500,000 Illinois children abused and neglected by public policy

"The Rostrum" is Illinois Issues' guest column.

In his State of the State address on February 4, 1987, Gov. James R. Thompson highlighted the need for welfare reform and pledged to take a leadership role, both in Illinois and in Washington. He also talked about children: "Those children are not just our children, they are our future. They are our neighbors, they will hold — or worse — not hold the jobs of tomorrow. They will literally be our State in the next century and we dare not let them go today" (emphasis his).

The governor is right. Illinois' welfare program has done little more than barely keep recipients alive, and present policies maintain a program that is immoral and destructive of dignity.

Welfare is a children's program. Nearly half the 1.1 million recipients of various forms of public assistance in Illinois are under age 18. (The annual reports of the Department of Public Aid for 1985, 1986 and 1987 document this trend). The welfare reform program enacted last year restructured the General Assistance program, but it has no immediate impact upon these children since only about 13,000 of them are in the General Assistance case load.

Thus we must ask some harsh questions about Illinois' welfare policies.

Does anybody care about the fact that 500,000 children (those on Aid to Families with Dependent Children and the thousands covered by the General Assistance program) are the real, everyday victims of a state supported policy of abuse and neglect? By state policy these children are not given access to the most minimal level of resources necessary to house, feed and clothe them. It is a fact that our state's 1988 Standard of Need is 52.1 percent higher than the cash grant provided for a family of four on Aid to Families with Dependent Children (typically two children and a mother). The grant, plus food stamps and low income energy assistance equals' only 71.5 percent of the federal poverty standard.

Do public officials realize that, in addition to the absence of an increase in the grant level for the past few years, there has been a real decline in the purchasing power of public assistance dollars and food stamps for a family of four of 31.7 percent between 1972 and 1987? (This data is in Background Material and Data on Programs Within the Jurisdiction of the Committee on Ways and Means, 1988 Edition, March 24, 1988, from the Committee on Ways and Means of the U.S. House of Representatives.)

Do we accept the biblical warning that the sins of the parents shall not be passed

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on to their children — if we believe their parents somehow "sinned" in the first place? Consider the children whose parents are not there at all, or who have only one, or whose parents are so young they need parents themselves to help them grow up. These are the reasons why the community-at-large must assume responsibility for meeting the basic human needs (food, clothing, shelter and proper health care) of these children. Do we really believe that boat marinas, a stadium and racetracks are more important than the lives of nearly 500,000 children?

Why are we willing to expend limited resources on education for a large proportion of these children when they are absent from school a substantial part of the year? Ask educators from all over the state. They will tell you that children who are embarrassed about their tattered clothes, hungry because of a lack of food, and tired because they fight off rats and roaches or sleep two, three or five in one bed often do not get to school at all.

Let's turn to the notion of work for welfare. These are programs that aim at moving people out of the welfare system, requiring those who can work to work. Illinois has begun such a program, called Project Chance. But for such programs to be realistic in their goals, the question of who is "work-eligible" must be addressed.

The total number of recipients in all categories of Illinois public aid has remained about the same for the past several years, more than 1.1 million people. (See table 3 for the February 1988 caseloads.) Of the total, those not eligible for work include:

• 479,000 children on AFDC and General Assistance.
• 53,000 recipients of Aid to the Aged, Blind and Disabled (AABD).
• A substantial number of the 221,000 adults on AFDC whose children are under age six. (The Department of Public Aid would like to lower the age to three for dependent children, whose young age automatically exempts a child's primary care-giver from work. That change would substantially reduce the number of adults exempt from work. The department estimates 64 percent of all AFDC adults, or 142,000, are now exempt for this and other reasons.)
• Another 280,000 recipients who receive medical assistance (MANG) only.
• Yet another 17,000 persons who receive Aid to the Medically Indigent (another special health-care-only category).

Thus the number of "welfare recipients" (using February 1988 IDPA data) who are not work-eligible, who are unemployable, or who cannot be considered for the work program because they are the working poor (they receive only medical assistance) is estimated to be 971,000. The corollary is that there are only 160,000 people on welfare for whom work is an appropriate, immediate goal!

Next, consider the jobs available and their wages. Of the 8 million new jobs (net new jobs) created in the U.S. between 1979 and 1984, nearly three-fifths paid less than $7,012 per year, according to The Great American Job Machine: The Proliferation of Low Wage Employment in the U.S. Economy, a study prepared for the Joint Economic Committee of the Congress in December 1986 by Barry Bluestone and Bennett Harrison.

