Welfare reform also had a small positive effect on the illegitimacy rate. In the debate over reform, politicians spoke out against out-of-wedlock childbearing, and the reforms themselves marginally decreased the disincentives for mothers to marry. The out-of-wedlock birthrate had skyrocketed from roughly 8 percent in 1965 to more than 32 percent in 1995. This rate of increase slowed, and among blacks the rate declined very slightly, from 69.9 percent in 1995 to 68.2 percent in 2003.
Welfare reform, then, has affected the lives of millions of people. If the 1999 poverty rate had still been at 1990 levels, there would have been another 4.2 million poor mothers and children. If the illegitimacy rate had continued at its pre-reform pace, another 1.4 million children would have been born out of wedlock. Some of the gains of welfare reform were lost in the 2001 recession, but reform has created a fundamentally different and better dynamic in the nation's anti-poverty policy.
More worrisome is that the success of the 1996 law has relieved pressure on policymakers to keep states from backsliding on enforcing work requirements. And the ultimate reform in poverty policy won't come until government encourages marriage among the women who now become single mothers. If that seems a hopelessly ambitious cause, a little more than a decade ago people said the same about reforming welfare.