Dismantling the Poverty Trap: Disability Policy for the 21st Century. Policy Brief

Working-age Americans with disabilities are much more likely to live in poverty than other Americans and generally did not share in the economic prosperity of the late 1990s. At the same time, public expenditures to support them are growing at a rate that will be difficult to sustain when the baby boom generation retires and begins to draw Social Security Retirement and Medicare benefits. We argue that this discouraging situation will continue unless we can bring disability programs into line with more contemporary understanding of the capabilities of people with disabilities and successfully implement broad, systemic reforms to promote their economic self-sufficiency. This policy brief summarizes a larger paper (Stapleton, O’Day, Livermore & Imparato, 2005). It suggests principles to guide reforms and encourage debate. Future policy briefs will elaborate on some of these principles

The Effects of Welfare Reform on Young Women With Disabilities

This paper uses the Current Population Survey (CPS) data to show that changes in family policy implemented in the 1990s led to a substantial increase in the number of young women who report work limitations. These changes also affected measures of socioeconomic outcomes for young women who report limitations. The findings emphasize the importance of disability to family policy issues, and suggest that past underreporting of disability by young mothers might well have disguised its importance. They also suggest that the impacts of family policy on mothers with disabilities have been quite different than the impacts on other mothers. An important effect of family policy changes may have been to segregate low-income mothers with disabilities from other low-income mothers, continuing to relegate them, and possibly their children, to lives of poverty and dependency.DE75A_PDF2.pdf: 191 downloads, before Oct. 1, 2020.0-DE75A_HTM1.htm: 27 downloads, before Oct. 1, 2020