ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Monday, July 29, 1996 TAG: 9607290089
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A-4 EDITION: METRO
AMERICA needs thoroughgoing welfare reform - and in many states, Virginia included, is just beginning to get it.
What America doesn't need is another political football for congressional Republicans and President Clinton to kick back and forth in Washington.
If Washington-style welfare "reform" were merely irrelevant, it perhaps could be chalked up to election-year politics and forgotten. But current proposals - the latest version was passed last week by the Senate - don't help the experimentation and genuine reform now occurring at the state level.
At the heart of Congress' problem is its misconception that welfare reform is principally a budget-cutting device. True reform - the kind that shows hope of actually changing lives, of ending cycles of welfare-dependent misery, of establishing the principle of work-for-reward reciprocity, of setting the stage for long-term economic and social savings - makes demands of those in need of help. But it also, at first, makes demands on the public purse. It entails, at first, money for items like child care, transportation, health coverage and, if need be, public-sector jobs as employment of last resort.
To the nation's reform-minded governors, this is no secret.
Wisconsin under Republican Gov. Tommy Thompson has gone perhaps farthest on the welfare-reform road. Indeed, Wisconsin has essentially abolished welfare. Those applying for public assistance are required to work, immediately, for their benefits.
But notice, for now, that it is adding to the welfare costs, not reducing them. Child care alone is costing the state an additional $158 million a year. Overall welfare expenses are expected to rise through 1999 - and this is assuming the state's economy stays robust.
Wisconsin looks to us like the right approach. But its experiment won't have all the answers. Maybe, say, Virginia will have something to contribute. The commonwealth is still in the beginning stages of welfare reform, having just completed its first year of a welfare-to-work initiative with pilot programs in four nonurban locales. For that matter, what works for Wisconsin may turn out to be the wrong answer for Virginia, and vice versa.
Four years ago, candidate Clinton did well to call for the "end of welfare as we know it." Welfare as we know it can and should be ended. The job, however, can best be done not in Washington but in the statehouses. Perhaps pledging to do it himself is why the president tends to get too little credit now for having done what can wisely be done from Washington: granting to 40 states the waivers from federal welfare laws, the waivers that allow Wisconsin to get moving on reform.
The political irony is that congressional Republicans seek to embarrass Clinton, and Clinton goes along with the game, with proposals that threaten to undermine the welfare initiatives of mostly Republican governors.
The policy irony is that measures are proposed in the name of reform - inflexible block grants, transfer of much of the welfare fiscal burden to the states, return to rigid welfare rules set in Washington - that could retard the states' reform efforts.
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