You may be able to file online, by phone, or in person. Some states provide extended benefits when there's high unemployment. Extended unemployment insurance benefits last for 13 weeks.
You can apply for extended benefits only once you've run out of regular benefits. Check with your state; not everyone qualifies. You must report unemployment benefits as income on your tax return. Federal agencies offer many unemployment education and training programs. They are generally free or low cost to the unemployed. Self-employment assistance programs help unemployed workers start their own small businesses. Known previously as "food stamps," SNAP benefits can help you stretch your food budget if you have a low income.
You can use your SNAP benefits to buy a variety of foods for your household, including:. To determine if you are eligible for SNAP benefits , you must meet certain requirements. States have income limits for SNAP recipients. They can also factor in your resources, such as money in the bank, to decide if you qualify for SNAP. Use the online map to apply for SNAP and to find your state and local offices and phone numbers.
You may also apply in person at your state or local office. At the same time, social programs began to include mechanisms to compel labor-market participation, by cutting benefits for able-bodied adults who proved unable or unwilling to find work. Today, the fixation on dependency and its consequences is no less acute.
Following a new directive by the Trump administration, Kentucky, Arkansas, and 14 other US states have announced or introduced work requirements as a condition of eligibility for Medicaid public health insurance for the poor. But the idea that government assistance drives dependency is not unique to any country, even if all countries face unique challenges in providing safety nets for the poor. Moreover, beliefs about dependency are not just common among the rich; one often hears similar complaints from the very people whom social programs are meant to help.
It is thus little wonder that such beliefs would translate into policy. Using the World Values Survey, my colleagues and I have assessed how much people attribute poverty to laziness, as opposed to social and economic unfairness, and how it relates to beliefs on redistribution. We find that the more people attribute poverty to a lack of willpower, the less generous the transfer system in their country will be. So, beliefs about dependency can have real and tangible implications for the poor and the protections they need.
But what if those beliefs are wrong? For example, far from creating dependency, it is possible that welfare programs actually give people the necessary tools to achieve financial independence, provided that the assistance is dependable rather than sporadic and temporary. In that case, the provision of government assistance over an extended period of time could yield high social and economic returns, not least by allowing low-income families to make longer-term investments for the future.
The program was implemented in randomly selected sub-districts, which were compared to a control group of sub-districts that did not have the program. Moreover, the program was directed at families, which were encouraged to use the benefits to invest in their children.
Only households with children or a pregnant woman could enroll, and a portion of the stipend was made conditional on fulfilling various health- and education-related obligations, such as basic immunization and the completion of at least nine years of school. As in many countries, these conditions are hard to enforce in practice, so many households received full payments despite non-compliance. One important feature of PKH is that it did not merely provide a few weeks or months of assistance between jobs or in the case of a financial shock.
Rather, it focused on the very poor, and was administered for at least six years, with the understanding that climbing out of poverty takes time and requires consistent support and stability. Given this initial success, the Indonesian government expanded the program widely over the next few years.
By , it was providing assistance to about 2. Now, however, the government was targeting specific districts, rather than following the previous random-selection process. As a result, many of the sub-districts in the initial control group were left out, and have not received the program yet. While many programs are welfare programs, the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program is the one most often called "welfare. Most TANF recipients are children. The June figures include , adults and over 1.
Those may seem like high numbers. But they represent just a fraction of American families living in poverty. Public perception of welfare, then officially known as the AFDC, soured in the '70s.
In , President Ronald Reagan's campaign highlighted a case of welfare fraud and popularized the concept of a "welfare queen. Reagan pushed for welfare reforms and warned of how welfare created a cycle of poverty.
Medicaid and CHIP provide health insurance. This allows low-income families to access medical care. In September , Medicaid helped pay for the care of more than 81 million low-income adults and children. It covers hospital care, medical supplies, tests, eye exams, dental care, and regular check-ups. Medicaid pays for a significant portion of U. The Affordable Care Act increased Medicaid coverage by It raised the maximum income level and allowed single adults to qualify.
SNAP is more commonly known as food stamps. These government food benefits helped more than 42 million people buy food in In Sept. It provides:. In , roughly 6. Another food-based welfare program is known as the Child Nutrition Program. In , this program provided free or reduced-cost lunches to Supplemental Security Income provides extra cash to help low-income adults and children who live with disabilities. As of January , more than 7. Of people getting benefits, more than 6.
The Earned Income Tax Credit is a tax credit for low-income families. More than 22 million individuals and families received EITC in The credits lifted approximately 5. About 3 million of them were children. Housing assistance often takes the form of rental assistance.
