THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Thursday, September 21, 1995 TAG: 9509210016
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A12 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Editorial
LENGTH: Medium: 71 lines
Tuesday's 87-12 vote in the U.S. Senate for sweeping welfare changes shows America has no need of a third party. It needs a second party. The Democratic capitulation was virtually complete. With Democrats intellectually bankrupt, the only debate is between conservative Republicans and more-conservative Republicans.
That debate on welfare now moves to conference where the GOP will try to work out differences between House and Senate versions. President Clinton threatens a veto if some House provisions prevail, but don't count on it. He's committed ``to end welfare as we know it.'' The country seems to favor just that, and either Republican version will do it. After his party's dive in the Senate, Clinton is unlikely to buck the trend.
The two versions have much in common. Most welfare functions - including cash payments, child-care aid and possibly food stamps - will turn into state responsibilities with block-grant money furnished by the federal government.
There will be between $65 billion and $102 billion less for the states over the next seven years, and any entitlement to welfare will end. Time limits will be imposed, 50 percent of recipients will eventually have to find work and there will be new penalties for nonsupport. Mothers who fail to cooperate in establishing paternity will lose benefits.
Both versions also reform the scandal-plagued Supplemental Security Income program that has made payments to alcoholics, drug addicts and children who fake disabilities. Substance abusers will be cut off and those claiming disability will be more strictly scrutinized.
The House also wants to deny increased payments to welfare mothers who have additional children, make teenage mothers under 18 ineligible and cut off benefits for legal immigrants. The House would also require far less welfare contribution by the states.
And once a bill passes, the next round will take place in the states. Welfare opponents are already preparing for action there. For example, The Claremont Institute, a conservative think tank, says the goal at the state level should be ``to make government welfare more burdensome, less appealing'' because it is ``more important to say `no' to the wayward able than to say yes.''
That assumes that welfare recipients are ``the wayward able.'' But a majority are children who are not responsible for their plight and many others may be wayward but aren't necessarily able. Any crackdown on the guilty ought to seek to spare the innocent, but few provisions address that issue.
The legislation also makes several dubious assumptions. Both versions mandate jobs for most welfare recipients. But at a time when hundreds of thousands of skilled blue-collar workers and white-collar managers are being thrown out of work buy a restructuring economy, jobs for the illiterate, unskilled and underage are few and far between. Telling pregnant teenage mothers to just go home also begs the question. For many of them, home is not even a concept.
This welfare-reform effort may save money and shift the problem from Washington to the states. It may catch more deadbeat dads and get substance abusers and scam artists off the dole. But it has also been sold as a plan to turn welfare recipients into employees, to promote family values and to combat illegitimacy.
It's not clear how the legislation will have those effects. To a surprising extent, this reform is a gamble that states will solve problems that the feds haven't. If the problems worsen instead, with more jobless women and homeless children and crime on the rise, an alarmed nation may find itself demanding reform of welfare reform.
KEYWORDS: WELFARE REFORM by CNB