Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: WEDNESDAY, February 22, 1995 TAG: 9502240015
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A-8 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE:
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
The real issue, some say, is who'll get to take credit for fixing the system. Ironic, that. Neither side adequately addresses one of welfare's central flaws: the divorce of obligation from benefit.
And if either did, the short-term costs might prove too high, and long-term benefits too far in the future, to offer an immediate political plus.
Many a poor family has used welfare - by which is usually meant Aid to Families with Dependent Children - as intended, for temporary support while the family gets back on its financial feet.
For others, however, welfare has become a multigenerational cycle of demeaning dependency. Though not the cause of the explosive rise in unwed and teen motherhood, the welfare system has helped make it possible.
The old-fashioned liberal view of welfare is right in suggesting that people don't choose to live on the dole because it provides a good living. It doesn't. The fact that welfare sometimes provides better for a family than does minimum-wage work with no health or day-care benefits says less about welfare than about America's unfortunate unwillingness to ensure that full-time work earns at least enough to provide life's basics.
The liberals are wrong, however, in contending that welfare has failed because its benefits are too stingy. If the dole were better, more people probably would be on it.
The liberals err, too, when they ignore the distinction between welfare and other entitlement programs, like land grants in the 19th century and veterans benefits in the 20th. Whatever the wisdom of those policies, they were fundamentally different from welfare. With Western homestead programs, recipients had to establish farms on the land; with the GI Bill, educational and housing benefits went to those who had served in the nation's military. They entailed reciprocal obligations on the part of their beneficiaries.
In theory, both Gov. Allen's and the Democratic legislators' versions of welfare reform recognize the need to reconnect obligation - in this case, work or education leading to work - with benefit.
But other than simply cutting off benefits after two years, Allen's plan would make little or no effort to help get able-bodied welfare recipients into the working mainstream. If jobs aren't available - and keep in mind, the cutoff would mainly affect that portion of welfare recipients least prepared for legitimate work - tough luck.
Absent other components, Allen's plan might well lead to one of two scenarios, both bad. Either you make the lives of blameless AFDC children even more miserable than they already are, or you relent and resume the practice of cash payments to their parents without reciprocal obligations.
By cutting in half the currently absurdly high ratio of one caseworker per 100 welfare clients, the Democrats' plan tries somewhat harder to turn welfare into an avenue toward work. But by granting exemptions to the two-year limit if work cannot be found, their version of reform could well guarantee that the obligation-benefit disconnect continues indefinitely.
Beware anyone who claims to know the entire solution to perpetual poverty and welfare dependency. Surely, though, the solution must involve more than additional caseworkers (the Democrats' answer), and more than nothing (the governor's).
Part of the answer is providing quality public services that aren't specifically for the poor but access to which is especially valuable for them: good public schools, safe streets, public transit, and so on. Another part of the answer is improving the reward-for-work equation so that people who get off welfare and into jobs don't lose health benefits and child care. On top of this, welfare recipients should be required to do something besides having babies to qualify for benefits - even if it means government-guaranteed make-work programs for the otherwise unemployable.
The likeliest prospect is for more of the time-honored patronizing or bashing of the miserable poor, which is too bad. Trying to reconnect the benefit-obligation link carries a price tag from which politicians tend to shrink. But in the long run, the price is lower than the economic and social costs of allowing that link to remain severed generation after generation.
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GENERAL ASSEMBLY 1995
by CNB