Brookings Ends Research on Welfare Reform(starts new Family Research)

[papau]

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/09/27/AR2005092701549.html



Brookings Ends Research on Welfare Reform
Think Tank Opens Center On Broader Familial Issues

By Amy Goldstein
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, September 28, 2005; A19



<snip>The center is intended to focus on several themes. Researchers will evaluate policies, such as the earned-income tax credit created during the Clinton era, that are intended to help low-income working families improve their financial well-being.

Researchers also will look at whether public investments in children -- including spending on early childhood education -- can help them move up the socioeconomic ladder by the time they are adults. To inaugurate the center, Brookings held a forum yesterday afternoon on the role of preschool, especially for poor and minority children.

In addition, the center will explore ways to increase the proportion of children who grow up with parents who are married, including by trying to continue recent decreases in teenage pregnancies. The center will work to ensure that public programs for children and low-income families do not get crowded out in an inhospitable fiscal climate, as the government faces long-term budget deficits and the aging baby-boom generation will soon place vast pressures on spending for health care and retirement benefits for the elderly.

"The direction we are headed in is making benefits more conditional on people helping themselves," Sawhill said. "But government needs to uphold its side of that bargain, as well, which is: If you work, you shouldn't be poor."

[Sugarbleus]

1. How lovely....what if you can't work?

What if you can't find a job that pays well enough to be independent?

What if a woman (with children) has been battered and traumatized and can't work in the time frame set forth in that IDIOTIC Welfare Reform Act?

What in hell does a "think tank" know about being poor or desperate or old or disabled or fatherless and poor?

Why is this country so stingy and aloof? No need to answer, I already know the answer.

Sad.