Even with a restructured Project Chance, adequately funded and working optimally, the jobs aren't there. Many large Illinois employers are still cutting back their work force, and others are not planning to increase their work force. Assuming welfare recipients in Illinois were placed in jobs through Project Chance at a starting annual salary of $8,000, and assuming — though unlikely — that each received annual raises of $1,000 each, it would take them more than three years to reach an annual income of $11,650 (the U.S. poverty level for a family of four in 1988). In the interim, what would our 500,000 children eat? How would they live? What would they wear, and who would meet their health care needs? For Project Chance even to achieve what

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it can, however, two major problems must be solved. The number of subsidized day-care slots will have to be increased substantially, and the state will have to find a solution to the problem of continuation of health care coverage. Many studies — and Project Chance itself — have proven that welfare recipients would rather work than be on welfare even if their earnings are about the same as their welfare grant. But low paying jobs do not come with employer health care benefits, and the wages are not enough to purchase health insurance. The extension of day care and health care for an initial temporary period under the program enacted last year is a step in the right direction, but only a first step. We are short hundreds of thousands of jobs in Illinois, and ironically we have either ignored what could be done in the voluntary sector in local communities or placed barriers in front of the few existing effective efforts; and the state has not yet funded the one decent job creation program enacted several years ago.

The fact is that the poor do work. Nearly half (49.2 percent) of the heads of all poor families in the U.S. now work at some point during the year. Those of prime working age (22 to 64) who work but are poor has increased more than 60 percent since 1978 and now exceeds 7 million. In fact, earnings from work now constitute a larger share of the overall incomes of poor families with children than does public assistance.

Moreover, the number in the U.S. who work full time year-round and are still poor now exceeds 2 million — an increase of two-thirds since 1978. More than one of every six children living in poverty, or 2.5 million poor children, is part of a family where an adult works full time year-round. These facts on the poor who work are in The Road to Independence, a 1986 report of the Social Policy Task Force, Legislative Education Foundation, Washington, D.C.

A June 1986 analysis by the Illinois Department of Public Aid of the characteristics of AFDC recipients reveals that 61.1 percent of the adults had prior work experience, 38.6 percent received AFDC for less than 24 months and 50.6 percent for less than 36 months.

While we are struggling to create jobs that pay real living wages, public officials must either re-order priorities to meet basic human needs or decide how to generate new revenues to meet basic human needs. It is unfair to wait for the public to either initiate or show signs of support for such efforts. The responsibility belongs to those whom the people elected.

In 1984 the Census Bureau reported that if all food, housing and medical benefits (excluding institutional care) were counted at market value, almost 18 percent of all pre-school children were in poverty. Between 1973 and 1983 the incidence of children in poverty rose 52 percent. The numbers are not any better today. Additionally, the proportion of families with children headed by "low wage earners" actually increased from about 20 percent to 30 percent between 1967 and 1984. These are facts reported in Children In Poverty, a report of a 1985 congressional hearing before the subcommittee on public assistance and unemployment compensation of the House Ways and Means Committee.

A recent analysis of Census Bureau data shows that a major factor in the increase of poverty since 1979 has been the failure of most states, including Illinois, to keep benefit levels abreast of inflation, together with the major domestic social program reductions made by the president and the Congress since 1981. According to the February 1988 analysis, Trends in Family Income, by the Congressional Budget Office, in 1979 nearly one of every five families with children who would otherwise have been poor was lifted out of poverty by cash benefit programs. In 1985, however, only one of every nine families with children was lifted out of poverty by these programs.

The cost of doing the right and necessary things for our children is high, and probably requires $550 million to $600 million from the state. An additional $400 million in matching dollars under the AFDC program would be available from the federal government.

The public aid budget accounted for 19 percent of the state's budget in fiscal year 1985, fell to 17 percent in fiscal 1987, and is only 16 percent of the proposed fiscal 1989 budget of $22 billion. That lost 3 percent is about $109 million, and that would go a long way towards the public assistance and child welfare services needs in Illinois.

Where would the increased state funds come from? At current rates, tax revenues grow by $300 million to $400 million annually, but this is not adequate. Decisions must be made about both priorities and additional methods of generating new revenue.

Assuming the will to find the funding, the state could carry out a plan currently before the legislature to change welfare policy. The key elements include:

• Guarantee that over the next two to three years grant levels will be moved up to 100 percent of the state's Standard of Need, including low income energy assistance and food stamps (but not medical assistance via Medicaid).
• Build in an automatic cost-of-living-adjustment (COLA) so that grant levels cannot fall behind again.
• Extend to AFDC families the new range of support, remedial and work-related services becoming available to General Assistance clients.
• Fund the state's job creation program
• Remove the barriers to work by coming to grips with the issues of an inadequate day care and health care system.
• Provide the funds necessary to strengthen the service capacity of our child welfare system to do the job for all children who require those services.

In Jewish life there is a term, "Tzdekah," which most people translate to mean charity. In fact, there is no such word in the Hebrew language. Tzdekah means justice or righteousness. It's time for all of us to shift to a righteous mode of behavior to achieve at last some real justice that will assure the future of our now poverty-bound 500,000 children.□

Joel M. Carp is assistant executive director of the Jewish Federation of Metropolitan Chicago.

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