In late 2015, a pair of researchers stumbled upon a remarkable finding: since the 1996 federal welfare reform law, the number of people who are living on less than $2 a day in America has doubled. They found that 1.5m American households, including three million children, are now living at or near this threshold, as guaranteed government aid that once existed in this country has all but disappeared. While they didn’t place all of the blame on reduced government aid, they pointed to the welfare reform law as one of the main drivers of increased extreme poverty in the US.

With that finding in hand, I attended a 20th anniversary event in Washington DC featuring many of the architects of the welfare reform law, which placed strict limits on aid to needy families. Bruce Reed, one of Bill Clinton’s chief domestic policy advisers and the man who coined the former president’s pledge to “end welfare as we know it”, told me that while the law had its shortcomings, overall it was a “success”. Former Wisconsin governor Tommy Thompson, another early advocate for welfare reform, was similarly unrepentant. “It did work,” he said. “Poverty went down and more people are working.”

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In the years since the passage of the welfare reform law, its architects have generally shied away from discussing any shortfalls of the law. You could chalk this up to ego, as if they simply are unwilling to admit their role in gutting America’s social safety net. But strong economic growth in the 1990s helped shield many of the law’s effects from the eyes of the public and government officials.

A growing body of research performed since then, such as the finding about extreme poverty, has shown us some of the downsides of eliminating “welfare as we know it”.

Earlier this year, a group of researchers released a working paper that examined the relationship between welfare reform and various social behaviors among adolescents. What they found is that welfare reform increased a number of antisocial behaviors – ranging from increasing smoking and drug use among boys and girls to increasing fighting and skipping school among boys.

These findings call into question claims among welfare reform proponents that the law, by reducing dependence on government aid, would reduce an intergenerational “culture of poverty”. In fact, the paper found “no significant effects of welfare reform on youth prosocial behaviors” – such as volunteering or participation in school clubs – for either boys or girls.

Lest you think the researchers were leftwing ideologues, previous research they conducted found that welfare reform was associated with an increase in civic participation among women and a decrease in illicit drug use, findings which many welfare reform proponents are likely to use to defend the program.

Rutgers University public health economist Nancy Reichman, one of the authors of the study, wrote to me over email that the results of the welfare reform law are a “mixed bag”, and that the main lesson is that “policies often have unintended consequences, that large-scale changes such as the 1996 welfare reform legislation should not be implemented based on assumptions for which there is a limited evidence base (eg there was no evidence underlying the assumption that welfare reform would prevent the intergenerational transmission of welfare dependence), and that success should not be declared based on a limited set of short-term outcomes”.

But their conclusion about the law’s impact on children – as well as the finding about extreme poverty – should force us to actually debate the impact of the law and talk about how it could be improved, something most politicians in America have refused to do.

The one exception was in 2016, when Vermont senator Bernie Sanders – locked in a battle with Hillary Clinton for the Democratic presidential nomination – called for repealing the welfare reform law. But since then, Sanders has not authored and released a proposal to alter or repeal the welfare reform law.

While the idea may seem utopian on first glance, cash transfer programs have been implemented all over the world, with some success

Among 2020 Democratic candidates, it is entrepreneur Andrew Yang who has proposed the largest cash transfer program that would benefit the poor: the universal basic income (UBI). Under Yang’s UBI, every American adult would get $1,000 monthly, with no strings attached. While the idea may seem utopian on first glance, cash transfer programs have been implemented all over the world, with some success.

Brazil’s cash transfer program bolsa família (family allowance) is credited with halving extreme poverty in that country; one US state, Alaska, even has a UBI funded by oil residuals and state investments. In 2017, every Alaska resident received about $1,100 annually from the state. While some on the right may worry that a UBI would reduce work incentives, comprehensive research on Iran’s UBI found that most residents did not cut back on work hours.

Welfare reform’s proponents, like Reed, would argue that the law has overall been a success. Critics would point to the recent findings by Reichman and her colleagues that the law has appeared to harm the children of recipients. Wherever you come down on the debate, it is long past time to have it.