Clinton-era welfare rule gets little notice while recent food stamp cutoff deprives the very poor.
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Four dollars a day. That’s about the price of a tall caramel macchiato at Starbucks, or a medium coffee and bagel with cream cheese from Dunkin’ Donuts.
But $4.40 is also the daily allowance for thousands of Massachusetts’ poorest residents on food stamps — an allowance that was cut off for some 10,000 people in the state earlier this year under a provision of a landmark 1996 welfare law. The provision required recipients to find at least an average of 20 hours of work a week or face a cutoff of benefits.
Twenty years after the welfare law was signed by President Bill Clinton, the food stamp cut-off and other provisions remain controversial with advocates for the poor, even as underlying policies to address the most extreme poverty are getting little attention on the campaign trail.
Bernie Sanders, who has made dismantling economic inequality the cornerstone of his presidential campaign, said in February that the welfare reform law “scapegoated people” and went “after some of the weakest and most vulnerable people in this country.” But he and Hillary Clinton have not presented policies that would directly address some of the law’s negative consequences, and advocates for the poor said the work-for-food requirement was one of the harshest.
Neither the Democrats nor presumptive Republican nominee Donald Trump responded to e-mails asking if they had plans to propose changes to the 1996 welfare legislation.
“For this population, they often aren’t eligible for other kinds of public assistance or support, so the loss of [food stamp benefits] can be really devastating,” said Ed Bolen, senior policy analyst at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a liberal think tank in Washington. “They might not be homeless only because they have SNAP benefits, and they can put the other money toward rent.”
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