Portside

The American safety net didn’t catch me when I fell. The people I was warned about as a child did.

Perhaps this pandemic’s devastation will promote a debate on the failures of our ragged social safety net.

Mainstream feminists never quite knew what to do with the welfare rights movement. Here was a group of mothers who, rather than wanting equal work and equal pay, demanded that the government support them while they stayed home and raised their kids.

Living wage construction jobs would be a significant benefit for women relying on TANF and the families they support.

It is true that the data show the number of families receiving cash assistance fell from 12.3 million in 1996 to current levels of 4.1 million as reported by The New York Times. But it is also true that child poverty rates for black children remain stubbornly high in the U.S.

A majority (53.1 percent) of workers earning less than $12.16 per hour—the bottom 30 percent of wage earners—earn so little on the job that they must rely on public assistance to make ends meet.

This year, State Senator Holly Mitchell, (D-Los Angeles), introduced Senate Bill 23, a repeal of the Maximum Family Grant rule, on the grounds that it has only driven poor women deeper into poverty, and done nothing to reduce the birth rate of women on welfare. That assertion has been supported by several studies, including one from the University of California, Berkeley and another from Cornell University.

Forty years after founding the Children’s Defense Fund, which advocates for federal and state resources for children, Edelman is still at work in the fund’s red brick building on E Street NW, displaying at 74 the same passion she had in 1967, when she was a 27-year-old civil rights attorney leading Sen. Robert F. Kennedy through the Mississippi Delta.