Single mothers’ hardships

From the article, “Effects of unemployment and underemployment on material hardship in single-mother families,” in Children and Youth Services Review, comes this list of hardships recorded by single mothers on the Survey of Income and Program Participation from the mid-2000s.

For context, you can situate the mid-2000s on this trend-mashup I made:

Sources: Employment from Table FG5 here ; TANF caseloads from these reports; poverty from Census, here.

Employment down (after rising in the 1990s), poverty up, TANF non-responsive; lots of financial, health, food and housing hardship.

 

 

Cash welfare down, food stamps, disability, marriage fiasco and extreme poverty up

In the New York Times, Jason DeParle has a very good article on the struggle to survive among poor single mothers, post welfare-reform, during the recession. Bottom line: Although millions more families are receiving food stamps, millions have lost benefits they really needed, and the crisis for people at the very bottom has reached extreme proportions as government turns away from their needs.

There are good experts and links in the story. I would only suggest two other things to consider, with a couple quick links.

Disability

First, among those worst affected are single mothers with health problems. Getting disability benefits is much harder than it used to be to get cash welfare (AFDC/TANF), and as the cash welfare support has been reformed away, employment opportunities and  disability benefits have not risen enough to keep many of them afloat. I explored this in a policy brief back in 2006, and haven’t updated the numbers since, but I’m still pretty confident in the conclusion:

Among single mothers with disabilities in the United States, the rock of disability has met the hard place of welfare reform, and the result is official poverty rates of 56% (only marginally minimized by household extension), employment rates below 1-in-5, and an increasing tendency to surrender residential independence for basic survival or wellbeing. For this group of about 700,000 mothers, more than 20% of whom live below half the poverty line, only sustained policy attention from government and, ultimately, substantial transfers of wealth, will lead to adequate standards of living.

Marriage fiascos

The other note is that, while welfare benefits have been slashed and material suffering has increased for the very poor, the government has embarked on the ridiculous fiasco of “marriage promotion,” which has had no demonstrable benefit for poor people who aren’t married. This is not just a plaything. Funded out of the TANF program budget, it has taken hundreds of millions of dollars worth of support out of the pockets of former welfare recipients.

That’s something to keep in mind as you read about poor mothers trying to eke out survival in today’s story.

Related reading

• Most recent in the series on welfare numbers
• The food stamp spike meme
• Tracking poor mothers pain with Google searches

When Gingrich used Black poverty to hype the coming apocalypse

The news about Ron Paul’s racism reminds me how many American politicians — if they have been around since the 1980s or 1990s — have such racial skeletons in their political closets. Even when they don’t reach the level of explicit racism of some of Ron Paul’s old newsletters.

Back then, poverty, crime and welfare — when paired with reference to “cities,” the “underclass” or single mothers — were all racial code regularly used to motivate Whites to oppose government support for the poor and bolster the policy of mass incarceration. With the fall in crime rates and the dismantling of welfare — and the rise of Latino immigration as a substitute boogeyman — the tone has changed and these issues have lost some of their racial salience.

Paul’s newsletter, in reaction to the Los Angeles riots of 1992, joked, ”Order was only restored in L.A. when it came time for the blacks to pick up their welfare checks,” according to the Weekly Standard.

In a fundraising letter written about 1993 and signed by him, according to Reuters, Paul not only warned of a coming “race war” in U.S. cities, but also this:

I fear there will be welfare riots in the big cities. Massive unemployment. The destruction of wealth. The erosion of personal liberties. Vicious economic controls. The exaltation of envy.

And so on: From welfare riots to government repression (see “jack-booted government thugs“), via “the exaltation of envy” (which I guess refers to poor people coming after the middle class).

Racism is one thing, but the political racism of that period — that directed against Blacks — focused on crime, violence and welfare, so much that these issues became racial issues. Ruth Sidel argued that, in the post-Cold War 1990s, poor single mothers — especially Black single mothers — shouldered much of the load of the American right’s apocalyptic tendencies.

Now, as Newt Gingrich has joined the congregation of people attempting to share the righteous limelight exposing Paul’s racism, it reminded me of a quote from Gingrich I’ve been using for years in my Family and Stratification courses, from 1995:

No civilization can survive for long with 12-year-olds having babies, 15-year-olds killing one another, 17-year-olds dying AIDS, and 18-year-olds getting diplomas they can’t read.

