Headline ‘O the Day, Wonkblog edition
by digby
Welfare reform took people off the rolls. It might have also shortened their lives.
I’ve got to ask: feature or bug?
The people in the experimental welfare-to-work group were much likelier to obtain employment, but they weren’t likely to make more total income than those in AFDC, once you take cash assistance and other forms of income AFDC recipients received into account. Of the 1,611 experiment participants in the county the study focused on, 75 died by November 2011. Of the 1,613 members of the control group, by contrast, 67 died by November 2011. That means the welfare-to-work had 16 percent higher mortality than those receiving normal cash assistance, a result that was highly statistically significant and, because of the study’s random design, can be attributed to the different welfare program. That amounts to a nine-month reduction in life expectancy between the ages of 30 and 70.
But hey, I’m sure they were comforted in their last days by their increased sense of self-esteem.
People are always going on about “trade-offs” as if the people who are doing the trading are people who have a choice. They rarely do.
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