Texas (& Others) Refusing To Give Approved Aid To Poor

The pandemic has been hard on everyone (except the rich who have just gotten richer), but the people hit the hardest have been the poor. Congress has approved additional aid for them, but some red states are refusing to give them that aid (choosing instead to spend that money for other things). It just shows once again that Republicans don't care about the poor -- only about the rich.

The following is part of an article at MSNBC.com by Jarvis DeBerry:

In the state of Texas, there are almost 4 million poor people, by one recent count, but apparently few are penniless enough to meet the Lone Star State’s qualifications for Temporary Assistance for Needy Families. To qualify for TANF in Texas, a single caretaker with two children must have less than $1,000 in assets and bring in less than $188 per month. For a person working full time, $188 a month amounts to an hourly wage of $1.18. Such stinginess helps explain why, according to a report Wednesday from ProPublica, Texas ended its 2020 fiscal year with $281 million in federal TANF funds unspent.

Texas, one of four states that denied at least 90 percent of its 2020 TANF applicants, had the lowest approval rate in the nation, approving only 7 percent. That means successfully applying for such welfare funds in Texas is as rareas successfully applying for admission to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology or Yale University.

This is former President Bill Clinton’s conservative-appeasing welfare reform in action: Individual states, which were given the power to set their own rules for distributing welfare dollars, denying the poor life-sustaining help by drawing up the rules in a way that excludes most people who need help.

To put that another way: There aren’t so few people getting welfare because the demand for aid is so low; there are so few getting it because the supply of aid is being withheld by states choosing not to dispense it. Or, as previous reporting from ProPublica and The Guardian has noted, because those states are choosing to dispense TANF on things other than on welfare: including child protective services, anti-abortion clinics, Christian summer camps and programs to help people addicted to gambling.

Texas isn’t alone in its parsimony. Across the country, the states ended fiscal year 2020 with $5.2 billion in unspent TANF money. The amount of welfare dollars the states have not spent has doubled over the last 10 years as the number of approved applications has fallen by half, ProPublica reports. Our states holding on to $5.2 billion in unspent welfare dollars would be an outrage at any time but is especially awful considering that the fiscal year ended in the middle of a pandemic that exacerbated the country’s already embarrassing and unforgivably high rates of poverty and child poverty.

According to the Census Bureau, “The official poverty rate in 2020 was 11.4%, up 1.0 percentage point from 2019. This is the first increase in poverty after five consecutive annual declines. In 2020, there were 37.2 million people in poverty, approximately 3.3 million more than in 2019.”. . .

The main argument for welfare reform was that nothing is as bad as a poor family spending a lifetime getting aid from the government. Framing it that way miscasts poverty as a consequence of laziness. But in the same way that prosperity is more a function of advantage than of hard work, poverty is more a function of disadvantage than of laziness. And in a nation that cares so little about dismantling systemic disadvantage, there is something that’s exceedingly worse than a family languishing on welfare: a government granted money to help people who are poor deciding that it’s better to leave hundreds of millions of dollars unspent.