It includes 1. Local agencies administer it to 2. The Low-Income Home Energy Assistance Program is a similar welfare program that provides energy assistance and weatherization programs. Many of these respondents may not realize that they benefit from federal assistance given to their state governments. Third, the federal government provides child care subsidies to low-income working and middle-class families through the tax code. However, because these child care tax credits are not refundable, families with no or little income tax liability lose all or part of the credit and most of the benefits accrue to relatively well-off families.
Fourth, Head Start and a few other programs provide early education and developmental services to many of the children whose mothers are likely to be on welfare. State spending on child care has probably increased as well. Nonetheless, a widely cited Department of Health and Human Services study shows that only 12 percent of children potentially eligible under federal guidelines are receiving subsidies through the child care block grant.
Other studies suggest that current funding is adequate to provide subsidized care for all families leaving welfare who need it, but many families have difficulty accessing the benefits for which they are eligible and only about a third of mothers leaving welfare receive subsidized care. Equally important, research suggests that there is not enough funding to serve all of the working poor, especially those who have never been on welfare.
Some states, such as Illinois, have sought to extend child care assistance to this group. Waiting lists exist in some states and child development experts are concerned about the quality of available care. If every state were to provide as much assistance to the working poor as Illinois now does, funding for child care would need to increase by about 50 percent, according to a study by Jean Layzer and Ann Collins conducted at Abt Associates in Cambridge.
But even this level of funding would provide little room for quality improvements. For these and other reasons, proposals to expand funding for the child care block grant are likely to be considered during the reauthorization debate. Child support enforcement is a federal-state program that attempts to collect money from parents who do not live with their children.
There are now over 50, child support caseworkers in the U. Child support payments are potentially a major support for struggling single mothers and their children. It does appear that both the percentage of families receiving child support and the amount of money they receive are creeping up, although the pace of improvement is slow. Even so, a realistic assessment of the role of child support in supporting low-income single mothers requires us to have modest expectations.
The program is improving and the help provided to mothers who actually receive payments is substantial. But future improvement is constrained by the fact that many of the fathers of poor mothers have limited income, especially when they are young. Even so, the nation should continue its current course of aggressive improvement in the child support program.
The frequency of paternity establishment, which more than doubled between and , is one of the great successes of social policy in recent decades and implies that the program can expect to continue its current path of modest improvement. One policy that would lead to instant improvement in the financial status of single mothers is reversing the current practice of government retention of some child support payments to mothers who spent time on welfare.
Approximately half the money collected on overdue child support owed to mothers who have left welfare is retained by states as an offset for welfare payments. Greater access to education and training would seem to be an obvious solution to the low wages earned by less skilled workers. For this reason, the pre welfare system stressed the importance of helping recipients acquire skills before taking a job. In addition, welfare leavers have the same opportunities to access community colleges, tuition assistance through Pell grants, and other forms of training as the rest of the low-income population.
This approach might be especially appropriate for mothers returning to the welfare rolls because they have been laid off from their jobs during a recession. Not all education and training programs are effective. But programs that are closely aligned to the needs of employers, that use existing institutions such as community colleges, and that train for jobs in high growth sectors such as health care could probably help families move up the occupational ladder. Calls for more state flexibility in the use of TANF funds for such purposes, and especially for demonstration programs, are likely to be an important part of the reauthorization debate.
There are a variety of other support programs that low-income working families can access, including housing assistance, transportation assistance, and several child nutrition programs. Indeed, one problem for families is that there are a multitude of programs, all with somewhat different eligibility rules and administrative systems.
Finding the time to apply, or reapply, for all of these different forms of assistance can be an exercise in frustration for an employed parent trying to balance work and care of children, especially if the benefits are uncertain or small. The result is that many families simply give up and fail to receive benefits for which they are eligible.
A possible solution is to establish a single application process for as many of these benefits as possible, to allow families to apply at times and places consistent with their work obligations, and to extend eligibility certification periods for those in regular jobs. If a single application for the EITC, the child tax credit, food stamps, Medicaid, and a child care voucher or tax credit could be established, it would go a long way toward solving the problems these families experience with bureaucratic hurdles.
It would also make more visible a troubling feature of the entire system: as earnings increase these benefits disappear at a rapid rate, thereby undermining one of the goals of a system that is supposed to reward work.
Unfortunately, there are no easy solutions to this problem, since making benefit reduction rates less steep would be very costly to the federal budget. Before welfare was reformed in , the prevailing assumption was that low rates of employment among less educated mothers reflected, to a large degree, a dearth of jobs for which they qualified.
But the experience of the late s proved that even low-skilled individuals can, if pushed by the welfare system, pulled by the work support system, and buoyed by a strong economy, find work and increase their earnings. Employment rates among women with less than a high school degree, for example, increased from 33 percent to 53 percent between and , according to the Urban Institute.
But there will always be some adults for whom finding a private-sector job is difficult and the number of such people invariably increases substantially during an economic downturn.
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