Paul Ryan's Poverty Attacks Hurt Women The Most
LAUREN RANKIN – MARCH 18, 2014, 6:01 AM EDT
It seems that ‘90s fashion isn’t the only trend from that decade back in style. Previewing his upcoming legislative proposals to reform American poverty programs, House Budget Chairman Paul Ryan (R-WI) recently expressed his support for the 1996 welfare overhaul and affirmed his commitment to actually increasing work requirements for welfare recipients.
Using racially coded language, Ryan appeared on Bill Bennett’s Morning in America show, and called for more work requirements for men “in our inner cities,” citing a “tailspin of culture” in which inner-city men aren’t “learning the value and the culture of work.” While this leftover rhetoric from the neoliberal craze of the mid-‘90s clearly targets urban black men, the welfare reforms that Ryan is naively touting as revolutionary are nothing more than the racism, classism, and sexism that underwrote welfare reform in the first place.
The Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act of 1996, championed by the Democrats’ own Bill Clinton, did away with the traditional welfare program Aid to Families with Dependent Children and replaced it with the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) program. Many know that TANF ended the federal need to provide public assistance by deferring to each individual state, requires states to have 50 percent of their TANF caseload meet standards of work participation, and it imposed a strict five-year lifetime limit on benefits, as well as a two-year consecutive limit.
But there’s a way TANF violates recipients’ reproductive privacy, as well that some may not realize: Under TANF, states may impose family caps which allow the state to deny additional funding to a recipient or reduce the funding she already receives if she gives birth to another child. This punitive measure may force welfare recipients to terminate a wanted pregnancy because they are unable to afford another child or afraid to risk losing their benefits.
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