That was part of a series of columns published in various places, as adapted excerpts from his book To Renew America. (Here it is in the Gainesville Sun, August 6, 1995.)

In the same column, Gingrich wrote that, “our civilization is decaying, with an underclass of poverty and violence growing in our midst.” He didn’t say, “Poor Blacks pose an existential threat to White America,” but he might as well have.

Google index of poor mothers’ pain

In light of the mean-spirited Obama-wants-everyone-on-food-stamps meme, and the Heritage Foundation’s mocking attack on poor people as air-conditioned, Xbox-loving couch potatoes, let’s consider something else about poor single parents — especially poor mothers: their Google searches.

That’s right, in addition to refrigerators, apparently almost everyone in America today has Internet access — often at their local public libraries.

And yet they still complain about their little problems. They type searches into Google like, “help paying electric bill,” “hair falling out,” and even — presumably so they can laugh at the poor suckers who actually work for a living — “walmart jobs.”

The old “misery index” was just unemployment plus inflation. Maybe the new index to watch is Google searches for “help for single mothers.” Here is the trend for that search, along with one of the searches that most closely follows its trend, “walmart jobs.” The temporal correlation between these two — the amount they rise and fall together over time — is .96 on a scale of 0 to 1.

You can see the full list of 100 searches most correlated with “help for single mothers” by following this link.

After the poverty report came out last month, comedian Andy Borowitz tweeted, “One in six Americans is living in poverty, but the other five are more concerned about the changes to Facebook.” Whether you’re in the first group or the latter one — or neither — it’s worth pausing for a minute to think about the lives of people Googling things like, “help with rent,” “iud side effects,” “cheap dinner ideas” and “get a credit card with bad credit.” (The searches all correlate with “help for single mothers” at .94 or higher.)

A similar list comes up in the correlations with searches for “food stamps.” Here it is graphed with “housekeeping jobs,” correlated at .97:

The list of correlated searches is similar, including a preponderance of women’s health terms (“clots during period”) economic crises (“light bill”), and ideas for climbing out of an economic hole (“medical assistant jobs,” “dispatcher jobs”).

On the plus side, both of these trends peaked in mid-2010, for now. So maybe things have stopped getting worse quite so fast. Or maybe they just lost their Internet access at the library due to budget cuts.

Am I being selective, not reporting the searches like “loving this cool TV,” and “food stamps rule”? Not intentionally, but you never know. The links to the searches are above, and the data is free.

Find that food stamp spike graphic meme

Classic axis abuse, and a memetic mystery unsolved.

My friend Danielle pointed me toward this graph from Michelle Malkin‘s blog yesterday. (I never heard of her, so I’ll use her identification: “mother, wife, blogger, conservative syndicated columnist, author, and Fox News Channel contributor.”)

For Malkin, this is evidence of “the Obama FoodStampCorps’s mission to enroll countless more food-stamp beneficiaries.”

From her own link trail, it looks like Malkin may have gotten the graph here, though in an earlier post she linked to a version here, so who knows. Trying to find the real source of it, I quickly discovered that it has been posted dozens, maybe hundreds, of times in different versions as new monthly data become available.

Case report

So this is the first case report on a food stamp spike graphic meme. Until I can examine a live version I won’t know for sure, but it seems to trigger a proto-oncogene that is carried on the conservative cultural-chromosome. (It comes with commentary like this: “Worst. Economy. Ever. Also, not coincidentally … Worst. President. Ever.”)

The graphic is usually credited to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), to USDA or both (as in this above example). But although SNAP publishes these data, I don’t believe SNAP produced the figure. Conservative bloggers attribute it to SNAP, presumably because whoever makes the graph puts that label on it, but they don’t say where they got it.

If someone else can trace this, I would love to know who produces it. Clue: the file is often called something like “food-stamps.png”. You can see a lot of them by image-Googling this: [food-stamps.png snap "food stamp participation"]

Anyway, the obvious problem is classic x-and-y axis truncation, which we’ve seen before. The lowest point on the chart is 26 million, and the earliest point is in 2007. The same source includes data back to 1969, so it’s easy to widen the angle (using years instead of months):

Source: My graph from SNAP enrollment data and Census population estimates.

