Editor’s Note: Sean Ericson was formerly employed by AmeriCorps and worked at Pillsbury United Communities (PUC) under Ethan Neal’s supervision as part of his AmeriCorps service.
How has our country’s social safety net changed since 1993?
Up until a couple of weeks ago, I would’ve told you that, while it may have increased since then, “welfare reform” decimated benefit programs in the 1990s.
But, a recent report from the New York Times and Child Trends called my assumptions into question. As the Times put it, the reality is, starting in the 1990s, the safety net “at once became more stringent and more generous.” Pre-existing programs, especially those that helped families where the parents didn’t have jobs, were cut. But also during this period, other programs expanded, especially ones targeted at families with working parents.
The report found from 1993 to 2019, child poverty fell by 59%. In 1993, about 28% of kids lived in poverty. In 2019, that number was 11%.
This was driven by a combination of different things.
“We found two main reasons for this decline,” Renee Ryberg, a sociologist and demographer who was one of the lead authors of the report, said. “One is a healthy economy, and, complementary to that, there’s also tremendous growth in the social safety net and its role in protecting kids from poverty.”
For instance, unemployment was much lower in 2019 than 1993. More single mothers were in the labor force, and some state minimum wages were higher.
While these economic factors, as well as demographic changes, were vital to explaining the decline, safety net programs also played an important role. According to the study, safety net programs, such as the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC), Social Security and food stamps (SNAP), played a much bigger role in alleviating child poverty in 2019 than in 1993.
This decline has been consistent across different places and groups.
“We found that the decline in child poverty was remarkably consistent,” Ryberg said. “There was a decline in child poverty in all 50 states and D.C. There were similar rates of declines in child poverty across almost all subgroups of children.”
However, their methodology is not perfect. Due to the limitations of the data set, some of the outcomes may be inaccurate. The impact of some programs is overestimated, while others are underestimated.
“It is standard practice, and it’s the best we have,” Ryberg said. “There’s definitely room for improvement in these simulations. They’re incredibly complicated. And I think that’s definitely an area for future research.”
Another caveat to the report is that, while child poverty has declined consistently in different groups, that doesn’t mean that inequalities between groups have gone away.
“In 1993, Black and Hispanic kids, and kids in single-parent families, were about three times as likely to live in poverty as their peers,” Ryberg said. “And this was still the case in 2019.”
This study shows that the EITC can be a very helpful program. But, one-fifth of the people who are eligible for this tax credit don’t claim it and are not accounted for in Child Trends’ simulation. And, even if they know about the program and apply, it can be burdensome, from complex forms to in-person appointments that don’t take people’s work schedules into account.
Once people are approved for the EITC, they might have to deal with even more paperwork. EITC recipients are about as likely to be audited by the IRS as the top 1% of taxpayers.
As the report shows, the EITC can be a powerful tool for fighting child poverty. But I think it could be even more powerful if we made it easier to access.
Conservative commentator Oren Cass has hailed this report as evidence that the imposition of work requirements on welfare programs was effective. Ryberg said the EITC can “pull…people into the workforce,” because “the more income you earn up to a certain threshold, the more you get in the tax credit.”
Ryberg said the role of work is one of the most important things scholars are debating. However, she and her colleagues “did not set out to answer this question of work versus the safety net.” Others have done the research, though, and there isn’t one clear answer.
One issue facing recipients of safety net programs is the so-called benefit cliff. A benefit cliff is when people receive more income through working, but then that makes them ineligible for the benefits they had been receiving.
Ethan Neal is the director of food systems at Pillsbury United Communities. He talked about his past experience trying to help adults with special needs get employment.
“Even if we wanted them to get full time work, and they could work full time, it would then throw them off Medicaid, it would then throw them out of low-income housing,” Neal said of some of his clients.
Some, he said, “were being forced into living in poverty to be able to accept the benefits that came with that.”
It’s not just in his previous work, either.
“I continue to see that with folks we work with in the food shelves,” he said, adding that about 60% of PUC’s food shelf clients have children.
The problem with benefit cliffs also ties back into the question of administrative burden. According to the National Coalition of State Legislatures, one reason for sudden benefit cutoffs is that recipients don’t understand the rules, or the rules aren’t transparent.
Neal also said safety net programs make his job easier. “Every dollar that we invest in SNAP and WIC is a better dollar spent than in a food shelf.”
However, some of PUC’s clients don’t qualify for these programs because of their immigration status. Neal said PUC works with organizations like the Volunteer Lawyers Network to try to help undocumented people obtain documentation. On the other hand, many PUC clients need help with refugee resettlement.
Ryberg said one of the changes that happened from 1993 to 2019 was the introduction of immigrant exclusion criteria to some safety net programs, criteria which aren’t always taken into account by simulations like Child Trends’. She also said, according to their findings, kids in immigrant families were 1.7 times as likely to live in poverty as kids in non-immigrant families.
Neal said a majority of people who come through the food shelf are already employed. It’s not just about whether people have jobs, he said, but the quality of those jobs.
“What is the employment that the folks in our neighborhood are able to get?” he asked.
“While there is reason to pause and celebrate this historic decline in child poverty, the work’s not over,” Ryberg said. “Millions of kids still live in poverty.”
But, the research has made clear what works to reduce child poverty, she said.
“First, we need to ensure that work is a viable option for families to support themselves. And we can do that through higher minimum wages that pay the bills, affordable, accessible childcare, so people can work and universal paid family and medical leave,” Ryberg said. “And then, when work is not a viable option, in terms of economic downturns, we also need to make sure we have an equitable social safety net so that all children have something to fall back on in times of need.”
A lot of this stuff can sound wonky, or make your eyes glaze over.
But, I want to come back to why this is important. The child poverty rate isn’t just a number on a spreadsheet. Fluctuations in that number make the difference between whether real, human children go to bed hungry or have a healthy dinner. It’s the difference between sleeping in a warm room or on the snowy street. It is life and death.