Welfare’s safety net hard to measure among states, By Amy Goldstein, October 2, 2010, Washington Post: “The nation’s welfare system of cash assistance, for decades the core of help for mothers and children in financial distress, has become a shrunken piece of the U.S. social safety net. The welfare rolls have absorbed relatively few of the Americans who have tumbled lately into poverty or unemployment. The number of families getting welfare checks, federal figures show, increased by about 185,000 between the start of the recession in late 2007 and this spring. During roughly the same period, the number of families living in poverty rose by more than 400,000 to record levels, according to the Census Bureau, which reported this week that, in Washington, three out of 10 children were poor last year. State by state, welfare programs are a patchwork, with little connection between the condition of a state’s economy and the number of people who have gone onto welfare…”
Poverty-related issues in the news, from the Institute for Research on Poverty