THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Friday, May 12, 1995 TAG: 9505110173
SECTION: VIRGINIA BEACH BEACON PAGE: 06 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Letter
LENGTH: Medium: 66 lines
Christie McDaniel is right: There is a ``dark side'' to welfare (letters, Beacon, April 14). But that dark side is not the people in need - mostly children, after all. The dark side - like many government and public policy issues - is bad information. Mix confused government bureaucracy with the empty words of politicians, add media deadlines, a shaky economy, low citizen confidence and what do you get? Fear. And fear spreads bad information as if it were the truth. Like wildfire.
Here's a dose of the real picture:
1. Welfare is for needy families with children. It's only 25 percent of the cost of living in the state of Virginia. It starts at $231 a month for a mother and child. It stops at $435 for a mother with five (or 50) children. Most families that end up on welfare are having trouble collecting child support. The average two-bedroom apartment in Virginia Beach costs $525. Add it up.
2. Yes, adults do cash out their food stamps, 50 cents on the food-stamp dollar, to buy Mad Dog, 20/20 and/or crack cocaine. Christie probably saw a MICA (mentally ill chemical abuser) at her neighborhood convenience store. They get Social Security and 110 food stamps a month. Many MICAs should be in treatment at Eastern State or monitored by local professionals - but these services have already been grossly axed. So now the MICAs are homeless and on the streets, or in jail.
3. My apologies to my feminist friends, but I got married to get off welfare. I was stuck on welfare (medical problems) for six years and couldn't find another way out. Any parent will tell you, it takes two incomes to run the average family in any kind of sane mode these days.
4. The Reagan administration manufactured the myth of the ``welfare queen'' - you know, a fat, black, illiterate mother with 12 kids who watches soap operas on her 50-inch color TV while stuffing her face with bon-bons under full-blast air conditioning, who drives her new Caddy to a government office once a month to refill her bon-bon tray while the rest of us are sweating it out in the salt mines. It's a lie.
In six years of surviving with other welfare families, wouldn't I have met one ``welfare queen''? In the last 10 years of working with families in need, wouldn't I have met just one? I haven't. She doesn't exist - except in political hype.
5. If we wipe out welfare today, can we balance the federal budget? Welfare costs us 1 percent of the federal pie - and the big chunks of that are for ``administration,'' not for the people in need. Better that our congressmen and women set the example and take a salary cut like the rest of us!
6. Do we need welfare reform? Sure. But not welfare deform that will throw the baby out with the bath water - and cost us more to do it.
7. Where's a good place to start? With the Department of Agriculture. End the printing of alternate currency (food stamps) that is spent at one cash register and trashed. Add the funding that we save from just the cost of food-stamp ink and paper to real food allotments for hungry children and we'll be doing something meaningful for America's future.
The truth may be more boring than political fiction, but somebody has to tell it.
Brenda McCormick
Mothers Inc.
Virginia Beach by CNB