ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Sunday, December 22, 1996 TAG: 9612240019
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: 2 EDITION: METRO
THE PREMISE that welfare reform will, in the short term, save money was wrong to begin with, and the evidence of this is beginning to come in. Wisconsin, for example, has found it must add another $25 million to day-care spending for welfare recipients moving into jobs.
Added to earlier increases in cost projections, the state will more than triple its spending on day care, bringing the total to $185 million, once its reform plan is fully implemented next September.
Virginia officials intoxicated by early successes in this state's reform effort would be wise to look carefully at Wisconsin's experience, and take heed: Welfare reform can work - Wisconsin has slashed caseloads by 41 percent in the past three years - but it will cost a lot of money.
Wisconsin's Republican Gov. Tommy G. Thompson, an early leader in state welfare-reform efforts, initially planned to require welfare families to use up to 46 percent of their incomes to pay for child care. But spending almost half of an already meager paycheck just to free oneself to work doesn't leave enough to support a family - pay the rent, put food on the table, clothe the children - as insulated policymakers apparently discovered when desperate parents began to howl.
Without more of a subsidy, they could not afford to pay caregivers, and without clients, day-care centers would close. Thompson has asked state lawmakers to ease the co-payment, requiring that recipients spend no more than 16 percent of their paychecks on child care.
But most of the new money will go to protecting government-subsidized child-care slots for working-poor families. As welfare recipients are being pushed into jobs, and their children pushed into day care, they are bumping up against families who have not been on welfare, working-poor families who have been trying all along to be self-sufficient, but are unable to afford child care on what they earn alone.
Which raises another cautionary point: Welfare reform cannot be purchased at the expense of the struggling working poor.
Nor should it be bought at a cut-rate price based on the cheapest day care possible, without regard for quality - a mistake Virginia seems about ready to make as it prepares to lower its education and staffing standards for day-care centers.
In Wisconsin, Thompson is planning to add $20 million for child-care subsidies for the working poor, and spend $5 million to create more day-case slots overall and improve the quality of care.
Governors serious about reforming welfare, not simply slashing its cost - as Thompson always has insisted he is - will recognize similar needs in their own states. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that the federal welfare reform act falls $1.4 billion shy of projected child-care needs over six years.
If "reform" is not to be a euphemism for "abandoning the poor to their wretched fate," states will have to invest more - both to help along the transition from dependence to work, and to avoid penalizing those already working.
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