It should have been easy. Gov. Hassan’s Gateway to Work program, which she announced in her State of the State Address seven months ago, had bipartisan support. It’s a well-planned program to spend money earmarked for welfare payments to pay for job training – and the child care assistance that makes job training and work possible – for low-income residents on public assistance or in danger of needing it. But Republican fiscal paranoia got in the way, and the Gateway program for teen summer jobs has already gone by the boards.
More opportunities for self-betterment and financial independence will go by the boards if the program is shelved until next summer, which is what some members of the Joint Legislative Finance Committee want to see happen.
The Gateway program has the support of employers, who are struggling to find competent workers in an aging state with one of the nation’s lowest unemployment rates. It is unlike the pie-in-the-sky education programs so often peddled to low-income people trying to better themselves. Too often, those programs train people for jobs that exist in theory, not practice, and leave them worse off and saddled with debt. Gateway participants would train for jobs employers need to fill now, jobs that pay enough to support oneself or a small family without reliance on public assistance.
New Hampshire is the only New England state without a minimum wage of its own. The income floor is set by the federal minimum wage of $7.25 per hour, which is itself a grossly outdated and unrealistic figure, especially in the high-cost Northeast. A single individual earning minimum wage cannot support himself or herself and live decently, let alone support a child as many women are forced to do. The Gateway program promised a way out of those jobs, that life.
Funding for the Gateway program, $8.3 million initially, was designed to come from the savings in welfare payments in the Temporary Assistance to Needy Families budget. At its peak in 2010, 14,000 residents were enrolled in TANF. As the recession wound down and employment ramped up, that number was more than cut in half, to 5,700 today. Using some of the savings to fund the Gateway program would have allowed hundreds of the 2,000 people expected to apply to be trained for new jobs and welfare-free lives.
“Not so fast,” said Weare Rep. Neal Kurk, the ever-watchful chairman of the joint committee.
Kurk believes $8 million is too much to be moved around without the permission of the full Legislature, and, since the money comes in the form of a federal grant to the state, without the approval of the Executive Council. Hassan, Kurk says, should have put the Gateway funding in the state budget. Since she didn’t, the program will have to wait for a legislative vote.
That position is shortsighted. It ignores the goal of welfare, which is to get people back on their feet again and self-supporting, in favor of control over the purse strings and conservative fear over anything that might be considered a hand-out, not a help up. It also mocks the numbers.
Health and Human Service is the state’s largest agency. Its budget, more than half of which comes from the federal government, accounts for more than 40 percent of the state’s $11.3 billion biennial budget. While $8 million is, in one sense, a lot of money, it accounts for less than .03 percent of the HHS budget. Holding up the Gateway program is like letting the roof leak rather than spend the leftover grocery money on shingles.