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WELFARE REFORM FAILS TO END POVERTY, STUDY SAYS
The study of Wisconsin Works, or W-2, said that people who enrolled in the workfare program in Milwaukee County continued to suffer from homelessness, depression and other personal and economic hardships, despite an increase in income and additional cash assistance. "We're not seeing much evidence that the services are really significantly improving the lives of these people. They're not getting worse, but they're not getting better," said Mark Courtney, director of the University of Chicago's Chapin Hall Center for Children and an author of the study. If other states pursue the reform strategy adopted by Wisconsin, Courtney said, they will have to recognize that the trade-off in cutting welfare roles is a smaller but "more troubled caseload" that will require additional assistance. The report from the Chapin Hall Center at the University of Chicago and the Institute for Research on Poverty at the University of Wisconsin-Madison followed nearly 1,100 applicants for W-2, a 1996 program designed to quickly move people off public assistance and into the paid work force. Over a 15- to 18-month period starting in 1999, the study found that employment "did not necessarily translate into self-sufficiency." Welfare applicants who participated in the program continued to experience the same personal and economic troubles as those who were not part of the program. While Courtney said it is too soon to draw long-term conclusions about W-2, this study suggests there is a core of poor people with families whose needs generally have not been addressed by government programs. While states across the nation, including Illinois, have embraced different forms of workfare to reduce welfare rolls, Wisconsin, which began reforming welfare in the late 1980s, has been one of the most aggressive. The state's caseload has dropped about 80 percent in the last decade. "How you see the success of welfare reform depends on what you think it should accomplish. If you judge it by the ability to the reduce caseload, then it is a resounding success," Courtney said. "But whatever W-2's stated goals are, the folks who walked in the door in 1999 are still facing pretty significant hardships," Courtney added. The median annual income of W-2 participants was $4,131. With W-2 cash assistance and food stamps for 12 months, the income level rose to $8,583, the report said. That is more than twice the income of welfare recipients who were not part of W-2, but it was far behind the poverty threshold for a family of three, which was $14,269 in 2001. A growing list of reports on individual state efforts to reform welfare shows, in most instances, large drops in caseloads. A study released last week by the University of Missouri-Columbia said the caseload in Missouri was halved from 1990 to 1999. The report said residents who left welfare in the 1990s earn low wages and tend to work in less stable jobs, but those individuals appear to have benefited from welfare reform. In Milwaukee County, the survey reported that nearly half (47 percent) of those surveyed had been unable to pay their rent or mortgage. It also found that 47 percent had their phones disconnected. "It's not surprising but it is good solid evidence of what we've been seeing in real life," said John Bouman, director of advocacy for the Chicago-based National Center for Poverty Law. Bouman said it is difficult to generalize about the success of welfare reform efforts because there are examples that show people have emerged from public assistance and become self-sufficient. But Bouman said last week's government figures showing that another 1.7 million Americans slid into poverty last year underscore the challenge of finding good jobs and holding onto them. Gamma ray bursts and other cosmic explosions called x-ray flashes are the same phenomenon in different guises. That's the prediction of a disputed new model in which GRBs, the most powerful explosions in the universe, aim their energy like a rifle shot, whereas x-ray flashes emit broader fans of energy. If true, up to 100,000 GRBs could blow up in the universe for each one that astronomers see. Satellites spot GRBs as flares of the most energetic radiation known. Astronomers reached a consensus about their origins earlier this year by finding the signature of an exploded star, a supernova, at the site of a nearby GRB. Theorists now concur that massive stars must spew fantastic jets of energy into space when their cores collapse into black holes, but they disagree about what those jets look like. Clues lie in comparing GRBs to their seemingly less-energetic cousins, x-ray-rich GRBs and x-ray flashes, whose sources are more mysterious. New research suggests all three types arise from supernovas that focus their fury in jets with drastically different shapes. Astrophysicist Donald Lamb of the University of Chicago and colleagues examined the energies of GRBs and their x-ray kin recorded by the High-Energy Transient Explorer-2 satellite and earlier orbiters. The team saw a tight correlation between the total energy observed for each blast and the peak wavelength of the measured radiation. The bursts that appeared to be the most powerful churned out most of their energy in intense, short-wavelength gamma rays, while the weakest ones had peak energies at longer wavelength x-rays. This striking pattern implies that the three types of explosions all have the same overall energy. If that's the case, says Lamb, an x-ray flash must spew radiation in nearly all directions, dimming its impact for a distant observer. However, a GRB would channel its outburst into a needlelike cone perhaps 1 angular degree wide, which we see as a far brighter flare. "Their jets are so tiny that we only see them if we are in the boresight," says Lamb, noting that we would detect just one of every 10,000 or 100,000 such blasts. His scenario earned a mixed reception. Astronomer Dale Frail of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory in Socorro, New Mexico, says the unified model "is so simple and elegant, you want it to be true." But astrophysicist Shrinivas Kulkarni of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena objects to the "incredibly tiny" 1-degree beams. Rather, his group's research points to a range of gamma ray and x-ray energies emerging together in wider cones.
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