THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Wednesday, December 28, 1994 TAG: 9412280006
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A10 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Editorial
SERIES: Issues facing the 104th Congress
This is the second in a series of editorials
LENGTH: Medium: 95 lines
If Americans have reached consensus on any issue, welfare is it: The system is broken. It needs fixing.
Candidate Clinton's promise ``to end welfare as we know it,'' and to make it ``a steppingstone, not a way of life'' helped make him President Clinton. But he has not fixed welfare, and his reputation as a ``New Democrat'' and his party's popularity have suffered for that failure.
The new Republican Congress plans to make welfare reform a major success. ``The Personal Responsibility Act'' is the third of 10 items that the GOP's Contract With America pledges the House will consider in the first hundred days of the next session. Where you stand on its welfare proposals depends, as usual, on where you sit.
The group that sits philosophically between Bill Clinton's White House and the American mainstream, the Democratic Leadership Conference, has published its alternative to the GOP Contract. It includes some of the GOP's carrots, shies at its sticks as ``punitive'' and ``insensitive.'' Yet it offers some basis of compromise if only the liberal Democrats left in Congress will heed one of the messages sent last month by the tax-paying electorate and confirmed by polls conducted since:
It is punitive, and counterproductive, and corrosive of America's social contract, for the welfare system to compel working folks to support able-bodied folks who aren't compelled by the system to work. It is insensitive to the immediate and the long-range good of the nation to equate compassion with endlessly enabling behaviors that perpetuate pov-er-ty.
And it is smart to use the states as ``laboratories'' for pilot programs to sort out proposals that don't work and improve those that do.
Welfare advocates are quick to point out that Aid to Families with Dependent Children, the primary welfare program, amounts to 1 percent of the federal budget. Add in food stamps, and it's 3 percent. Add in the costs of housing, educating and doctoring the 15 million Amer-i-cans on welfare, and you're in the hundreds of bil-lions.
Add in the costs, monetary and otherwise, of crime and you're into the host of reasons beyond the flouting of the work ethic that makes America's working majority so fed up with welfare dependency. As Mickey Kaus put it in The New Republic this month:
(W)elfare is implicit in America's most difficult social problem - the existence of whole neighborhoods, mostly African-American, where there are precious few intact, working families. Welfare may or may not have caused this underclass, but welfare is clearly what sustains it. And the underclass, in turn, drives the crime problem, the race problem, the ``urban crisis'' and the general sense of social decay (``12-year-olds having babies, 15-year-olds killing each other'').
Wherever the reform debate ends up, the GOP Contract will be the starting point. Its major legislative proposals, and brief comments on them, appear at the bottom of this page. In short, however, those proposals generally offer the essentials of genuine reform to a system that now serves 10 million children, 92 percent of whom do not have a father in the home, and 5 million adults, 95 percent of them single women.
A limit to the amount of time a recipient may remain on welfare. Public assistance to the able-bodied must be a way station, not a destination.
An attempt to discourage births out of wedlock. They account for most of the rise in welfare spending and a great deal of our current social ills.
A determined effort to identify fathers and demand of them financial, and if possible, parental support.
A link between receipt of public assistance and the recipient's preparation, through job training and-or education, for life off welfare.
An end to limitations - on health care, in particular - that discourage marriage and work.
The general push should be to end the idiocy that makes non-work pay more than work - and to end the growing notion that anyone who can't get $7 an hour plus benefits should not have to work at all. On the contrary, Americans have been and are still willing to help people who do what they can to help themselves. The first way to help themselves is to earn at least the first $4.25 of their income.
The Contract's authors project that their proposals for block grants with which states custom-tailor their welfare systems will save $40 billion in state and federal funds over five years.
Critics contend it can't, or not without depriving children through mean-spirited reforms authored by the Gingrich who stole Christmas. But the speaker-elect and his colleagues are on the right track: There is no compassion in enabling children to have children. There is no future in allowing adults to teach them by example a way of life that is dependent on others' largess, produces resentment all around, and deprives the dependent and the nation of the contributions responsible citizens can make to themselves, to others and to their country.
Saving $40 billion in taxpayers' money would be great, but saving children and their parents from unproductive lives is worth this effort at welfare reform.
KEYWORDS: ENTITLEMENT WELFARE SOCIAL SERVICE CONTRACT WITH
AMERICA by CNB