I'll stipulate from the get-go that I have no quarrel with the raises Gov. Mark Dayton attempted to give state agency heads earlier this year — and may still, come July 1. They were both reasonable in comparison with other metro-area public-sector salaries and overdue after a 12-year salary freeze.
But as that dozen-year pay lock was cited by Dayton defenders in recent weeks, I kept thinking: What about the Minnesotans who depend on state government checks that haven't increased since 1986? Where's their raise?
That date is not a typo. Minnesota has not boosted the cash grants it provides to families enrolled in the state/federal Minnesota Family Investment Program (MFIP) — in other words, "on welfare" — for a shamefully long 29 years. The maximum cash grant to a needy family of three, typically a single mother and two children, was and still is $532 per month. The average grant: a measly $353 per month.
In 1986, those sums might have covered the rent in a modest apartment and allowed a little left over for bus fare and the clothes, toiletries and diapers that food stamps won't cover. Today, particularly in the metro area, those amounts won't rent half an apartment. According to realtor.com, the average one-bedroom unit in Hennepin County rents for $1,373.
The 1986 sums were intended to give Minnesota's neediest child-rearing families incomes at 70 percent of the poverty level set by the federal government. That's far from generous, but it allowed families to function during their time on welfare, which averages less than three years in Minnesota. Those sums today are worth only 32 percent of the federal poverty line. That's deep poverty. In fact, since the feds define deep poverty as 50 percent of poverty-line income, it's deeper than deep.
Last year, nearly 70,000 Minnesota children and 29,000 adults were "helped" to lives of deeper-than-deep poverty by the taxpayers of Minnesota.
"We have made the welfare program into a deep financial hole that we systemically place families into," lamented Jim Koppel, the new assistant commissioner for children and family welfare at the state Department of Human Services. "The hole is so deep that these families are unable to plan for their futures because they are unable to think beyond dinner that night. It paralyzes them."
One result: Even as the Great Recession retreated in Minnesota, homelessness among families with young children increased. When last measured in 2012, the number of homeless families in Minnesota was more than four times greater than it had been 21 years earlier, Wilder Research reports.