Playing With Our Future: Child Care and Development Spending at Its Lowest Level in Over a Decade

March 13, 2012

State child care and preschool programs provide safe and affordable care that helps low- and moderate-income parents find and retain jobs. These programs are as important as ever as parents work to keep their jobs or return to the workforce in the aftermath of the Great Recession. In light of this, it is especially troubling, as we’ll show in an upcoming CBP report, that total spending for child care and development programs—which include child care, preschool, and afterschool programs—has dropped dramatically since 2007-08 and would fall even further under the Governor’s Proposed 2012-13 Budget. In just four years, child care and development spending in California has dropped from its peak by 22.7 percent, after adjusting for inflation. Under the Governor’s proposal, spending would fall by an additional 18.5 percent in 2012-13, to its lowest level since 1998-99. The CBP’s upcoming report will look at recent trends in state child care and development programs, examine recent spending cuts targeting child care and preschool, and highlight the importance of these programs for California’s working families.

– Sam Sellers

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Ending CalWORKs as We Know It?

February 29, 2012

In the aftermath of the Great Recession, California’s families face the toughest job market in decades. The state’s unemployment rate, currently 11.1 percent, is projected to remain in double digits through 2014. Nearly 1 million Californians have been without work for six months or longer – seven times higher than before the downturn began. Nearly one-quarter of California’s children (23.4 percent) were living in poverty in 2010, up from 17.9 percent in 2007. Moreover, the recession hit single mothers and their families particularly hard, as we show in this chart. The share of California’s single mothers with jobs dropped from a recent peak of 69.2 percent in 2007 to 58.8 percent in 2010. In just three years, the downturn erased all of the employment gains that single mothers made following implementation of welfare reform in the 1990s.

Given this grim landscape, CalWORKs – a key part of the state’s safety net for low-income families with children – is more important than ever for the 1.4 million Californians in the program, more than three out of four of whom are children. While state policymakers have made deep cuts to CalWORKs in recent years to help close budget gaps, the basic foundation – welfare-to-work services and modest cash assistance – remains intact. The Governor, however, proposes to blow apart that foundation with even deeper cuts, including reducing parents’ access to welfare-to-work services and dramatically cutting or eliminating cash assistance for more than 430,000 families – nearly three out of four families currently in the program. These changes would cut spending on CalWORKs by roughly $1 billion in 2012-13, providing more than 9 percent of the Governor’s proposed “solutions” to the state’s budget gap even though CalWORKs accounts for less than 3 percent of the state budget, as we show in a new report released this week.

The Governor’s proposal will receive a full airing in the Legislature this afternoon and tomorrow. Assembly Budget Subcommittee #1 on Health and Human Services will review the CalWORKs proposal today at 1:30 p.m., and the full Senate Budget and Fiscal Review Committee will hear the proposal tomorrow at 9:30 a.m.

– Scott Graves

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Falling Behind

February 2, 2012

A new CBP report, Falling Behind: The Impact of the Great Recession and the Budget Crisis on California’s Women and Their Families, looks at the economic downturn’s effect on the state’s women, especially low-income women and single mothers.

The report shows that the budget crisis has resulted in severe cuts to supports for families as well as to programs that help women prepare for, find, and keep employment. These include major spending reductions to CalWORKs as well as to child care, Medi-Cal, in-home care, and postsecondary education. The report also shows that these cuts have come amid an economic downturn that has been hard on California’s women, especially single mothers.

The report finds that:

  • Employment and earnings among single mothers have dropped significantly during the economic downturn. In just three years – from 2007 to 2010 – the share of single mothers with jobs fell by more than 10 percentage points to 59 percent, its lowest point in almost 15 years, while the percentage of single-mother families living in poverty jumped to 36 percent.
  • The state cut a total of more than $3 billion from CalWORKs between 2008-09 and 2011-12, equal to about $3,000 for each of the 1.1 million children in the program.
  • The state has cut child care and preschool funding by a total of $1.5 billion over the past three years, eliminating services for tens of thousands of children – including 35,000 children in the current year alone.
  • Since 2007-08, state support for community colleges has dropped by almost one-fifth. Community college enrollment has dropped by almost 130,000 during this period, with women accounting for more than 80 percent of the decline.

Support for Falling Behind was provided by a grant from the Women’s Foundation of California. You can read the full report here and an executive summary of the report here.

– Steven Bliss

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A Fresh Start for CalFresh

January 11, 2012

The new year brings a major change to CalFresh, a federal program that provides modest food benefits that help nearly 4 million low-income Californians – more than half (60 percent) of whom are children – ward off hunger. Thanks to AB 6 (Fuentes), Californians applying for CalFresh assistance no longer have to be fingerprinted in order to receive benefits. This change should help increase the number of Californians who enroll in CalFresh, since numerous studies suggest that fingerprinting deters eligible individuals from applying, as we reported in 2009. Boosting participation in CalFresh is sorely needed. In 2009, just 53 percent of eligible Californians were enrolled, ranking dead last among the 50 states, according to a recent report from the US Department of Agriculture. In addition, because CalFresh benefits are 100 percent federally funded, improving participation would bring more federal dollars to California. Those additional federal dollars would be spent at grocery stores throughout the state, supporting jobs and further aiding local economies.

– Scott Graves

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Assembly Committee Assesses CalWORKs in Wake of Recent Budget Cuts

November 7, 2011

CalWORKs, the state’s welfare-to-work program, has been battered by budget cuts in recent years. Last Thursday, Assembly Budget Subcommittee No. 1 on Health and Human Services held an overview hearing to assess what those cuts mean for the 1.5 million Californians – including 1.1 million children – who rely on CalWORKs to help keep a roof over their heads, afford other necessities, and move toward self-sufficiency. The CBP provided testimony on the state’s discouraging jobs picture and recent trends in the CalWORKs Program. Our presentation described the impact of years of cuts to CalWORKs cash assistance and highlighted the fact that California now has a grant level lower than 27 other states, after adjusting for housing costs. Video of the hearing is here.

– Scott Graves

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