DATE: Wednesday, March 5, 1997              TAG: 9703050008

SECTION: LOCAL                   PAGE: B10  EDITION: FINAL 

                                            LENGTH:   53 lines

FOOD STAMPS: MINIMIZING PAIN OF CUTS AS WELFARE REFORM KICKS IN, VIRGINIA IS WISE TO TEMPER JUSTICE WITH MERCY

The beauty of welfare reform has been that politicians, so far, could crow about its benefits without any dire consequences to face.

Because recipients have two years to get their acts together, only those who've been lax or recalcitrant about finding or keeping a job have suffered to date.

But all that is about to change. Over the next few years (and beginning in July in Virginia) hundreds of thousands of individuals will lose support. They and we will discover together what happens when the government safety net goes into storage.

A warm-up act will come our way sooner, courtesy of reforms in the food-stamp program. Starting now, able-bodied, childless adults who are between the ages of 18 and 49 and work less than 20 hours a week will have food stamps limited to three months in any three-year period.

The government began cutting off those benefits two weeks ago. About 20,000 Virginians are affected.

While no children should be affected by this change, some within the public-policy debate view the step with foreboding. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities describes the cut as ``probably the single harshest provision written into a major safety-net program in at least 30 years.''

According to Peter Edelman, a Clinton appointee who resigned after objecting to provisions of the welfare-reform legislation, that's because the food-stamp program until now has been the one government plan that addressed need irrespective of age or family situation.

``It was the safety net under the safety net,'' Edelman writes in the current issue of Atlantic magazine.

The Virginia legislature wisely has taken two steps to protect those who would lose benefits simply because they cannot find a job. Gov. George F. Allen already had requested waivers for nine Virginia counties where the unemployment rate is more than 10 percent.

In addition, the legislature instructed the administration to seek waivers for some two dozen localities qualifying as ``labor surplus areas.'' Those are places in which the unemployment rate has exceeded the national average by 20 percent over the past two years.

And the legislature specified that volunteer work should count toward the 20-hour work requirement in some cases.

Both of these are sensible ideas, and Allen should approve them. This is too prosperous a nation to deny food to anyone who makes an effort to support himself or herself. Nor should individuals go hungry if personal or environmental limitations make work unobtainable.

The challenge of welfare reform is to see that those who can work do, without penalizing those who legitimately cannot find a job they are qualified to hold. KEYWORDS: FOOD STAMPS WELFARE

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