The x-y distortion is what gives the meme its distinctive appeal to the conservative cultural-oncogene, which strongly favors simple linear forms. The meme’s molecular structure allows it to snap into what is normally a relatively-harmless gullibility gene, triggering uncontrolled replication. Here’s an illustration:

Showing the additional ranges on the graph doesn’t change the fact that Food Stamps really is serving a record number of people, and a record percentage of the population. The situation is dire, and of course has gotten worse during Obama’s term.

Partisan-wise, however, the wider graph shows that Food Stamp rolls increased by almost 11 million under President Bush, rising in all but one year of his presidency. So after the 2001 recession, unlike the previous two recessions, there was no major fall back in participation. By the end of Bill Clinton’s term, in contrast, Food Stamp numbers were back down below where they had been in the 1980s.

As a smaller point, in the narrow time range of the meme version graph, you can’t see that the number served has risen proportionately faster than the percentage served. In terms of the change shown on the graph it is noticeable: from the previous peak in 1994, the number served has increased by a multiple of 1.6, while the percentage served is up just 1.3-times.

Conclusion

With its simplistic storyline, welfare-state target, and official-source labeling, this graphic meme is well-adapted to its host environment: gullible, mean-spirited members of the blogosphere’s conservative echo chambers.

The simple blog post I have laid out here might be able to block the successful replication of the meme, but prospects for producing a delivery system capable of reaching the target are bleak in the absence of corporate funding for research and development. Like other promising cures, it may never see the clinical light of day.

Sheesh. I think I need a vacation.

In absence of welfare, gov’t delivers poor children to big pharma

Now our shambolic welfare system drives children into the arms of big pharma.

Now we learn from the Boston Globe that poor mothers and their children are increasingly turning to federal disability support for children. In the process, which requires a diagnosis, more of their children are being diagnosed (and medicated) as mental health patients, creating a web of perverse incentives — the kind we don’t seem to impose on the rich (see Rock v. Hard Place).

Caring for children is a job, but when it’s not paid it doesn’t put food on the table, or a table in the house (or a roof on the house). So a single parent needs a paid job and help (paid or not) with the children — without welfare or other income source. As we know, welfare is not there for poor single-parent families, and wasn’t even before during the recession.

A few years ago, I belatedly noticed that disabilities throw off this indelicate getting-by work-family balance — by increasing the care needed and reducing the capacity to work. And, unsurprisingly but little-noticed, the process of caring for children with disabilities includes a very strong set of mechanisms sorting them into living arrangements under the care of women.

As the old welfare system was shedding its wards, women with disabilities were falling through the cracks: more likely to be in poverty, relatively less likely to be employed, and less likely to be receiving state support of any kind — and increasingly turning to extended household living arrangements.

It turns out some of those welfare-receiving single mothers had disabilities, but the old AFDC/TANF had been easier to qualify for than disability support (which may require — for a diagnosis, at least — decent health care), and many were not successfully making the transition (even though states were pushing them toward disability, to meet federal pressure for shrinking “welfare” rolls). In that paper, I concluded:

U.S. social policy does not proceed from the assumption that unpaid carework, and care for children in particular, is an essential public good. Therefore, the practice of caring for children instead of working for pay is easily classified as “idleness,” and public compensation for the time and effort expended is considered charity or demeaned as dependence. … Among single mothers with disabilities in the United States, the rock of disability has met the hard place of welfare reform, and the result is official poverty rates of 56% 32(only marginally minimized by household extension), employment rates below 1-in-5, and an increasing tendency to surrender residential independence for basic survival or wellbeing. For this group of about 700,000 mothers, more than 20% of whom live below half the poverty line, only sustained policy attention … [etc. etc.].

For some reason the authorities haven’t yet taken my advice. Must be because we didn’t have blogs back then.

Poverty, welfare, and not

The 2009 poverty update, with caseloads again.

Updating the latest poverty data with the latest welfare data, we see:

1. The number of single-parent families in poverty has been more than twice the number receiving TANF since 2007. This chart updates and corrects a previous one, back in the welfare thread here:

2. The number of families receiving TANF support has peaked for now. This goes three months further than the annual average above:

The peak in TANF caseloads could reflect:

1. Families getting kicked off because of term limits
2. States getting more strict or punitive because budgets are inadequate.
3. Maybe the problems weren’t that bad after all, and the recession really did end last year.
4. Or?

