Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: MONDAY, March 6, 1995 TAG: 9503080005
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A-7 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: WILLIAM RASPBERRY
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
Newt Gingrich, the nemesis of all (the friends) I hold dear, is plumping for an ``opportunity society'' that sounds astoundingly close to Martin Luther King Jr.'s dream. Have I been missing something?
Then I take another look at the Contract With America, and it all comes back.
The section on welfare reform, for instance, seems almost calculatedly punitive - full of ``may no longer receive'' and ``can be prohibited'' and ``will be required'' and empty of compassion. The premise, it seems clear, is that poor people must be forced into independence.
I look yet again, and a strange thing happens. I discover that, notwithstanding the harsh gracelessness of the way they say it, I believe a good deal of what these ``mean-spirited'' conservatives believe: that availability of welfare to single mothers (including teen-agers) has tended to increase the number of families in need of welfare; that it's hard to find anything that could be called a reasonable return on our welfare expenditures - even that government may be incapable of doing welfare in a way that doesn't make bad matters worse.
Furthermore, I think a lot of people who call themselves progressive have - however reluctantly - reached similar conclusions.
Suppose we could agree to put ideology and mutual suspicion aside and try to figure out how to help poor people in a way that might even enhance their chances of achieving independence. What might it look like?
It might, for openers, look a lot more like private charity than the public dole - and for good reason. We know what our policy proposals don't always reflect: that people need a way to set themselves apart in positive ways, a chance to establish themselves as special and deserving. Public assistance driven solely by need denies its recipients any way of setting themselves apart and thereby demeans them.
Suppose the benefits - health care, job training and a monthly check - were the gifts of people who had the ability to say ``no.'' Wouldn't the prospective recipients tend to behave in ways the donors established as appropriate? Would they not as a result be open to suggestions and advice and additional help that might actually improve their lives?
That's why private charity - whether foster care, self-help centers or gospel-oriented soup kitchens - manages at least some of the time to turn lives around.
How could we transform tax-supported charity so it looks more like the private variety?
``The only way to do it,'' says futurist Robert Theobald, ``is to take it away from the bureaucracy, take it back to the community and allow honest and compassionate people to make the tough choices: ``You've had a hard time and you need our help. Here's what we want you to do ...'''
Marvin Olasky of the University of Texas and former Delaware Gov. Pete du Pont are working on a proposal that would allow a taxpayer to direct up to $3,000 of his taxes to a qualifying public or private assistance agency.
The Points of Light Foundation has proposed a network of volunteer centers, run by local residents, with the means and authority for dealing with local need. There would, under such a scheme, be enough centers to assure maximum coverage and enough communication among them so they could learn from each other's mistakes and successes. They would empower local leaders, thereby strengthening communities, and they would be close enough to the people they serve to assure personal involvement. In short, effective organization without bureaucracy.
What all these schemes have in common is they would bring charity closer to home, providing help but also providing people who have a need to help a personally satisfying mechanism for doing so. There's nothing punitive about any of them, but there is also nothing about them that would tend to worsen the plight of those they would help.
But wouldn't these localized, amateur-run schemes also introduce the possibility of favoritism, of high-handedness, of low-level corruption? Of course they would, Theobald acknowledges - but so does the present system, without doing much countervailing good.
``It seems,'' he says, ``that we'd rather have a system that pretends to be equitable, while doing great harm, than one that makes mistakes while saving human beings.''
- Washington Post Writers Group
by CNB