THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Friday, March 24, 1995 TAG: 9503240002
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A14 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Editorial
SOURCE: Beth Barber
LENGTH: Medium: 82 lines
Is the Republican House taking food from the mouths of children?
Only if their parents don't feed them. In which case, they should be taken from those parents.
If you are looking for a marker of the fundamental disagreement between Republican and Democratic, or conservative and liberal, approaches to welfare reform, you will find it most clearly revealed in the current school-lunch flap.
The GOP has proposed turning the school-meal program and the Women, Infants and Children program into two block grants to the states, for an administrative saving of an estimated $200 million. The GOP plan would increase funding for school meals and WIC. But the increase, from $11.5 billion this year to some $13.2 billion five years hence, would be less than the $15.1 billion that the previous Democrat-controlled Congress had projected would be required by increases in inflation and poor, hungry children.
Democrats call that not just a cut, but a cut that will mean as many as 2 million of the 25 million children now in school lunch and breakfast programs will go hungry.
Will they? Not if administrative saving means more money for meals. Not if monitors can march on state capitals as well as Washington. And not if welfare reforms proposed by Republicans and some Democrats at the federal, state and local levels get a chance to do what current policies do not: (1) not just encourage, not just prepare but require parents - both of them - to work to support their children, and (2) reduce the number of poor and hungry children by reversing the failed revolution of rising expectations of welfare. That revolution has produced not just millions of Americans helped over a financial hump but millions of Americans who expect others to provide them and their offspring all basic necessities, and not a few extras.
The premise from which to start this debate is not the question posed by Democrats: How dare Republicans take food from the mouths of hungry chil-dren?
The correct premise begins with this question:
How dare parents send their children to school hungry?
Why are parents who cannot sustain themselves having children they cannot sustain, and how can society reverse that trend?
What kind of parents don't take whatever job(s) available to feed their kid(s)?
The rise in government funding for school meals and the WIC program comes not so much from children sliding into poverty as being born into it. Birth to a young, unwed, uneducated mother and an unsupportive, usually absent father is a ticket to poverty; and births to young, unwed, uneducated mothers and unsupportive, absent fathers have soared. Moreover, they have soared with the soaring number and soaring costs of programs intended to end child poverty.
If the increase in federal school-meal money is reduced, critics say, 2 million children will suffer. They needn't. And the country needn't suffer a crime wave, either.
A seventh of school-meal money is spent on solidly middle-class kids; they can withstand the cut, especially if their parents get the extra tax exemption per child which the GOP proposes.
The work requirements that are included in the federal and most state reforms, supported even by Democrats and coupled with child-care, health-care and transportation aid, are also aimed at the basic difference between liberal and conservative approaches: enabling parents - and expecting parents - to earn their own way and pay their children's way. That's better for children than continued excuses for dependency disguised as compassion, or extortion disguised as no-alternative-but-crime.
The goal is hardly to have 2 million children starving five years hence. The implication that supporters of the GOP's welfare reform efforts don't care if they do starve doesn't come wholly from critics' compassion for poor children. It comes as well from political dependence on a status quo that uses children to redistribute income, a dubious enough policy even if it worked. But it hasn't worked. It has worsened the very poverty it was designed to cure.
How a society treats its poor is one measure of its civility. Treating them as capable of learning, of working, of acting responsibly, of contributing more to society than hungry children isn't just civil. It's essential. MEMO: Ms. Barber is an associate editor of the editorial page.Ms. Barber is an
associate editor of the editorial page. by CNB