The Administration for Children and Families has quietly proposed closing loopholes in the nation's cash assistance program for the poor that a 2021 ProPublica investigation found states had exploited for years.

Through a package of proposed reforms to the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program, or TANF, the administration plans to shore up the U.S. social safety net. The regulations are intended to ensure that more federal and state welfare dollars make it to low-income families, rather than being spent on other things or not spent at all.

The proposal, drawn up by the federal Administration for Children and Families, is open for public comment until Dec. 1. Once comments are reviewed, officials plan to issue final regulations that could take effect in the months after that, heading into the 2024 election.

  • SkepticalButOpenMinded@lemmy.ca
    21·
    10 months ago

    One can of course argue that said bad decisions are due to social problems linked to the client’s impoverished background, and that’s true, but it’s not a direct consequence of the parent not having enough money to take care of their children, and the distinction is important. One is an issue of one government system punishing a person for another government system’s failure, not the parent’s; the other is a much more complex societal systemic issue that is not a problem with government systems per se, but rather a sociological problem that requires a much more complex solution.

    I don’t get this reasoning. Whether some problem is the “direct” or “indirect” consequence of poverty does not matter for whether poverty reduction programs like TANF are effective. It’s a non sequitur.

    You imply that improving the delivery of social supports like TANF will not be effective at helping the poor (who are, after all, the direct cause of their own problems in your experience!). But other rich countries with better social safety nets enjoy much better outcomes for the poor than the US. It’s strange that you criticize a systemic change to the delivery of welfare to the poor for not being “complex” or “systemic”. I’m not sure how blaming the poor for their problems is more “complex” or “systemic”. On the contrary, that’s highly individualistic and moralizing.