Patricia Brown wipes her brow while checking for job related emails on the tablet she holds in her hand. Beside her is a pile of clean laundry that she will fold. Brown had just returned by bus from the Center for Workforce Innovation in Richmond.

From [HERE] The federal government established a 60-month lifetime limit on cash public assistance in 1996 as part of welfare reform. In the early years, when the economy boomed, the welfare rolls plummeted nationally. They have continued a steady decline since. In Virginia, the TANF roll has fallen 61 percent. It is now at its lowest point, even after a rise during the Great Recession.

Most — about 67 percent – enrolled in the commonwealth’s welfare-t0-work program did, indeed, find work, though no one is tracking how many have remained employed. This is generally true elsewhere  in the country and, in that sense – healthy, unmarried mothers find work — welfare reform has been a success. This is not the same thing as saying these mothers – and some fathers – have left poverty. The average hourly wage of those who went immediately from welfare to work over roughly the past two decades in Virginia? $7.33 an hour. [MORE]