Food stamps reduce poverty

From the New York Times:

WASHINGTON — A new study by the Agriculture Department has found that food stamps, one of the country’s largest social safety net programs, reduced the poverty rate substantially during the recent recession. The food stamp program, formally known as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, reduced the poverty rate by nearly 8 percent in 2009, the most recent year included in the study, a significant impact for a social program whose effects often go unnoticed by policy makers.

To read the entire article, click here.

Delays in food stamps

WYPR-FM’s Maryland Morning with Sheilah Kast looked at Maryland’s inability to get food stamps to applicants in the wake of a Baltimore City circuit court’s ruling last week that state must comply with federal law and must design a plan to come in to compliance in 45 days.

“Case workers now have on average about 1,000 cases, double the number of cases last year,” said Maryland Legal Aid staff attorney Sandra Brushart. “There’s a backlog, but also a multitude of problems. I have clients who have turned in paperwork three, four and five times.”

To hear the segment, click here.

Fighting hunger in Maryland

Maryland Morning’s Sheilah Kast looked at the rising numbers of people listed as “food insecure” on a segment aired on WYPR-FM earlier this week. Interviewed in the nearly 15-minute-long segment was staff attorney Sandra Brushart, who works in Maryland Legal Aid’s Baltimore County office in Towson. Brushart spoke about the difficulties people face when applying for food stamps and other benefits at Maryland Department of Social Services offices: “I’ve had clients turn in the same paperwork three or four times. It is very scary. If you ever to to [DSS] waiting rooms, it’s standing-room-only, there’s a sense of tension. Security guards get called if people get upset.”

To hear the segment, click here.

Are Maryland agencies that serve the poor ready to handle the stimulus influx?

Acting chief counsel Peter Sabonis was interviewed today on WYPR-FM’s Maryland Morning with Sheilah Kast about President Obama’s stimulus package and whether agencies that serve low-income Marylanders are ready for the influx of federal funds. “We’re seeing a state human resources infrastructure … that’s skeletal at times,” Sabonis said. “We’ve seen a steady decline over the last seven years in the number of state workers … as the number of problems increase–long waits, documents lost, supervisors not returning phone calls.”  Sabonis also talked about food stamp recertification, a routine process that usually allows for smooth transitions as people reapply for the benefit every six months. “But those transitions aren’t there anymore,” Sabonis said. “There aren’t enough [state] workers. Our clients have to rob Peter to pay Paul, they pull out money meant to pay utilities and use it to buy groceries, they start using food pantries. Our clients have to scramble. If there’s more of a demand on the system, we’re going to see if the state infrastructure, which is already weakened, can handle it.” To hear the interview, click here (scroll down to February 20).

Legal Aid responds to op-ed on welfare reform

Maryland Legal Aid’s Peter Sabonis responds to a recent Sun op-ed on welfare reform:

The state of Maryland may deserve praise for the way it handled welfare reform, but none of it for the reasons cited by Gary MacDougal (“The Welfare Reform Model,” Baltimore Sun, Sept. 8).

MacDougal and his libertarian think tank examined the change in unemployment, poverty, teenage birth rates and Temporary Assistance to Needy Families caseloads from 1996 to 2006 in all states, and put Maryland near the head of the class for “poverty reduction.”

Then, after determining the presence of seven policies “known to encourage self-sufficiency” (including welfare sanctions, family cap provisions, and work requirements) and subjectively evaluating most of these, the think tank ranked Maryland number one in welfare reform success.

Fortunately, welfare reform policy in Maryland is informed by far more than this superficial analysis.

Since 1996, the University of Maryland School of Social Work has, at the behest of the state, engaged in the most comprehensive longitudinal study of those who exit the rolls (“welfare leavers”), examining post-exit employment data, welfare recidivism, and other public assistance participation (including Medical Assistance).

This wealth of information indicates that roughly half of “welfare leavers” are employed in the calendar quarters immediately following welfare exit. Even more encouraging is the fact that work participation levels increased as time passed, as did earnings.

The “sobering reality,” however, as the latest report indicates, “is that, even a decade after leaving welfare … the average earnings of working adults are still less than the poverty level for a family of three” (“Life After Welfare #12,) Univ. of Md. School of Social Work, p. 18 ).

Putting aside the limitations of the antiquated federal poverty level, these workers should be lifted above poverty by the assistance that includes and is targeted for the working poor: food stamps and the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC).

Maryland’s food stamp participation rate is shameful compared to other states. For the last ten years, the state has ranked near the bottom of all—enrolling a little more than 56 percent of those who are eligible for the program, which extends to 130 percent of poverty.

The “welfare leaver” studies show that food stamp participation by those exiting welfare is more likely compared to other low-income groups—but only in the two quarters immediately following exit.

After that, food stamp participation rates drop steadily—to the extent that less than one in three of those who exited welfare in 1996 now participate.

EITC participation rates are worse, and this is where MacDougal’s report is valuable. Using data from 2004 (the last year the IRS made public state-by-state participation ratios), MacDougal shows that 73 percent of EITC dollars remain unclaimed in Maryland. This is typical for most states.

The reasons why low-income persons do not maintain food stamp eligibility or file tax returns that would net them EITC refunds are many and multi-faceted. MacDougal’s explanation for this, provided relative to EITC in his report, is typical and cynical—poor people don’t know about the benefits and “since the tax credit flows directly to individuals and not through welfare bureaucracies, there is little incentive…to invest in public education programs” (“Welfare Reform after Ten Years: A State-by-State Analysis,” p.75).

This conclusion is undermined by our food stamp experience. There, dollars do flow to the state, as the federal government picks up the program’s administrative costs. The “welfare leaver” reports dispel the myth that the poor are ignorant of the benefit. Despite this, participation declines over time.

Further, MacDougal asks the bureaucracy to do more—while Maryland is giving it less. According to the Maryland Budget and Tax Policy Institute, the Department of Human Resources and the Department of Health and Mental Hygiene have lost 1,333 and 1,042 full-time positions respectively over the last six years.

The institute shows that Maryland is clearly disinvesting in its human services infrastructure, relative to other state agencies.

This comes at a time when the federal government is upping the ante on welfare reform. Legislation in 2006 reauthorizing the program imposed even more onerous work requirements on states, most of which are seeing the current recession wipe away their prior reductions in the unemployment, poverty and teenage birth rates.

The issues of the working poor, however, involve only half of those who leave welfare in Maryland.

The “welfare leaver” studies show that the group that does not find employment is split almost evenly between those who return to the rolls and those who are never heard from again (although there is evidence this latter group remains linked to food stamps and their children, most likely, to Medical Assistance).

Much remains to be done in welfare reform—both on behalf of the working poor and those who are not employed. Maryland can accept MacDougal’s praise. But wise policy-makers should turn their attention from him and his cohorts to the ones that are contained in the “welfare leaver” studies.