Poverty, single mothers and race/ethnicity

Confusing the facts with the issues.

The other day I picked on the Heritage Foundation’s post, “Poverty Explodes, Root Cause Is the Collapse of Marriage.” In that post, they conclusively demonstrated two things: first, that children of single parents are more likely to be poor; and second, that more children are born to unmarried parents now than in the past. The dots they didn’t connect were between family structure and the child-poverty “explosion.”

In the comments on the post, Jay Livingtson reasonably asked, “Why didn’t he add a line showing rates of child poverty to show that it tracks with the Death of Marriage?”, and Wanda pointed out, “I don’t see that you refuted the information in any way.” I didn’t empirically refute the ideological claim of the HF guy because I didn’t show the relationship between child poverty and single-parenthood.

Looking at the graph below, which Jay asked for, the intellectual-history reason seems clear — his is an old collapsing-society story, that hasn’t been in the news much because the association broke down in the 1980s, when the news was all about single parents, crack, homicide, and welfare. Ten years ago I used to assign this book by Ruth Sidel, which put it all together very nicely.) She

shows how America, in its search for a post-Cold War enemy, has turned inward to target single mothers on welfare, and how politicians have scapegoated and stigmatized female-headed families both as a method of social control and to divert attention from the severe problems that Americans face. She reveals the real victims of poverty–the millions of children who suffer from societal neglect, inferior education, inadequate health care, hunger, and homelessness.

Anyway, it was fashionable in the 1990s to line up the trend toward unmarried parenting with any other time series showing things getting worse. You can see why they don’t do that so much any more:

Source: My graph from the Census Bureau’s poverty and living arrangements data. These are spreadsheet files — (if you think I’m messing with the data, feel free to show me another interpretation — I’ll post it here.)*

The rise in child poverty in the1970s and early 1980s did not persist, while the single-parent living situation kept going up (similarly, crack-use and homicide declined, too). It looks like the culprits after the 1980s are recessions, and the improvement is concentrated in the miracle 1990s, driven by some combination of economic growth, the expansion of the Earned Income Tax Credit, and welfare reform forcing single mothers to “work.”

Of course, single parents are still more likely to live in poverty. One thing I liked about the old welfare system was that at least it gave some money to poor people. But that was then.

For a recent review of the facts and policies around single parents, welfare, and poverty, I recommend an article in the 2010 Annual Review of Sociology by Sandra Danziger. Since it’s behind a pay wall, I’ll fair-use a couple of the figures for you here.

This figure shows only single mothers ages 18-54 with only high school diplomas or less education. The economic boom and/or radical reforms are apparent in the late 1990s, as these mothers increased their employment rates while falling drastically off welfare. (The economic boom theory is bolstered by the rise in “no work/no welfare” and the downward slide of employment after 2000. )

The next figure is for those who thought I didn’t do enough with race/ethnicity last time. This figure nicely shows both the trends in child poverty rates and the inequalities by race/ethnicity.

In particular, several readers of the Sociological Images repost of a figure I did on income-to-needs distributions thought it a problem that I had neglected to include Asians. I did that because of my view that they are not well captured in the Current Population Survey (CPS), too small and diverse and geographically concentrated in ways that intersect with national origin and mess up the sampling. (For example, they are very concentrated in places with high incomes and costs of living, like Hawaii and parts of the West.) Anyway, Asian child poverty is on here since the mid-1980s. My skepticism about the data is reinforced by the big blips around the Decennial Census years of 1990 and 2000, when the statistical weights in the CPS are adjusted to reflect the more accurate national count.

*The drop in single parents in 2007 reflects a change in the definition: before 2007 Census only identified one parent, then reported there were two parents if that person was married. Now they identify two parents whether or not they are married. So instead of “single parents” for 2007 forward, it is really counting “one parent.”

Charting welfare numbers

Keeping a trend in perspective.

The sociologist down the hall pointed out that yesterday’s chart gave the impression of a whopping increase in TANF (Temporary Assistance to Needy Families) support for poor families. But I have been complaining since December 2008 that the welfare system is not responding adequately to the recession’s effects on poor single mothers and their children. I wrote then:

We now appear headed back toward a national increase in TANF cases. But the restrictive rules on work requirements and time limits are keeping many families that need assistance out of the program…. If the government can extend unemployment benefits during the crisis, why not impose a moratorium on booting people from TANF?

