THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Monday, December 26, 1994 TAG: 9412240006
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A12 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Editorial
LENGTH: Medium: 89 lines
On welfare reform, Governor Allen and his Empowerment Commission have responded to a statewide and nationwide demand: that public assistance - $4.2 billion from this commonwealth's taxpayers in the current fiscal year - be a hand-up for the able-bodied, not a handout. The basic premise of the governor's ``Welfare to work'' reforms is simple: No work, no welfare.
There are exceptions: the elderly; the ill; the parent of a child under 18 months; teenage mothers who, under this program, must be in school; recipients who live in areas of high unemployment.
That may still sound Draconian to some Virginians: Why, they ask, punish children? But where are all these parents who will not work if necessary to feed their children and to provide them a better life? Where are all these people who aren't smart enough to see that rules change and their behavior must too?
Society can continue to step in for those few who cannot or do not learn that work, any work, brings to adults and children more value, dignity and hope than the dole ever can. The current system, welfare without work, has bred dependency and illegitimacy. It has eroded the work ethic and the family. It has severed the essential parental link between producing children and providing for them.
Between January 1989 and January 1994, the state's AFDC cases increased 38 percent, most of them single-parent households. In 1993, 81 percent of AFDC families were headed by mothers. Forty percent of current AFDC families live in Richmond, Norfolk, Newport News, Portsmouth, Virginia Beach and Fairfax. Of 70,807 Virginia families receiving Aid to Dependent Children in January 1992, 47 percent were still on AFDC two years later, and another 16 percent had left briefly but returned to welfare.
Many recipients are financially better off on welfare than at the jobs they have the skills and experience to handle. But they won't learn more skills or the work ethic at home. They won't learn them in current work and job-training programs, either. According to federal records, fewer than 1 percent of welfare recipients are in work programs. Current job-training programs actually move few recipients into jobs and seldom reach the recipients most in need of job training. And states' experience indicates the best job-training course is to take a job, any job.
Governor Allen's alternatives aim at moving most recipients from dependence to self-support. His major proposals, listed in the box below, provide the basics of genuine reform, beginning with an end to welfare as generations of some families have known it.
In his budget message last Monday, Governor Allen put money where his major proposals are. He requested $3.4 million to expand education, job training and employment services for welfare recipients and $6.2 million for child care.
Passing the governor's welfare reforms and funding for them will take some dickering and some tinkering. But the basic message of his proposals should remain intact: No work, no welfare, no more. FUNDAMENTALS OF ALLEN REFORM Major proposals from Governor Allen and his Empowerment Commission in-clude:
Two years of AFDC and other welfare benefits plus mandatory on-the-job training, beginning within 30 days of eligibility determination, at whatever work is available. Where private-sector jobs are unavailable, even if subsidized, community-service work is required. After six months, adjustments may be made for job training or education.
One year of child care, transportation and medical benefits after AFDC stops.
``Diversionary assistance,'' a lump-sum payment to meet pressing needs - for auto repairs, for example, child care or health care of families who need not long-term assistance but help over a temporary hump.
An increase in the limit on welfare recipients' savings accounts to $5,000.
A series of steps to re-establish parental and family responsibility: requiring that a mother identify the father of her child(ren) before receiving welfare; that teenage mothers live with their parents and attend school; that the children of AFDC recipients meet minimum school attendance requirements or lose a portion of that benefit; that additional benefits for a child born to a mother on welfare be paid by the father; that child-support orders also mandate parenting classes; that the parents of a minor father contribute financially to his child.
Expanded privatization of child-support collection and denial of fishing and hunting as well as driver's licenses of fathers in arrears.
Denial of assistance to convicted felons.
KEYWORDS: WELFARE REFORM VIRGINIA by CNB