Editorial for Tuesday — November 04, 2003

• The child care catch

The child care catch

The Welfare Reform Law of 1996 has been a mixed blessing. While it’s credited with turning hundreds of thousands of single parents into breadwinners, it’s also blamed for pushing an estimated 15 percent of poor families further to the margins, without jobs and mired deeper in poverty. That’s one of the issues Congress must address when it reauthorizes the time-limited welfare reform law.

Because of that law, the number of families on the welfare rolls has fallen to about 2 million from about 4.4 million in 1996. More than half of those who left the welfare rolls are believed to have found jobs, but there is no data on how many still are working. An estimated 300,000 poor families who have left the rolls have yet to find work. For some, learning disabilities and a lack of transportation make it hard to find work.

For others, the lack of affordable child care is a high hurdle. In Missouri, for example, a woman earning $1,472 a month could lose her child care subsidies if her pay increased from $8.50 an hour to $9 an hour, according to an analysis by Legal Services of Eastern Missouri. And paying full price for child care would take up to two-thirds of her take-home pay.

This kind of dilemma illustrates why Congress needs to include more money for child care when it reauthorizes the welfare reform law. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a liberal public policy group, estimates that Congress should add at least $5.5 billion for child care over five years in order to make welfare reform a sustainable success.

If Congress does allocate more money, the state could use a portion of it to pay for child care for more working parents. It could also use part of that money to increase the income eligibility limit for working parents, allowing them to make a little more without losing the child care subsidies they already have.

St. Louis Post-Dispatch