ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Sunday, February 11, 1996 TAG: 9602090106
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: F-2 EDITION: METRO
A BIPARTISAN plan last week from the National Conference of Governors could prove a way out of the welfare-reform deadlock in Washington between a Republican Congress and a Democratic president.
That would be fitting. Drowned out by the political trumpeting in Washington is the fact that significant welfare-reform efforts already are under way in several states, including Virginia. Republican governors are leading experiments made possible by a Democratic president's willingness to grant waivers from federal rules.
Moreover, the chairman of the governor's conference, Republican Gov. Tommy Thompson of Wisconsin, is the farthest along in those efforts. Indeed, if you define welfare as per-child cash payments to able-bodied people - and that pretty much defines Aid to Families with Dependent Children, the nation's core welfare program - then Wisconsin intends to simply abolish welfare.
Well, not simply. The idea isn't to abandon AFDC families to whatever fate might befall them. Under the plan that Thompson announced last summer, welfare recipients would get child care, guaranteed health care and jobs - including, if necessary as a last resort, public-sector work created for the purpose. Virginia should be watching this experiment closely.
Also of interest, though less extensive than Thompson's statewide plan in Wisconsin, is the so-called Project Zero announced recently by GOP Gov. John Engler of Michigan. It's to begin in six places with a total of about 7,000 welfare families: a poor Detroit neighborhood, a Detroit suburb and four rural counties.
The Engler plan doesn't impose time limits, nor does it refuse additional benefits for children born to mothers already on welfare, features of a congressional bill that Clinton vetoed. But it does require welfare recipients to work or, as a last resort, perform community service. State social workers are to provide help in finding a job, subsidized transportation to work and subsidized child care.
Part of the debate in Washington is over how to fund welfare programs: Should federal money for AFDC and, equally important, Medicaid and food stamps continue as entitlements in some fashion, as generally favored by Democrats? Or should it instead be sent to the states as block grants to use as they deem best, as generally favored by congressional Republicans?
The governors' bipartisan plan has some of both. It gives the states great flexibility, but maintains food stamps as an entitlement and guarantees health care for pregnant women, children, the elderly and the disabled.
Experiments like Thompson's and Engler's can be cited to argue either side of the issue. On the one hand, they show that the states (some of them, anyway) can be trusted to undertake the kind of welfare reform that attacks rather than ignores the plight of mothers and children who depend on public aid for subsistence. On the other hand, the experience shows that significant reform can be undertaken by the states (some of them, anyway) within the context of the current system.
Which suggests the issue as framed in Washington is a sideshow. The nation's governors could help the feds focus on the meat of the matter: How do you revamp welfare not to make short-term budget points, but to promote self-sufficiency and improve the long-term lot of welfare families and the children in them?
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