Mitt Romney’s non-fact-based accusation that President Barack Obama “gut[ted] welfare reform by dropping work requirements” takes place against the backdrop of states nationwide making severe cuts to an already-tattered safety net. But the candidates’ racially charged political sparring has received far more media attention than the actual reduction in aid to poor people.

States have cited either fiscal crises or moral concerns for the ethical shortcomings of the poor in implementing punishing new welfare work requirements, slashing benefits and forcing recipients to undergo drug tests since the beginning of the recession.

In Pennsylvania, the debate over welfare work requirements is about to play out in real time. That’s because Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) recipients will now be forced to apply for three jobs per week as soon as they submit their application for benefits, thanks to a provision quietly slipped into Republican Gov. Tom Corbett’s new budget. Previously, work requirements only kicked in once cash assistance ― and the childcare support often necessary to actually go to work ― had been approved.

“These new provisions will make it much harder for single mothers of young children to get the cash assistance and other supports they need while they look for work,” Kathy Fisher, co-chair of the Coalition for Low-Income Pennsylvanians and Family Economic Security Director at Public Citizens for Children and Youth, said in June. “Most penniless single mothers cannot look for jobs without a child-care subsidy and transportation allowance. There are already strict job-search requirements for parents once they start receiving cash assistance. There is no need to add this new requirement.”

The percentage of welfare applications approved by Georgia dropped from 51 percent to 22 percent in the three years following the state’s implementation of a similar law, according to Community Legal Services.

Meanwhile, five states followed Florida in 2012 and passed laws requiring drug testing or screening of welfare recipients, and 30 states considered legislation to do so. A federal judge blocked Florida’s law four months after implementation, and the state has appealed. In those months, however, the drug testing cost the state money instead of creating anticipated savings. Welfare recipients, it should be noted, have not been found to use drugs at a higher rate than the general population.

In 2008, Louisiana state Rep. John La Bruzzo took the animus and suspicion one step further, floating the idea of paying women on welfare $1,000 to get their fallopian tubes tied.

President Bill Clinton and congressional Republicans may have “ended welfare as we knew it” in 1996, but the “welfare queen,” conservative antihero of late-20th-century America, is never far from the surface of American politics.

“The poor often end up being targeted when the economy is bad,” University of Connecticut law professor Kaaryn Gustafson told me last year. “I think the drug-testing policies are an expression of economic frustration, resentment toward the poor, and a denial of the policies and structural causes that have caused the welfare rolls to increase again.”

Romney knows that the image of loafers living off hardworking people’s taxes forms a potent―and when race gets mixed in, toxic―political contrivance during this prolonged recession. Not only did you “build that” business, but the government is now redistributing the fruit of your labor to the lazy you-know-who’s.

Earlier this week, Romney told a reporter that Obama was eliminating work requirements to “shore up his base.” Newt Gingrich drew similar charges of using racially coded language after frequently calling Obama the “food stamp president” during his campaign.

Even states that have traditionally provided relatively generous welfare benefits, like California, have cut back. Stricken by fiscal crisis, the state imposed new work requirements. But the legislature beat back Democratic Gov. Jerry Brown’s proposal to radically downsize the program. Washington state, facing a 29 percent increase in the number of participating families, reduced eligibility and made time limits stricter.

On the federal level, welfare’s deconstruction might serve as a blueprint for conservative plans to remake other entitlements. Presumptive vice-presidential nominee Paul Ryan, who has called welfare reform an “an unprecedented success,” proposes a remarkably similar solution for Medicaid, the healthcare program for the poor: capping federal spending and block-granting it to the states.

In Pennsylvania, state cuts to the safety net go beyond TANF.

In Pennsylvania, Gov. Corbett has made public welfare cuts a top across-the-board priority: he completely eliminated the state’s General Assistance program, $205-a-month in cash assistance to the disabled, victims of domestic violence, and recovering addicts; removed tens of thousands from Medicaid; cut funding to programs that help the disabled apply for Social Security and the poor apply for the Earned Income Tax Credit; and slashed funding to county programs that assist the poor and disabled.

Romney’s current line of attack derives from a July Department of Health and Human Services announcement that waivers would be available to states that can improve employment outcomes for Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF) recipients. The waiver came at the request of Democratic and Republican governors, and Politifact gave Romney’s claim its “pants on fire” not-true rating.

Nonetheless, Pennsylvania politicians have scrambled to amplify Romney’s talking points. Rick Santorum, who earlier this month said that Obama’s waivers demonstrated the president’s “contempt for the law,” will tonight address the subject before the Republican National Convention.

TANF, created by 1996 welfare reform, gives states great flexibility to restrict welfare eligibility but forces them to abide by rigid work-hour accounting requirements; it caps the years that benefits are available and gives incentives states for shrinking their rolls rather than demonstrating positive outcomes.

States now divert more than two-thirds of federal welfare dollars to programs that are not cash assistance to needy families, according to an August Urban Institute report. And though TANF is ostensibly about moving the poor from “welfare to work,” less than 8 percent of federal TANF dollars are spent on work- or training-related activities.

In Pennsylvania, the percentage dedicated to work-related activities was 15 percent in 2011, according to the liberal Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. A full 7 percent went to “Pregnancy Prevention & 2-Parent Family Formation and Maintenance.”

“TANF reaches a minority of the families living in poverty and offers them little cash assistance and insufficient help preparing for, finding, and maintaining employment,” the researchers concluded.

And TANF spending nationwide has dropped precipitously in real dollars: federal spending has been flat since 1996 and unadjusted for inflation, and so its value has declined by nearly 30 percent.

The political debate over whether the Obama Administration has relaxed welfare work rules rests on the assumption that getting tough on welfare recipients is a good thing. Advocates for the poor disagree: the millions of people pushed out of work by the recession now lack a safety net at the very moment they most need it.

The minimum-wage service industry that poor mothers were pushed into the in the 1990s is no longer so bountiful. And so welfare has been “reformed” to the point that it no longer does its job: Between 1996 and 2010, the number of poor families on welfare plummeted from 68 out of every 100, to 27, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. Meanwhile, poverty rates have skyrocketed, the portion of families with impoverished children rising by 17 percent to 7.3 million.

Welfare has simply not been a safety net for the deluge of families that have fallen into poverty since the recession. In April, the New York Times filed a haunting story from Arizona, profiling women dropped from welfare who desperately “sold food stamps, sold blood, skipped meals, shoplifted, doubled up with friends, scavenged trash bins for bottles and cans and returned to relationships with violent partners ― all with children in tow.”

Philadelphia City Paper – August 28, 2012 – Read article online