Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: TUESDAY, October 3, 1995 TAG: 9510030065
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A5 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: JON SHURE
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
As the House, Senate and president take sides on how to mesh their various positions in the welfare debate, I'm on the side of not having a debate at all. It's not worth it.
You can't tell by all the congressional person-hours, TV air time, newsprint and overly emotional political rhetoric this fight is consuming. But the number of people who actually receive welfare benefits, and the amount of money it costs, is too small to merit this hoo-ha.
Politicians who attack welfare because of its obvious symbolic value give the impression that welfare is responsible for the breakup of the American family, the growth in teen pregnancy, the demise of the work ethic, the federal deficit and everything else that's wrong with our nation.
The hype reached new heights the other day when two high-level officials of the Cato Institute (a beacon for anti-government aficionados) wrote a piece in The Wall Street Journal.
They argued that welfare benefits ought to be even more sharply cut because some recipients in some places wind up getting more in welfare and corollary benefits (like health care and food stamps) than some working people.
Strange, isn't it, how folks with this view are the first to oppose raising the minimum wage, or making health care less expensive and more available for working people? They insist the problem is people on the bottom getting too much instead of people just above the bottom getting too little.
At the same time, the Republican National Committee urges GOP officeholders to back up their opposition to the Earned Income Tax Credit (a proven anti-poverty tool) by saying there is fraud in the system.
Follow that line to its logical conclusion and the Republicans ought to call for doubling the top income-tax rate because, after all, some of the wealthiest people in America have been known to cheat on their taxes.
Don't hold your breath.
Fix welfare and you fix America, the Republicans seem to be saying. (Those no-good deadbeats will just have to get off their butts and get a job. It's their problem and we're not going to pay for it anymore.)
Ever since Ronald Reagan and his mythical ``welfare queen,'' welfare-as-symbolism has been a mainstay of anti-government doctrine.
It's time that a few facts had a chance to slip through the fusillade of hype. Like who gets welfare and how much it costs.
Of the more than 250 million people in the United States, 14 million are on welfare.
That's right, fewer than 6 percent of the entire population is assisted by Aid to Families with Dependent Children, or AFDC, which is what most people mean when they use the term ``on welfare.''
Of that 14 million, some 9 million are children. Thus the number of people who might be working instead of getting welfare checks constitute just 2 percent of the U.S. population.
Aren't most welfare recipients black? No, African Americans account for 37 percent of welfare recipients.
What about teen-age mothers? Sorry to disappoint lovers of stereotyping, but only 5 percent of welfare mothers are teen-agers.
If you think welfare is the biggest item in the federal budget, in this frenzied climate who could blame you? But it isn't the biggest and it isn't even close.
The federal government spent $12.3 billion in 1993 on AFDC. That comes out to approximately 1.5 percent of the federal budget.
By way of comparison, the federal tab for Social Security in 1993 was more than $400 billion.
Add in the money that states spent on welfare and you get about $22.3 billion, or four-tenths of 1 percent of the gross domestic product.
And, Cato's complaints notwithstanding, the amount of benefits per recipient is hardly enough to make more than a handful of lazy people renounce work forever and live on the dole.
Nor does Cato bother to point out that one advantage work has over welfare is the opportunity to get pay raises, while welfare benefits have actually fallen in real terms over the years. The average grant today is $373 a month for a family of three.
This varies from state to state, but if you think poor people flock to states with the highest benefits, look at Texas. It has the nation's third-highest caseload, yet it ranks 48th in the benefits it pays ($159 a month for a family of three).
If more people knew these facts, we might have an honest debate about facing up to reality.
There will always be a few people who aren't making it. Some will be blameless and some won't, but they will be there.
And a compassionate society will spend a little bit to help them because doing so is in their interest and ours. With that kind of thinking, we could put welfare in its place: off the front page and out of the big debates of our times.
Jon Shure is vice president of the Twentieth Century Fund, a nonprofit policy-research foundation in New York.
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