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LUNCH is a ladle of chilli with rice, cornbread, salad and a slab of chocolate cake. The Seventh-Day Adventist soup kitchen in Glen Burnie, Maryland, serves a hot meal each Tuesday to anyone who shows up. Families can take home monthly bags of extra food and second-hand clothes, too.
It’s busy. Carolyn Goss, the manager, reckons that half of the 150 people she feeds each week have fallen on hard times only recently. As the recession rumbles on, the number of Americans claiming welfare (cash assistance aimed mostly at poor mothers of dependent children) appears at last to be rising. A survey by the National Conference of State Legislatures found increases in 23 of the 30 largest states in the past year. The welfare caseload rose by more than 20% in Oregon and South Carolina, and by more than 10% in California, Colorado, Florida, Maryland, Ohio and Washington state. This is the first time since the big welfare reforms of the 1990s that the total number of recipients has increased. (The national caseload fell from 4.5m in 1996 to 1.6m last year. This year’s national figures are not yet available.)
Some see surging caseloads as evidence that the safety net is working. When times are tough, extra payouts cushion the pain. Doomsayers on the left, who predicted calamity when welfare was made temporary and conditional on seeking work, have been proved wrong, says Ron Haskins, an architect of welfare reform now at the Brookings Institution, a non-partisan think-tank.
But others fret that the work of welfare reform is being gradually undone. This year’s stimulus bill provides extra cash for states whose welfare caseloads increase. This gives them an incentive to enroll more people, says Katherine Bradley of the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think-tank. Congress also reduced the proportion of welfare recipients who must find work if a state is not to lose subsidies. Ms Bradley predicts that states will respond by relaxing work requirements. Mr Haskins thinks not. Most states are keen to get as many people working as possible, he reckons, though the recession makes this hard.
It will be a while before anyone knows who is right. America’s safety net is multilayered and varies from state to state. When workers are laid off, they often receive lump-sum severance payments. Next comes unemployment insurance, which used to last only for six months but which Congress keeps extending. Hard-up families can also apply for food stamps, which are relatively easy to claim. The number of Americans receiving them has risen sharply, from 24.9m in September 2007 to 33.2m in March this year.
Welfare is harder to claim, so the numbers getting it have risen more slowly. Another factor is that most welfare claimants are women, whereas most of those laid off in the past two years have been men. Thousands of hard-hat jobs in construction and manufacturing have vanished, while female-dominated sectors such as health-care and education are hiring more hands. Male unemployment is 10.5%; for women it is a somewhat less dismal 8%.
An unscientific poll of soup-kitchen clients in Glen Burnie suggests that the able-bodied jobless are getting by on a mixture of public assistance and private charity, but still have plenty of incentive to find work. Ernest Bedford, for example, is down to his last $15, having been laid off as a bus driver. He trekked 1,400 miles (2,200 km) to Texas to find a job as a truck driver, but failed to get it and came home. Undaunted, he has been searching for work online, using the free computers at a public library. He hears they need drivers at Baltimore airport. He says he expects to have a job by the end of the week.
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