THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, April 30, 1995 TAG: 9504280001
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J5 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: PERRY MORGAN
LENGTH: Medium: 63 lines
For some, the problems involved in welfare reform always seemed insuperable. Democrats emphasized job training and child care as means of putting recipients to work, but such measures run up the cost of the program. So why bother? Cost-wise, the status quo seemed the way to go: Just mail the checks and be done with it.
Not so, said others. Welfare being a federal entitlement, costs keep climbing. Besides, doing nothing would leave undisturbed a cycle that has fed one generation after another into dependency. Government's helping hand has worked against self-reliance and family formation and fostered other social ills.
When Republicans took control of Congress, they moved quickly on welfare and seemed to resolve the dilemmas easily. Ending its entitlement status, the House voted to freeze welfare funding and convert it into a block grant to the states. Policy follows the money; the states will determine who should be eligible for aid and for how long. Block-grant funding would save federal coffers an estimated $66 billion over five years - no small change when you're pledged to cut taxes and balance the budget.
But what about the human questions? Which current recipients and future applicants will be denied aid and on what basis? It was not necessary to turn welfare over to the states in order to freeze the level of funding or end its entitlement status.
Ah, but the course chosen is much less messy and it has been quick. President Clinton, one remembers, promised to ``end welfare as we know it'' but dithered until he no longer was identified with the subject. Besides, as House Speaker Newt Gingrich points out, block grants subject welfare to ``51 state experiments'' (counting the District of Columbia) designed to find answers to hard questions.
This is a comforting notion - the states as laboratories - echoing maxims that say the best government is the closest. Those most comforted, though, are likely to be those least in need of aid.
State experiments are permitted under current law, having been going on for years, and have produced no heralded reforms. In the opinion of Paul E. Peterson, a professor of government at Harvard, ``state proposals to reform welfare have generally taken the form of reductions in welfare assistance.'' The states, he says, have been motivated by a desire to discourage in-migration of the poor and out-migration of taxpayers. But why not? goes a counterargument: The better the benefits of welfare, the greater the demand for them.
The complexities of welfare defy cries for tidy reforms, a point that seems inherent in the amorphous Clinton pledge to ``end welfare as we know it.'' Although sufficient to attract many votes to his campaign, the president has not been able or willing to give the promise shape or substance.
He seems now to have become a critic of the Republican gambit of shifting the problem to the states without being able to offer an alternative that can catch the public eye. If the Senate concurs in the block-grant approach, he will be in a very tight spot - along with welfare recipients being called upon to make themselves over into more prudent and productive people. MEMO: Mr. Morgan is a former publisher of The Virginian-Pilot and The
Ledger-Star. by CNB