South Carolina’s Poor

So here’s a regular guy in the street question: How many people in South Carolina get welfare — cash payments to help them make it through rough times?
A hundred thousand? Two hundred thousand? More than 874,000 — the number of people who live in poverty in the Palmetto State?
How about 34,355 people, which includes 25,330 children? That’s how many people in July 2013 received old-fashioned welfare in our state, which has the nation’s third highest rate of poverty. Any suggestion of hundreds of thousands of people on the government dole buying Cadillacs is as much of a myth as the man in the moon.
In the mid-1990s, President Bill Clinton promised to end “welfare as we know it,” and he did. Yep, a Democrat. He worked with Congress to make program changes so that welfare had a five-year lifetime limit and restrictions that the longest continuing time someone could get help was 24 months in a row.
According to the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities, some 49,800 of 118,700 South Carolina families (42 percent) in poverty received welfare payments in 1994-1995. Sixteen years later, the percentage dropped to 15 percent (19,800 families out of 135,000).
Those families receiving help aren’t on easy street. “The monthly grant for a family of three was $216 in July 2012, 26 percent less than in 1996 after adjusting for inflation,” the Center said.
Can your family live on that?
Even if someone in your family works part-time, you can’t make too much money or you won’t qualify for the temporary help. According to state Department of Social Services spokesman Marilyn Matheus, several factors determine whether a family is eligible. “For a general, ballpark estimate, the monthly income limit for a family of three would be $795 in order to qualify,” she said.
That would bring the family of three’s total income to no more than $1,011 per month to pay bills, buy clothes and survive.
Welfare, known today as Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, “is hard to qualify for,” said another DSS spokesman, Kathleen Goetzman.
Not only do you have to meet income limits, but you have to “participate in work activities,” such as trying to find work or participating in training or educational programs that lead to work. If you are a single woman with a child, you have to work with DSS to find the deadbeat dad to try to establish paternity to collect child support.
Despite the myth that the state is teeming with welfare queens, it’s just not true. In July, for example, the state spent just $2,568,072 in cash support payments, which works out to an average of $74.75 per person (which is very close to the $216 listed above by the Center.)
One former DSS official went as far as to say that South Carolina really didn’t have a safety net for the needy these days.
State Sen. Brad Hutto, an Orangeburg Democrat, put it this way: “We still have the issue of what do you do to assist the needy among us? Until we can get everyone properly trained, we have moral obligations to take care of people in our society. This notion that we are busting at the seams with government programs is not really happening.”
While changes to the traditional welfare program cause fewer people to get help, many who are poor rely on food stamps to get money for food. During the Great Recession, the number of South Carolinians on food stamps jumped dramatically, from 605,852 people who split $60.9 million in July 2008 — an average of just over $100 per person — to 873,808 people in July 2013 who split $115,416,870, or an average of $132 per person.
Translation: A three-person family gets about $400 more to buy food.
And that’s led to a new myth — that thousands of people are using food stamps to eat lobster.
“I don’t see anybody doing that,” said Hutto, who should know. His home county has 24.5 percent of people in poverty.
As a society, we’ve got to do more to help, as the Bible says, “the least of these.” To continue to ignore our poverty problem is immoral.
Andy Brack is publisher of Statehouse Report. He can be reached at: brack@statehousereport.com