By Seth Wessler
Unable to find jobs, kicked off welfare, women in Connecticut are forced to sell food assistance to buy basic necessities.
When Congress overhauled welfare in 1996, it created the Temporary Aid to Needy Families (TANF) program that placed time limits on aid and made cash assistance contingent on finding a job. Connecticut adopted the shortest time limit in the country—just 21 months—and nationwide the number of families on TANF dropped from 4.8 million before welfare overhaul to about 1.7 million families in 2008.Most people who left the rolls were pushed into insecure and low-wage work. At the time in 1996, there was no national debate about what would happen to families if an economic crisis struck. Now, with a national recession that many analysts recognize as a depression in poor communities of color, even those low-wage jobs are few and far between... Read more...
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