Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: TUESDAY, February 28, 1995 TAG: 9502280085
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A-4 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE:
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
Their gamble - that welfare toughness will work where welfare charity (if it can be called that) has failed - is based on a couple of basically sound assumptions. But its chances of success are cramped, severely, by narrowness of vision.
The first sound assumption is that government should be a financial parent only of last resort.
Thus the new requirements that AFDC mothers identify the fathers of their children and, if the mothers are minors, that they live with their own parents or guardians. Thus, too, the denial of benefits for additional children born to a mother already on AFDC.
The second sound assumption is that, for at least a significant minority of recipients, welfare fosters attitudes of dependency and disregard for the value of work - attitudes that damage AFDC children as much as the material poverty in which they're reared. Thus the new requirement, to apply eventually to most AFDC recipients, for participation in a welfare-to-work program in exchange for benefits. Thus, too, the cutoff of benefits after two or three years (depending on circumstances).
Enough has been left up in the air, however, to suggest that the subject will have to be revisited by future assemblies. For one thing, Richmond has yet to come to grips with the fact that welfare reform, in the short term, is more expensive than welfare.
Unclear, for example, is whether local social-services departments - which under the bill are supposed to ease the transition to work by ensuring provision of child-care, transportation-assistance and health-care services up to a year after the cutoff of AFDC cash grants - will get sufficient personnel to do that job right. One way to help would be to rely more on private-sector job-training and child-care providers, via a voucher system and/or contracting with community-action organizations.
Unanswered, too, is the larger issue of what becomes of mothers - and their children - who can't find work. This is not an idle question even if jobs generally are plentiful, given that AFDC mothers tend to rank low on the employability scale. Some suffer from partial disabilities of one sort or another (clinical depression is a frequent ailment), some are drug abusers, some cannot read and write.
For some, makework programs may prove the only answer. In extreme cases - welfare mothers who simply won't work, even in guaranteed jobs, or who refuse to give up drug addictions - the answer may be removing the children to foster care. Hard choices, those, but so is acceptance of the alternatives.
Meanwhile, where is the guarantee of quality preschool for at-risk kids, or the health insurance for families who lose Medicaid benefits?
Virginia, along with other states, is right to take the welfare gamble. Some of the current welfare generation may be beyond hope; the next generation need not be. The task now is to make the odds as strong as possible that the gamble will pay off.
Keywords:
GENERAL ASSEMBLY 1995
by CNB