While low unemployment rates in Missouri and across the country have helped many former welfare recipients find work, many remain in poverty even while working. These families are "too rich" to receive aid their families need, according to the flawed income eligibility guidelines that most social services programs use.
A Missouri family of three earning more than $846 per month is considered too well-off to qualify for public assistance -- even though this is well below the federal poverty level of about $15,000 annually for a family this size.
In fact, it's less than half the true cost of living in at least one major city in our state. According to a 1999 report by the East-West Gateway Coordinating Council, a family of three in St. Louis would require an income of just over $27,000 annually, to secure life's necessities. Costs of living are not significantly lower in other parts of Missouri, according to studies conducted during the 1996 ballot initiative which failed to raise the minimum wage in Missouri.
The reality is that 77 percent of poor children in America live in families where someone is employed for wages. Many of these children experience incredible deprivation while failing to qualify for welfare.
In December, President Bush pledged to "work together to make the promise of America available for every one." To make good on that promise Tommy Thompson, Bush's new secretary of Health and Human Services, will need to revise his approach to social services.
In his former position as governor of Wisconsin, Thompson was the driving force behind implementation of the Welfare Reform Act of 1996. Thompson's Wisconsin Works (W-2) program served as a model for privatization plans across the country. Now at HHS, he will have oversight over social programs that will have enormous impact, particularly for people with low incomes in this country.
However, if Thompson brings similar policies and philosophies to HHS that he used as governor of Wisconsin, the result would be disastrous for poor people in Missouri and the rest of the country.
Since the first year of implementation of W-2, the infant mortality rate in Milwaukee County increased by 17.6 percent, with a 37 percent increase among African Americans, according to a review of Wisconsin welfare records by the Los Angeles Coalition to End Hunger and Homelessness. Forcible evictions increased from 700 per year to 3,000 in 1999. From January 1996 to July 1999, Wisconsin experienced the largest decrease in the nation in Food Stamp enrollment -- 40 percent statewide -- even though the number of people living in extreme poverty (at less than 50 percent of the federal poverty level) doubled.
Not all those who leave welfare find and keep employment. Most parents leaving welfare find jobs at $5.15-$7.50 per hour -- less than $15,600 per year before taxes. These same families often have cycled on and off welfare depending on availability of work and the presence or absence of a family emergency such as illness or loss of transportation.
For example, in Wisconsin, 38 percent of women leaving welfare in that state become unemployed again within six months, according to the Los Angeles Coalition to End Hunger and Homelessness.
Moreover, thousands of people who have left welfare are unaccounted for -- not showing up in welfare or employment statistics. Mayretta McLaine, director of a Racine homeless shelter, told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, "I keep hearing . . . there are 2,000 families that can't be accounted for. If they want to know where those people are, they should come see me because a lot of them have come through here."
With new welfare time limits, there will be fewer ways for poor families to legally fill the vast gap between income and need in future years. Low-income workers often are not able to access unemployment benefits. In fact, a 1997 analysis by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities found that only 35 percent of unemployed workers received unemployment insurance in 1995. Prior to 1980, the figure virtually always exceeded 40 percent.
As a recent report by the Foundation for Child Development states, effective social service policies need to be based on a realistic assessment of what families need, not on the outdated federal poverty line that leaves families in Missouri and elsewhere strapped. The Foundation calls for policies that reach beyond the current welfare-to-work agenda and consider broader social and economic strategies to assist all low-income families.
This means that parents of poor children need a living wage, access to health care, adequate financial assistance and educational opportunities for themselves and for their children in quality early education programs.
It is easy to reduce the number of people on welfare: Simply create a program that is unwelcoming, burdensome and unhelpful like W-2, and people will not apply for it. It requires more intelligence and creativity to see that all workers are lifted out of poverty.
President Bush and Secretary Thompson will need a new approach at HHS if they want to achieve this goal.
Hargadon and Oxford are members of the Reform Organization of Welfare. 
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