THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Tuesday, March 28, 1995 TAG: 9503280008
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A14 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Editorial
LENGTH: Medium: 74 lines
Bill Clinton won the White House in part because he promised to ``end welfare as we know it.'' The Republican-controlled House of Representatives at the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue has voted to do exactly that, in fulfillment of a key provision of its Contract With America and doubtless to general applause.
Four days of bitter debate preceded last Friday's 234-199 victory. The losing-end Democrats accused the hard-charging Republicans of robbing the poor to underwrite a tax cut for the rich. It's too early to say that charge will stick - or that it won't, either.
The Republicans are counting on middle-income Americans to view the reform as an overdue change that will shrink the welfare bureaucracy and federal spending of hard-working taxpayers' money on programs that pay poor women to have babies out of wedlock, fostering unhealthy dependency upon government handouts from generation to generation.
If anything was clear from the emphatic repudiation of Democrats in the 1994 federal and state elections, it is that middle-income Americans generally are fed up with bloated government and social-welfare programs that they judge multiply ills instead of banishing them.
But middle-income Americans also sense that the game in Washington is rigged against them. They have been losing ground economically for a couple of decades. If overhauling welfare and cutting funding for shelter and heat for the poor and elderly doesn't appreciably improve their lot, the search will be on for other savings - and they can be found in federal generosity to powerful economic interests.
Like, for example, the billions of their tax dollars passing through Washington to assist manufacturers, farmers, ranchers and mining and timber companies better off than they.
Specifically, the $1 billion-a-year federal bounty that flows to the mining industry, the $500 million-a-year assistance to the tree cutters, the $425 million-a-year U.S. Department of Agriculture overseas-marketing effort, the $4.15 billion-a-year water subsidy to desert farming and the $250 million-a-year boost to the cattle industry provided by the grazing-on-public-lands program.
Each of these disbursements is justified as beneficial to the economy. Proving they aren't would be difficult. More to the point, the extremely powerful economic interests that benefit directly have the very respectful attention of politicians - Democrats and Republicans alike - positioned to perpetuate them and disposed to just that despite a lengthening string of ruinous federal deficits.
Jubilant House Republicans foresee a happier day for America if their welfare reforms are written into law. Forty-five federal social-welfare programs - ``failed programs,'' which a mammoth chunk of the electorate agrees they are - are supplanted by sending tens of billions of dollars to the states to do for their poor as they see fit, within limits (no money to unwed teenage mothers, no money for additional babies born to women on welfare).
These changes accord with the national mood. Democrats battling them are out of step.
Unfortunately, there is markedly less zeal in Washington - and in the land - for diminishing federal largess to the manufacturing, farming, mining, timber, cattle and other industries for programs that presumably have not failed. But these programs' beneficiaries are no less dependent upon them than many welfare mothers are upon theirs. Some economic interests' dependency has existed for decades - a century in the case of mining subsidy.
The conservative National Taxpayers Union and assorted environmental groups such as the Sierra Club have identified $33 billion-a-year in such spending that they say the taxpayers should not have to support.
The conservative Cato Institute has identified $88 billion-a-year in federal kindness to businesses that should be ended.
The poor need aid. But welfare for the affluent while the national debt soars? Want to go on helping to foot the bill for that? by CNB