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Key To Welfare Reform? Get A Job

Tarren Bragdon in a 2010 file photo. Bragdon, CEO of the Foundation for Government Accountability, told Congress this week that recent experience at the state level showed that the best way to get people off welfare was to get them back to work. (AP)

Welfare: Twenty years after an epic welfare reform bill was signed, Congress is again looking at how it can reform the current system to move more people out of poverty. In this, as in so many other things, innovative states may have the answer.

The House Ways and Means Committee is deeply concerned about the 46 million Americans who are officially considered poor. While few of them work at full-time jobs, once they do, their chances of emerging from both welfare and the poverty cycle improve enormously.

"The best way to do this, and to solve many of the other challenges welfare programs currently face," said Tarren Bragdon, CEO of the Foundation for Government Accountability, as quoted in a post by Leah Jessen on the Heritage Foundation's Daily Signal blog site, "is through a simple but powerful tool that must be core to any welfare reform conversation: work."

Bragdon cites two examples of this: Recent reforms in Kansas and Maine, which have bucked the trend and imposed work requirements on those who receive welfare benefits.

Take Maine, a reliably liberal state that nonetheless has pursued sweeping welfare reforms. "Thousands of able-bodied adults leaving food stamps found jobs and increased their hours, leading their incomes to rise by 114% on average," Bragdon notes.

"And," he adds, "in both states, that higher income more than offset the food stamps they lost, leaving them better off than they had been on welfare."

Better still, “Those who didn’t meet the work requirement were transitioned off welfare after three months,” he said. “But guess what happened next? They went back to work in record numbers and are now better off.”

In Kansas, incomes rose by 127% within a year, and 60% had full-time jobs, according to the Foundation for Government Accountability, and the number of able-bodied adults on food stamps plunged 75% since the reforms began in 2013. "Work eliminates poverty," Bragdon said. "The research is very, very clear on that."

Unfortunately, the message has not gotten through to the federal government. Robert Rector, a leading welfare reform proponent and scholar at the Heritage Foundation, notes that current federal efforts to reform the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) program would "undermine work requirements."

"A key principle of workfare is that parents who refuse to participate should have their welfare checks halted," Rector noted. "Ironically, the legislation financially penalizes states for doing this."

He claims that Congress is moving away from a "work first" strategy and back to the failed "social service and training model" that has been discredited by both experience and research. The key isn't to remove the welfare safety net, but to keep it from turning into a hammock.

Most importantly, it's time for politicians to stop playing with poor people's lives. That can only be done if, like some states, Congress decides to really help people leave welfare dependency to find a job. It also needs to stop doing things that don't work, and never will.

Remember, poor lives matter, too.