WASHINGTON — Eight years after Congress handed over to the states the responsibility for getting people off welfare and back to work, Utah's welfare reform performance has been given a resounding "F," according to a state-by-state report card discussed Tuesday at a forum sponsored by the Cato Institute, a public policy research foundation in Washington, D.C., that is nonprofit, libertarian and seeks to limit the role of government.
"What is surprising is that Utah would fail both on the policy side of the equation and the results side," said Jennifer Zeigler, a welfare policy analyst with the institute and author of the study.
"It is unfortunate Utah is lacking important programs needed before it will ever see the results," she added.
Utah was one of eight states and the District of Columbia to receive failing grades. Overall, the state ranked 45th.
Utah's neighbor to the north, Idaho, received the highest ranking of all states.
Zeigler said Utah received low marks because its welfare policies are not consistent with getting people back into the work force. For example, the federal reforms require that 50 percent of those on welfare must work at least 30 hours a week.
But Utah wrote "exceptions" into its law, and the state now meets the federal standard if its welfare recipients are merely looking for work or going to school.
"I'm not saying going back to school or looking for work are not good things," Ziegler said. "But let's not call it work."
State welfare officials defend the more flexible policy, saying it is grounded in the notion that escaping the constraints of poverty is more likely to happen with education.
Merely landing a minimum-wage job with no benefits does little to alleviate the financial realities faced by many of the working poor, said Curt Stewart, a spokesman with the state Department of Workforce Services.
"We think our program is sound and that many people agree with it — from advocates to people who administer the program in Washington, D.C., at Health and Human Services," he said.
Utah also scored the lowest grade possible for its failure to implement a standard whereby those on welfare do not receive additional welfare benefits if they have more children while on welfare, something called a "family cap."
In most states, welfare benefits are frozen at the level when the benefits were first granted — an incentive for welfare mothers not to get pregnant while on welfare and thereby compound their poverty.
Advocates, however, say there is little need for such a cap because the average size of a family on welfare in Utah is 1.9.
Federal reforms also required states to develop welfare incentives for teenage mothers to live at home and finish high school, rather than the old policy where government would set the teen mothers up with housing and a monthly stipend.
"Utah wrote such a broad exception that (teen mothers) are exempt (from the live-at-home requirement) if they have been successfully living on their own for a year," Ziegler said. "But can you really say it is a success if they are pregnant and on welfare?"
"Utah's loopholes are just too big," she added.
Stewart, however, said that living at home is often not an option for young mothers and the goal of the policy is aimed at encouraging self-sufficiency.
Utah also scored poorly on the results of its welfare reform. Nationally, poverty is down 2 percent, but in Utah it is up 2.2 percent. That was good enough for a ranking of 50 out of 51. Still, the state's poverty rate remains well below that of the national average — with the latest U.S. census figures showing 12.7 percent of the nation's population lives in poverty, compared to Utah's rate of 10.6 percent.
Nationally, the teenage pregnancy rate dropped 8.2 percent, but in Utah, which had a lower rate to begin with, it fell only 2.9 percent.
"Utah suffers a little because it started out at a lower rate, but there were other states with low rates, like Wyoming, that fell far more," Ziegler said.
Ziegler's study looked at welfare reform primarily from the perspective of whether or not states had the policies in place that would get people off the welfare rolls and into the work force, and whether those policies were producing results.
She believes Utah's poverty and teen birth rates are symptomatic of poor policies, and without the policies it will be difficult to ever see the results.
"Work requirements are the backbone" of welfare reform, she said. "Utah's broad definitions run counter to that philosophy."
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