Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: MONDAY, February 7, 1994 TAG: 9402080016
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A5 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: JAMES P. PINKERTON
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
At first glance, the two proposals may seem contradictory: one a plan to shrink federal employment, the other an idea for creating government jobs. But there is a logic behind both. If enacted, as they should be, the old pear-shaped bureaucracy - bulging at the middle - will be reworked into a pyramid, smaller and smarter at the top, heavier at the bottom.
First, Vice President Al Gore revealed plans to lay off up to a quarter- million federal employees. Gore had announced last September the administration's intention to reduce the executive branch by an eighth. Such downsizing is painfully routine in the private sector, but few believed a Democratic president would actually threaten a core constituency, public employees, with such tough medicine. Second, a draft from the administration's welfare-reform task force was leaked, outlining a scenario for creating as many as 2.3 million public-sector workfare jobs. Such candid thinking suggests that the president is serious about reinventing welfare, too.
The Democrats have learned: The happy days are not here again. In the new global economy, we need fewer midlevel civil servants because of computers. And we can't afford to waste anyone's talents by subsidizing idleness.
In the '90s, Uncle Sam is stumbling down the path of perestroika that corporate America traveled in the '80s. The Social Security Administration has shrunk in recent years from 83,000 employees to 65,000. It is now possible to economize and serve beneficiaries better by replacing hard-to-get-to offices with convenient toll-free numbers. The president wants to close 1,200 local Agriculture Department offices. That will still leave 11,000 Agriculture outposts intact, but it's a start.
If new thinking means less work for bureaucrats, then the old problem of underclass dependence requires more work from welfare recipients. The familiar welfare ``reform'' strategies have failed. Social work and training sound nice, but in practice they have had little impact. Consider these numbers: In the recession year of 1982, unemployment averaged 9.5 percent, while 4.4 percent of the population was on welfare. In 1993, unemployment averaged 6.8 percent, but almost 5 percent of the population was on welfare. For a decade, unemployment has declined while welfare has risen. It's time to try something different.
In the 1930s, when the U.S. economy was mired in the Depression, the economist John Maynard Keynes argued that only government intervention could stir up ``stagnant pools'' of capital to get the economy bubbling again. Today the problem is stagnant pools of humanity, people trapped in a deep well of perverse disincentives.
The answer to the problem of people not working is simple: Give them jobs. That was the lesson of New Deal work programs. That lesson was ignored during the Great Society, and the Democratic Party, as well as America, suffered as a result. Even after hard-nosed reform, many of the 5 million heads of households currently on welfare will not be able to find work in the private sector. The government must be the employer of last resort because make-work is better than no work.
It's possible that Clinton will back down from his reforms. But let's hope he doesn't. His fate and that of the rest of us are closely linked for at least another three years. Even Republicans won't begrudge Clinton a sunny spot in history if he can reduce the bureaucracy and expand the work ethic.
\ James P. Pinkerton, a Washington-based senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, wrote this for Newsday.
\ L.A. Times-Washington Post News Service
by CNB