Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, December 12, 1993 TAG: 9312140262
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: D2 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE:
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
Congratulations to President Clinton for starting to get serious about his "New Democrat" campaign promise to overhaul welfare. The purpose of welfare ought to be to help families escape from the despair of poverty, not lock them into it for generation after generation. A two-year limit on welfare grants for most families is a good idea.
But two years and they're out - to what? Homelessness? Soup lines? Thievery to get money to feed starving children?
Clearly, that would be a welfare system not reformed but deformed. It has to be recognized from the outset that a two-year limit - as proposed by the Clinton administration and, in Virginia, by Gov.-elect George Allen - is in itself neither a magic wand for welfare reform nor an easy way to save taxpayers' money.
It is, indeed, a significant and desirable measure, but only as one component of an array of changes in social policies, some of them costly in the short term. Combined with reforms and expanded access to health care, education, job training, child care and child-support enforcement, the two-year limit should help accomplish what welfare has failed to do for many Americans.
That is: help them to lift themselves from the sinkhole of debilitating dependency, into the economic and social mainstream of self-sufficiency. No one should welcome that prospect more than welfare recipients themselves.
The overwhelming majority of those taking Aid to Dependent Children - the target group of the two-year limit - do not enjoy being on welfare. They don't like being typecast as ne'er-do-well freeloaders. They don't like being isolated in the culture of poverty as the welfare system does. Most struggle mightily on their own to get off the dole - and more than half of those who go on welfare are able to get off within two years.
Still, for a hard-core group of ADC mothers - perhaps as many as 2 million - welfare becomes a way of life, perpetuated across generations. Even if they want to work, these women - typically poorly educated - discover that low-skill, low-wage jobs, if they are able to get them, won't catapult them out of poverty. They earn less working in these jobs than they get on welfare, especially when you consider the cost of child care, the sacrifice of housing allowances and food stamps, the likelihood that they'll lose health insurance for themselves and their children. They remain stuck.
And so welfare is a system that virtually everyone despises - none so much, perhaps, as the working poor, who resent their tax dollars going to support those who don't work when they themselves struggle to get by.
It's a system that virtually everyone - across the political spectrum from fuzzy liberals to bedrock conservatives - now declares a failure. It has failed to cure a single one of our most virulent social ills: poverty, racism, inner- city crime, teen pregnancy. In fact, it has exacerbated them. Teen mothers, for instance, are rewarded with larger welfare checks if they have more babies.
It is a system of awful waste - not just of taxpayers' money, but of human potential. A political consensus in favor of reform isn't hard to find.
The problem will come in mustering sufficient support for the costs of reform. Again, it isn't enough to declare that the able-bodied can receive welfare payments for only two years before they have to go to work. As it is, the lion's share of welfare goes not to the loafers conservatives love to decry (would they like to trade places?), but to people who lack the education and skills needed to compete in today's economy. Reform can't work without major investments in job training and counseling, as well as in schools, health care, child care, and child-support enforcement.
And ending welfare for the able-bodied will require jobs, jobs and more jobs for those who lose their benefits. Not just token jobs, though some will have to be given community-service jobs for a while, but meaningful jobs that make working more profitable than dependency.
The president made a good start toward changing the welfare-work equation this year by expanding the earned-income tax credit, thereby upping the incentive to work. Now comes the other side - welfare reform - but this will be harder.
In the long run, Clinton's plans to "end welfare as we know it," and Allen's plans for a comprehensive "workfare" program, would save billions of dollars. In the short run, they will require more spending - and neither politician has said yet where the money will come from.
by CNB