CHICAGO (March 19) – Missouri is among seven states that earned an “F” for its welfare reform policies on the 2015 Welfare Reform Report Card, a comprehensive piece of scholarship produced by four public policy researchers at The Heartland Institute.

Missouri was the state with the worst welfare reform policies, finishing No. 50 of the 50 states. Alabama, Georgia, Massachusetts, Oregon, Rhode Island, and Vermont also earned F grades on the report card.

Nearly two decades ago, in 1996, Congress passed and President Bill Clinton signed a reform measure ending the national entitlement to welfare for families with dependent children. Each state implemented welfare reform differently and a natural experiment began, allowing researchers to discover welfare policies that help people become financially independent and escape poverty.

In 2008, The Heartland Institute published the first and only state-by-state analysis of the success of welfare reform. Missouri received an “F” grade on that report, as well.

“There is no reason why Missouri should be in this condition,” said Gary MacDougal, chief author of the Welfare Reform Report Card. “I think it’s just a question of inattention, I think people in Missouri ought to be able to come together and implement some welfare reform policies that have been proven successful in other states — work requirements, cash diversion, time limits, and sanctions in particular.

“Missouri has great universities, its got good people,” MacDougal said. “It’s a bipartisan state really. It can go either way in elections. There’s no political reason why Missouri couldn’t do better.”

The 2015 Welfare Reform Report Card grades five policies key to the goal of welfare: raising the standard of living of the nation’s poor by moving them to work and self-sufficiency. Those five policies are work requirements, cash diversion, service integration, time limits, and sanctions. Missouri’s grades:

• What Missouri needs to do to improve its grade: Adopt work requirements, empower caseworkers with a cash diversion option, and do more to enforce eligibility rules. It also should impose tougher lifetime limits on eligibility for aid and do more to integrate the delivery of welfare and other services.

• What the report said Missouri is doing right: Quite frankly, nothing.

There is hope for Missouri’s poor, according to the report’s authors: Effective welfare reform can save lives and produce positive effects on multiple generations. It can save taxpayers billions of dollars and help address such serious social maladies as crime, alcoholism, and teenage pregnancy.

To read the welfare reform report card – and compare Missouri to every other state in the union using an interactive map – visit heartland.org/welfare-reform.