Word: afdc
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...that anyone expects the creaky 50-year-old system of providing Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) and other welfare services to be + transformed overnight. The problems of training and finding jobs for welfare recipients -- teenage girls who drop out of school to have illegitimate children, to take the most stark example -- are immense. In the long run, money could be saved if a significant number of long-term welfare recipients could be placed in unsubsidized jobs and more absent fathers could be required to contribute to the support of children they have abandoned. But there is a problem...
...focus of the reform movement, and the central problem, is AFDC. It is not the only welfare program; the Reagan Administration has issued a much disputed count of 59 federally assisted plans that it considers welfare. Nor is AFDC the biggest; Medicaid accounts for nearly three times as much spending. But AFDC is the principal program that gives cash to people who are neither sick nor disabled; they qualify solely because they have children they cannot support. As such, it is the program that most people think of when they use the word welfare...
...AFDC began in 1935 as a little-noticed part of the Social Security Act; it was conceived as a program to tide widows and their children over until the Social Security survivors' fund could pay out claims. Expanded and made independent, AFDC has since mushroomed into a program that last year rang up $2 billion in federal, state and local administrative costs and dispensed an estimated $15.8 billion in benefits to 3.7 million families comprising 11 million people. Almost half of AFDC recipients these days are mothers who have never been married to the father of their children...
...about half of the states, families in which both a mother and a father are present can receive benefits, but in the other half only single-parent households qualify. Benefit levels vary widely: in Alabama, for example, a family of three gets about $4,000 a year in AFDC and food-stamp benefits; in Alaska such a family gets about $11,500. Some state officials feel that the system must be reformed on a nationwide basis so that recipients do not have an incentive to move to places where the benefits are more generous...
...recent years the nation has been conducting what amounts to an ad hoc experiment in discouraging welfare applicants. Under Reagan Administration prodding, states have tightened eligibility rules. Partly as a result, the number of AFDC families peaked at 3.9 million in 1981 and has declined slightly since. Benefit increases since 1970 have lagged so far behind inflation that the real value of combined federal and state AFDC grants has plummeted...