Posted on 12/30/2004 5:27:27 PM PST by neverdem
MILWAUKEE -- Angela Jobe, 38, is a grandmother who has lived most of her adult life at ground zero of the struggle to "end welfare as we know it." At about the time candidate Bill Clinton was promising to do that -- in autumn 1991 -- she boarded a bus in Chicago, heading for Milwaukee, lured by Wisconsin's larger benefits and lower rents. Unmarried, uneducated and unemployed, she already had three children and eight years on welfare.
Today she is in her ninth year of employment in a nursing home, earning $10.50 an hour. How she left welfare, and how her life did and did not change, is one of the entwined stories in Jason DeParle's riveting new book, "American Dream: Three Women, Ten Kids and a Nation's Drive to End Welfare," the fruit of DeParle's seven years of immersion in Jobe's world.
His subject is the attempt of welfare reformers, in Wisconsin and then Washington, to end the intergenerational transmission of poverty in the chaotic lives of fractured families. His book reads more like a searing novel of urban realism -- Theodore Dreiser comes to Milwaukee -- than a policy tract. His reporting refutes the 1930s paradigm of poverty -- the idea that the perennially poor are strivers like everyone else but are blocked by barriers unrelated to their behavior. Angela Jobe is not Tom Joad.
After the liberalization of welfare in the mid-1960s, the percentage of black children born to unmarried mothers reached 50 by 1976 (it is almost 70 today), and within a generation the welfare rolls quadrupled. But DeParle says people mistakenly thought people like Jobe were organizing their lives around having babies to get a check. Actually, he says, their lives were too disorganized for that.
What can help organize lives, at least those that...
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonpost.com ...
The only behavior they have to change is to quit demanding my tax money. Welfare reform has been a rousing success. They can do whatever they want on their own dime.
I suspect there is a second behavior that forcing welfare recepients into work has changed, which is criminal activity. I wouldn't expect the Old Media to notice that one.
Disappointing but unsurprising.
Her life changed. She started paying her own way, and hopefully that trait will get passed to her children. Instead of the sponge off the government trait.
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