Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: TUESDAY, May 30, 1995 TAG: 9505310024
SECTION: EDITORIALS PAGE: A-5 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: WILLIAM RASPBERRY
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
The problem is not so much inefficiency as impersonality, he says. The cure? Find ways to establish ``a broader base of human contact between those who receive welfare and the general population.''
To that end, the former Republican governor is offering a pair of modest proposals. The first is for a tax credit of up to $500 for people who spend at least 50 hours a year in volunteer work with a charity that serves poor people. The second - far more controversial - would allow states to contract directly with religion-based charities for the delivery of services to the poor.
Both would begin with what Ashcroft insists is necessary: a ``clean'' block-grant system that would send federal welfare money from the U.S. Treasury directly to the states, without passing through HUD, HHS or other federal agencies. The only stipulation he would put on the transfer would be that states must have a work requirement.
This is not some punitive approach of the sort often associated with Republicans but (I am convinced) a search for a solution to an endlessly vexing problem.
``These ideas are not ideas that I have without reservation,'' Ashcroft told a small group of journalists over sandwiches in his Senate office. ``They deal with what I think are very tender, very difficult issues. But I think they are worth discussing and perhaps worthy of implementation.''
The easiest case to make (which is not the same as saying it's easy to enact) is for the ``clean'' block grant. The advantages are that it would ``bypass the superintending tendency of the federal government to micromanage and to regulate and to stifle and to control,'' while also avoiding the problem inherent in having new approaches administered by the creators and defenders of the old.
But what really drives the Ashcroft ideas is his belief that the whole concept of government-run charity is fundamentally flawed. ``At the risk of sounding maudlin, I believe there is a character associated with voluntary charity that is distinguished from the character of governmental entitlement,'' he said. ``I'm hoping to get some of that [voluntary] character to rub off on our welfare system. I think our culture will be successful to the extent that we start developing an interface between the people on welfare and the people who aren't on welfare.''
Ashcroft, of course, is not the first to believe that state-run charity - welfare - tends to trap the poor people it would help. Social commentators from Alexis de Toqueville to Charles Murray have noted that charity which flows to needy individuals from other individuals or small groups has the power to transform while charity that flows, more or less mechanically, from the state tends to debase.
The problem has been how to combine the personal touch that gives private charity its special character with the universal access that public charity affords.
Ashcroft's tentative solution is to use the taxing and contracting authority of government to draw more individuals into charitable relationships with their neighbors.
But he recognizes that some of the most effective transformation is done by charitable organizations that are spiritually driven: churches, the Salvation Army, Catholic Charities and the like. His proposal would allow states to contract for such services as feeding programs, drug rehabilitation and work training directly with these religion-based agencies - without requiring them to establish separate legal entities or to secularize their operations.
Ashcroft recognizes this as one of the ``tender'' points of his proposal. ``You don't want to finance or otherwise provide a government subsidy for the evangelical efforts of a religious organization,'' he says, noting that his proposal would expressly prohibit such organizations from forcing their beliefs on any client. But he also argues that it makes no sense to strip a belief-based organization of the very thing that produces its transforming success.
Isn't there some middle ground between ``establishing'' religion through government contracts and the constitutionally pure fiction that the needs of the poor are exclusively financial?
- Washington Post Writers Group
by CNB