Welfare Rolls See First Climb in Years

Peter Edelman, a Georgetown University law professor who left a senior Clinton administration position in protest of the 1996 law, said the Obama administration and Congress should adopt emergency legislation to suspend work requirements and time limits on cash assistance. "The whole construct [of TANF] is to go out and find jobs," he said. "So it's a Catch-22. It's kind of an impossibility."

For now, lawmakers are considering whether to add to a welfare contingency fund, likely to run out for the first time this year, in an economic stimulus bill.

For some states, the predicament is immediate. The 1996 law replaced a limitless federal stream of welfare money to states, giving instead a fixed amount -- $16.5 billion a year nationally -- and significant spending freedom. In the years when people were leaving the rolls, less of that money went for cash assistance, and virtually all states shifted much of their grants to other help for poor people: child care, transportation, training programs, child welfare.

Now that welfare rolls are surging again, "the flaw is the states did not save enough money," said Ron Haskins, a Brookings Institution senior scholar who worked as a welfare adviser in the Bush White House and in Congress. "They have used the TANF block grant for everything under the sun. . . . That leaves them in the lurch."

Florida is a hub of the problem, particularly Fort Myers, where the number of people getting cash assistance has soared by 50 percent in the past 1 1/2 years. Across the state, rolls have swollen by 20 percent in the past year, including by 4 percent in October. "Pretty unprecedented," said Don Winstead, deputy secretary of Florida's Department of Children and Families. And adults on welfare are staying longer than they used to, with jobs so hard to find.

Florida's legislators have been warned that the state will have an $8.6 million welfare deficit for the fiscal year that ends in July and a $33 million shortfall the next year. "We already know those estimates are low," Winstead said.

The help Florida offers is slim -- $303 a month for a family of three, a benefit unchanged since 1993. Even so, applicants pour in. "Some of them, if you ask them if you ever thought they would be here, they look at you like you've lost your mind," Winstead said.

After Tip Top Tile failed in 2005, Toni and Jason Robinette lost their three-bedroom stucco house to foreclosure, and their black Ford four-wheel-drive truck was repossessed. They've been living with relatives.

The day before Thanksgiving, things got worse. Jason Robinette was driving their 11-year-old car when police pulled him over for expired tags. After officers asked for his license, they told him it was invalid because he had stopped paying to keep up his car insurance.

He is in the Lee County Jail waiting for a court hearing for that -- and another charge that caught up with him -- because the couple can't afford to post a $2,000 bond.

Toni Robinette hadn't planned to be pregnant, out of work, out of a house, with a husband in jail, sitting at a social services office trying to get government help. "I've always, since I was young, had money, babysitting and everything," she said. "People came to me to borrow money. Now it's the other way around."

Two Decembers ago, the unemployment rate here in the City of Palms was 2.5 percent, tied for third-lowest in the country. By October, it had soared to 9.5 percent, far above the average, giving this stretch of southwestern Florida coast one of the nation's most dramatic reversals of economic fortune.