THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Friday, August 4, 1995 TAG: 9508030007
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A12 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Editorial
LENGTH: Medium: 64 lines
Studies are like adages: For every ``Look before you leap'' there's a ``He who hesitates is lost.''
That seems to be the case so far with analyses of the ``family cap'' on Aid to Families with Dependent Children that New Jersey adopted two years ago, and Virginia adopted this year, amid much hue and cry.
The cap denies additional AFDC benefits for children born to mothers on welfare. Some supporters of the cap, as staff writer Margaret Edds reported in these newspapers recently, ``applauded the change as a way to reduce welfare rolls,'' largely by reducing the horrific rates of illegitimacy that are the major factor in welfare dependency.
Has the family cap reduced illegitimacy rates in New Jersey? The answer depends. In the first year of a five-year study of the impact of that cap in New Jersey, Rut-gers University researchers find no statistical difference in births to welfare mothers who are subject to the cap on AFDC and those who are not.
A study 20 percent complete, Jersey officials protest, is hardly definitive. Ten months after the cap became effective, an initial study showed that illegitimate births to welfare mothers subject to New Jersey's family cap dropped almost 20 percent compared with illegitimate births to welfare mothers not subject to that cap.
What accounts for the difference? Probably, researchers in both studies agree, it took time for the welfare mothers to learn that an additional child still means additional food stamps and Medicaid, and may mean additional housing assistance.
If, as critics of the cap contend, the extra $40 or $50 a month in AFDC that another child brought in to a welfare family was seldom the stated reason for having another child anyway, the loss of that $40 or $50 won't much influence welfare mothers, particularly if other benefits rise.
There's another factor: In some states (including Virginia) an additional child may also delay a mother's compliance with another welfare reform: workfare. Recipients with children 2 years old or younger are often exempt from the requirements that recipients get a job or into training to receive AFDC.
The fact is, discouraging the birth of more children to mothers already on welfare has been only a hoped-for result of the family cap long-term, not a primary reason for instituting it. A quarter-century of welfare-as-entitlement has produced today's intolerable illegitimacy rates. They won't be reversed in 1/25th that time.
As expressed by Wayne Bryant, the black Democratic state legislator who shepherded the family cap through New Jersey's legislature in 1992, its primary purpose is to stop rewarding irresponsible behavior. It's unfair, Bryant noted, that another child mean an automatic raise for families that draw welfare but not for families that pay for welfare . . . and food stamps, housing assistance and Medicaid.
Critics of the cap on families who receive AFDC payments argue that it is punitive. The women who have had additional children anyway apparently don't think so. Perhaps Rutgers will study as well what the taxpayers who make welfare payments think: Do the data so far indicate a need to loosen the link of welfare benefits to the family cap, or to tighten it? by CNB