Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: MONDAY, June 14, 1993                   TAG: 9308260228
SECTION: EDITORIAL                    PAGE: A6   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: 
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

WELFARE

In an interview the other day, Health and Human Services Secretary Donna Shalala said: "I don't think we should subsidize poor mothers to stay out of the work force when working-class mothers are going into the work force."

Tough talk - and, perhaps an indication from the secretary that she finally is getting serious about President Clinton's pledge to overhaul welfare.

During the campaign, Clinton declared he wanted to "end welfare as we know it." He proposed that low-income Americans should be offered education, training and public assistance for two years, after which the able-bodied must be willing to work or be cut off from welfare.

Shalala until recently has seemed reluctant to sign on to these ideas. She served for many years (beside Hillary Clinton) on the board of the Children's Defense Fund. In 1988, this group opposed a law that required states to put more welfare recipients into education and training.

Perhaps now Shalala is coming around to the view that work requirements are better and fairer not only for taxpayers, but for recipients of Aid to Families with Dependent Children, who too often are locked into debilitating and intergenerational dependency.

Clinton likes to bring up welfare reform when he wants to show independence from the Democratic Party's liberal lobby. But, in fact, substantive reform wouldn't save taxpayers money during a transitional period, because for a while health care and child care would have to be subsidized as supports for low-income mothers to go to work and achieve self-sufficiency.

Major reform would save huge amounts in the long run - think about the effects on crime and drug costs alone from emphasizing education and job placement. Plus, it would replace the current system, which gives work to no one but bureaucrats.

As Clinton has said, eligibility for Aid to Families with Dependent Children ought to be limited to two years for those able to work. The Earned Income Tax Credit must be expanded, as an incentive to work and as a means of making jobs the path out of poverty. And efforts by community-based private and nonprofit organizations to help people find work should be supported as an alternative to government's inefficient and poorly managed programs.

In the end, people must lift themselves from poverty; the government can't do it for them. But the government can do a better job helping them, and getting out of the way, than it does now.

Reform is the way not just to increase the president's popularity with resentful taxpayers, but also to begin shrinking the shameful poverty that splits our nation into separate and unequal societies.

Was Shalala's promising talk last week an indicator of change on the way? Everyone, the poor especially, should hope so.