely regressive and threaten to impose impossible burdens on states and poor mothers. Child care funding is an essential element of a decent welfare system but it's not sufficient all by itself.
Those who can get jobs easily have already left the rolls; the numbers show that those who are left are having a harder time finding work, and are doing so mostly with patient, flexible programs. Now Bush and his allies want to tighten work requirements even beyond what the typical middle class single working mom does in the U.S. anyway.
The GOP spent the Clinton years saying that the states knew welfare policy best and that TANF was a great solution. Now, they all say it's worked brilliantly, but they need to revise it to slap on a bunch of new, stricter federal requirements.