Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: THURSDAY, February 24, 1994 TAG: 9403040012
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A9 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: DOUGLAS MACKINNON
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
More often than not, I also found myself biting my tongue as I listened to various friends and co-workers pontificate on the plight of the poor and how they must be helped and dealt with. It wasn't necessarily out of anger at the ideas they were expounding - some were sensible enough - but rather because of my feeling that something important was missing from the discussions: any personal sense of what it means to be poor.
Most of my friends and co-workers in the Reagan and Bush administrations came from middle-class or upper-middle-class backgrounds. I did not.
I came from deep in the heart of what might today be called the ``underclass.'' While I mostly had two parents, I grew up in a world of abject poverty in various inner cities, saw our family homeless on a few occasions, living on public assistance at times and frequently evicted. I know what it's like to go without food and new clothes and to have others torment you because of your poverty.
I guess that's really the point I'm trying to make. That old feeling of anger returned awhile back, when I read a Wall Street Journal essay by Charles Murray on the growing problem of illegitimate births and welfare dependency. In that much-discussed article, Murray prescribes this drastic remedy:
``Restoring economic penalties translates into the first and central policy prescription: to end all economic support for single mothers. The AFDC payment goes to zero. Single mothers are not eligible for subsidized housing or for food stamps. An assortment of other subsidies and in-kind benefits disappear.''
``How does a poor young mother survive without government support?'' Murray asks. ``The same way she has since time immemorial. If she wants to keep a child, she must enlist support from her parents, boyfriend, siblings, neighbors, church or philanthropies.''
That answer is so laughable as to be embarrassing. Let's just analyze it for a second, using Mr. Murray's own numbers. He says the illegitimacy rate for blacks in the inner city is typically in excess of 80 percent.
How many parents in the inner city will have the resources to support their daughters, given these huge numbers, or for that matter how many boyfriends, brothers or sisters? They're more likely to have problems of their own.
Churches? Not a lot of money at an inner-city black church, I'm afraid.
Philanthropies? Call the Rockefeller Foundation, and see what it will do for a single mother.
And what happens if single mothers don't follow Murray's blueprint for success? Or, as he puts it, ``What about women who can find no support but keep the baby anyway?''
Well, he says, ``There are laws already on the books about the right of the State to take a child away from a neglectful parent.''
That's strange. I didn't know that keeping one's baby was necessarily a form of neglect. But suppose the child is taken away from its mother - what then? Is it Murray's intention to put it into some kind of future Orwellian orphanage, where all things are possible?
My advice to Murray and some of the other welfare theorizers is to get their noses out of the books, studies and position papers, and get on down to the inner city, where they can talk with and observe some real, live poor people.
There truly is something to be said about knowing your subject personally. For example - and as a Republican it pains me to say this - what I've seen of Bill Clinton's welfare reform seems to have successfully jump-started the debate.
It's not just that it would shake things up and discomfort those in the left wing of his own party who think the welfare status quo is fine except that there isn't enough of it.
It's more that I think Clinton is temperamentally suited for the effort of getting through a workable plan because he's been there himself; he went through some hard and uncertain times as a kid - not abject welfare dependency, but periods when no one was quite sure where the rent and food money was coming from. Clinton brings something useful to the table.
I only hope he also brings the courage of his convictions and does not cave in to those whom the conservative humorist P. J. O'Rourke once called ``poverty pests'' - the professional welfare-dispensing class.
As one who grew up on welfare, I believe very strongly that it does do some good. Even with the help of family and friends, we sometimes fell through the cracks and needed a helping hand from the government.
But I also believe that welfare is an evil that should be offered for no more than two years and should cover no new births. For whatever good welfare does, it also robs people of their self-respect and dignity. Two years is about all a human being should take of it.
Somewhere between what Murray wants and what the ``poverty pests'' advocate, there is an answer that deals with this problem with logic and compassion. We're most likely to find it if the people making the legislation take the trouble to learn something, on the personal level, about the people and the situation they're dealing with.
\ Douglas MacKinnon was a White House aide under Presidents Reagan and Bush, and later a special assistant in the Defense Department.
\ The Washington Post
by CNB