Cash-strapped Arizona cuts welfare limit
One-year cutoff is shortest in nation
PHOENIX – Facing a $1 billion budget deficit, Arizona’s Republican-led Legislature has reduced the lifetime limit for welfare recipients to the shortest window in the nation.
Low-income families on welfare will now have their benefits cut off after just 12 months.
As a result, the Arizona Department of Economic Security will drop at least 1,600 families – including more than 2,700 children – from the state’s federally funded welfare program on July 1, 2016.
The cuts of at least $4 million reflect a prevailing mood among the lawmakers in control in Arizona that welfare, Medicaid and other public assistance programs are crutches that keep the poor from achieving their potential.
“I tell my kids all the time that the decisions we make have rewards or consequences, and if I don’t ever let them face those consequences, they can’t get back on the path to rewards,” Republican Sen. Kelli Ward, R-Lake Havasu City, said during debate on the budget. “As a society, we are encouraging people at times to make poor decisions and then we reward them.”
Cutting off these benefits after just one year isn’t fair, said Jessica Lopez, 23, who gave birth to her son while living in a domestic violence shelter and has struggled to hold on to jobs because she has dyslexia and didn’t finish high school.
“We’re all human,” said Lopez, who got $133 per month for about a year until she qualified for a larger federal disability check. “Everybody has problems. Everybody is different. When people ask for help, we should be able to get it without having to be looked at wrong.”
Most states impose a five-year limit on welfare benefits. Thirteen states limit it to two years or less, and Texas has a tiered time limit that can be as little as 12 months but allows children to continue to receive funding even after the parents have been cut, welfare policy analyst Liz Schott said.
“The reason they are on public assistance is because many of them are not really succeeding in the workforce,” said Schott, a senior fellow at the Center of Budget and Policy Priorities, a non-partisan research organization.
Arizona’s Legislature cut the budgets of an array of programs to meet the governor’s no-tax-increase pledge.