COURTESY OF MAGNOLIA MOTHERâS TRUST
Cajania Brown, a Black single mother from Jackson, Mississippi, receives $1,000 per month as part of a cash assistance program called the Magnolia Motherâs Trust.
Undoing Welfare Reform
If Congress makes the expanded Child Tax Credit permanent, simple, and universal, it could have reverberations across the entire welfare state.
Cheri Honkala has been a welfare rights activist since the 1980s. Itâs been decades of frustratingly slow work, ensuring that poor mothers like herself could access the benefits they needed to survive. These days, the bulk of her time is spent occupying empty houses for people with no alternative shelter. Combined with the pandemic, there is a housing crisis in Philadelphia, where Honkala lives.
Long-term benefits
Many studies conducted in recent years show that lifting children from the burdens of poverty has the potential to improve their health and ability to get a good education.
For example, economist Chloe East found that when low-income families with young kids receive benefits from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, the children are less likely to miss school and more likely to be in good health as they get older.
A team of researchers who assessed the effects of reforms to cash welfare programs conducted in the 1990s similarly found that helping low-income families pay their bills leads to their kids doing better at school in the future.
Hilary Hoynes is a Professor of Public Policy and Economics and holds the Haas Distinguished Chair in Economic Disparities. She is the co-editor of the leading journal in economics, American Economic Review. Hoynes received her undergraduate degree from Colby College and her PhD from Stanford University.
Hoynes is an economist and specializes in the study of poverty, inequality, and the impacts of government tax and transfer programs on low income families. Current projects include evaluating the impact of the Great Recession across demographic groups, examining the impact of Head Start on cognitive and non-cognitive outcomes, examining the impact of the Earned Income Tax Credit on infant health, and estimating impacts of U.S. food and nutrition programs on labor supply, health and human capital accumulation.
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