Twenty years ago last month, President Bill Clinton and a Republican Congress passed welfare reform that gave each state more say in how they managed welfare assistance to needy families.
Along with time limits on how long people could receive benefits and stricter work requirements, the new system gave each state the power to spend its own Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) block grant as it sees fit.
Before TANF, needy families were given cash assistance by the federal government based on national poverty statistics. But by implementing TANF, states became able to choose how much of its grant to allocate to programs that met the programs four goals of assisting needy families with children, promoting job readiness, preventing out-of-wedlock pregnancies and encouraging two-parent households with grant money.
But others say the non-cash benefits — like food stamps, school lunch programs and federal rental assistance — now offered by states is equal to or greater than direct cash assistance, like Scott Winship of the Manhattan Institute in his report "Poverty After Welfare Reform."
A recent analysis by FiveThirtyEight looked at data from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities and found that while spending on welfare has remained relatively stable since 1998, spending per-person has decreased.
One of its main findings was that fewer poor families are receiving direct cash assistance from their states. It found that in 1996, 68 of every 100 needy families in the United States received direct cash benefits. In 2014, only 23 of every 100 did.
In 1998, direct cash assistance accounted for 60 percent of of welfare spending, but it only accounted for 25 percent in 2014.
But a vague category of programs that the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities calls "other" is quickly accounting for more and more states total welfare spending. The other category includes training for parents, early education, domestic violence help and substance abuse treatment.
Georgia, for example, spends nearly 80 percent of its share on "other" programs, like those listed above. South Dakota, on the other hand, spends 61.2 percent of its welfare spending on cash assistance, more than any other state.
FiveThirtyEight also cited a 2014 Congressional Research Service study that points out that the level of benefits a person on welfare could earn now varies greatly from state to state, particularly among the different regions. Parents in the South were paid the lowest benefit amounts, and parents in the Northeast received the highest benefits.
In Alaska, for example, a single parent caring for two children was eligible for up to $923 dollars a month in 2012. A single parent with two kids in Mississippi was only eligible for up to $170 a month. The most recent data says that 11,103 people are currently eligible for TANF benefits in Mississippi, compared to 3,500 in Alaska.
What those parents earned to be eligible for those benefits also differed. The Alaskan parent could make up to $1,605 a month, whereas the Mississipi parent had to earn $457 or less each month to be eligible.
As for the future of federal and state welfare programs, current presidential candidates have remained vague on specific plans.
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