segunda-feira, junho 16, 2003
Welfare Lessons from America
(...)In 1996, Congress passed President Clinton’s bill aimed at ‘abolishing welfare as we know it’. The bill set each state a target for reducing its welfare numbers—not marginally, but dramatically, by 50%. It also limited people’s eligibility for welfare—no more than two years in any one period, no more than five years over a whole lifetime.
Critics in and outside America were horrified. They forecast chaos and misery. There would not be enough jobs for all the people currently on welfare to do. Women and children would starve; millions would suffer. A group calling itself the Children’s Defense Fund predicted that child poverty would go up by 12%; the Urban Institute warned that 2.6 million more people would be pushed into poverty; one of Clinton’s own advisers resigned, arguing that malnutrition, infant mortality, crime and drug abuse would all escalate; and Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan denounced the reform as a ‘brutal act of social policy’, adding that those responsible ‘will take this disgrace to their graves’.
But as things turned out, the critics were wrong. Most former welfare claimants found jobs, and although they were often low-paid, they ended up better-off than before (single mothers who moved off welfare improved their incomes by an average of 60%). Follow-up surveys found that most former claimants were positive about what had happened; they were pleased to be off welfare, and they reported that their lives were better for it. Their children, too, seemed to benefit; the poverty rate among black children and single parents is at its lowest in recorded US history. As for the 50 states, they saved so much money on welfare payments that they were able to increase spending on things like childcare and one-to-one job counselling to support people as they moved from welfare to work.
Recomendo a leitura deste artigo publicado na Policy do Center For Independent Studies em que se faz a comparação dos modelos americano e europeu.
posted by Miguel Noronha 5:23 da tarde
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