Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, July 2, 1995 TAG: 9506300116
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: F-2 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE:
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
So what? Even if it were to cost millions more over the next five years, welfare reform - about to be phased in, subject to federal approval - would be a resounding success if it moved substantially more people from welfare to productive lives. It would be a success, above all, if it broke the chain of chronic dependency and enhanced prospects of a fulfilling future for the children of welfare families.
Conversely, welfare reform will be a dismal failure, and a tragically wasted opportunity, if all it does is save a few bucks now while hardening the lot of welfare children. Whatever short-term savings are initially achieved will be lost several times over by the eventual costs of dealing with various social malignancies.
At best, the Allen administration's apparent belief in the compatibility of (1) immediate savings and (2) moving people from welfare to work is an unproved assumption. At worst, it reflects a politically expedient disinclination to genuinely engage the problem, and a cynical resort to bashing the least influential and most vulnerable members of our society.
The problem with welfare as we know it is not that it provides a handsome living to the undeserving poor. There's nothing handsome about the size of welfare benefits in Virginia, and the children on whose behalf payments are made are "undeserving" only of the fate that ill fortune has assigned them.
The problem, rather, is that welfare as we know it perpetuates such ill fortune. For a significant number of recipients, albeit not for most, welfare dependency has become a permanent lifestyle enduring across generations. Perversely, it encourages (or at least helps sustain) single motherhood, often a guarantee of continued poverty. Welfare doesn't provide much, but it can provide more than a minimum-wage job that has no health benefits, no day care and no way of getting to it.
In part, the new Virginia rules for Aid to Families with Dependent Children - including, centrally, a requirement to work within 90 days of getting the first check, and a two-year limit on benefits - are on to something. The point is to attack one of the system's worst features - an absence of reciprocity that demeans welfare recipients and helps fuel outrage on the part of millions of working Americans. Traditionally, welfare checks have been handed out with nothing expected in return but having children. Makework would be better than no work.
For some on welfare, the new rules may provide the motivational difference propelling them into the work force. For others, it may not matter. Some welfare mothers are clinically depressed, some drug-addicted. What to do about them, or the children, is a question that gets little attention - perhaps because the answers are dispiriting, or at least difficult.
The presence of motivation, moreover, does not necessarily imply the presence of means. On this point, welfare reform in Virginia so far offers little. That each caseworker is expected to handle an average of 90 welfare clients, for example, hardly inspires optimism. The provision for day care, health care, transportation and training - to help facilitate the transition to work - is equally inadequate.
Let's hope Virginia's new rules result in as much progress against, as punishment of, welfare dependency. But let's not get hung up over whether these rules manage to save $26 million annually over the next five years. That's a tiny sum compared to the real stakes at issue in welfare reform.
by CNB