So it does seem contradictory that I would post a chart yesterday showing a huge increase in TANF family recipients, and continue the same complaint. So let me put it in better perspective. It’s a good lesson for me on the principles of graphing data, which I have made a point of picking on others for.

Height and width

There were two problems with yesterday’s chart. First, the vertical scale only ran from 1.6 million to 1.9 million families. Second, the horizontal scale only ran for 26 months. I’ll correct each aspect in turn to show their effects. Here’s yesterday’s chart:

It sure looks like a dramatic turnaround. And any turnaround is a big deal. I wrote last year:

What should be striking in this is that the rolls are increasing even as the punitive program rules continue to pull aid from families according to the draconian term limits dreamed up by Gingrich, ratified by Clinton and endorsed by Obama — 2 years continuous, 5 years lifetime in the program. The current stimulus package includes more money for TANF, to help cover an expected growth in families applying — but no rule change to permit families to keep their support in the absence of available jobs.

But, run the vertical axis down to zero, and the same trend is not so dramatic:

Now the big bounce since July 2008 is put in perspective. We’ve seen a 16% increase since that bottom point, but the response seems much more modest in light of the size and impact of the Great Recession we’ve come to know.

In fact, though, the longer-term view underscores how paltry that response has really been. Back the chart up to 1996, and you can see how small the increase has been compared with the pre-draconian reform period:

All three images are correct, but their emphasis is different. To me, the important take-home message from this trend is, “That’s it? The greatest economic recession since the Great Depression, and our welfare response was that measly uptick? Our system really is a shambles.”

One important issue remains, however, and that is some measure of the need for welfare. So consider the number of single-parent families below the poverty line, compared with the number of families receiving TANF (formerly AFDC):

Now the story is much more clear.

After welfare reform in 1996, the number of families receiving welfare was cut by half in just a few years. At the same time, however, the number in poverty dropped. Since then, as the number in poverty has increased, the number on welfare has not. The two trends appeared to be uncoupled through most of the 2000s. In the last year we’ve seen the first increase in TANF numbers since 1996, but nowhere near enough to meet the increase in poor single-parent families.*

It is still the case that, although the stimulus bill allocated more money to TANF, the punitive rules and term limits have not been changed. So the system does not address longer-term poverty — something we should expect to see much more of in the next few years.

*We don’t have the official 2009 poverty rates yet, since they are compiled from a survey done in March 2010, to be released this fall.

Clarification Oct. 6, 2010: The blue line in that last figure is labeled “Single-Parent Families in Poverty,” but I noticed it’s actually all poor families with unmarried householders, whether they have children or not (so, would include people alone in poverty, or adults with their adult relatives, etc.). So it’s not the best comparison, because a lot of them are not eligible for TANF. However, the trends are about the same if you do draw the line for just parents of children under 18. I’ll get to that soon, and you should be able to find it from here by clicking on the tag for welfare.

Welfare system in shambles

After careful consideration, I’ve changed my assessment from “welfare doesn’t keep up” to “welfare system in shambles.” The ratio of harm to help is atrocious. Harms include dehumanization and degradation for the would-beneficiaries, who are a small proportion of the struggling poor, helped almost not enough to make it worth it.

The latest news is that, as states slash child care subsidies — along with (almost) everything else — single mothers are signing up for welfare because their welfare-to-work programs left them with jobs but no childcare. In a uniquely American perversion of the concept of “welfare,” the NYTimes reports, using one woman’s search for childcare as an example, “Her effort to avoid welfare through work has brought her to welfare’s door.”

As unemployment continues to affect poor women disproportionately, and those without work experience are competing with more skilled workers who have been laid off, the demands on the welfare system are increasing — and spending for children is getting a shrinking share of the federal budget.

Source: Various tables around here. (These reports seem to revise previous months now and then, but not by very much.)

Lest you think that increase means the system is reaching those in need, note there are about 5 million single-parent families living below the official poverty line, and about 10 million below twice the poverty line.

It bears repeating: “Given the onerous restrictions, stingy payments, and heavy social stigma, this truly reflects the desperation of those with nowhere else to turn.”

In a few months, the recession-boom cohort of TANF recipients — who started the run-up in caseloads that began in July 2008 — will start hitting their two-year term limits. Woe is them.