THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Monday, March 27, 1995 TAG: 9503230009
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A6 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Another View
SOURCE: By PAUL OFFNER
LENGTH: Medium: 100 lines
Listening to the current band of welfare reformers, you might think welfare is a threat to our whole way of life. Clay Shaw, chair of the House welfare subcommittee, calls it ``the last plantation.'' William Bennett says it's ``the most pernicious government program of the past quarter-century.'' Even a liberal like Health and Human Services Secretary Donna Shalala calls it ``a national tragedy.'' But is welfare really the problem?
Consider the black community, for instance. Many people blame welfare for spawning the crime, drugs and illegitimacy that have overtaken the nation's black ghettos over the past 20 years. And it's true that black child poverty has worsened, going from 40.6 percent in 1973 to 45.9 percent in 1993. The black family is weaker - 56 percent of black households were headed by women in 1993, compared with 40 percent in 1973. The out-of-wedlock birth ratio has gone from 46 percent in 1973 to 68 percent in 1992.
But guess what? Black welfare dependency has declined. While 37.3 percent of black families were on welfare in 1973, the figure dropped to 32.7 percent by 1993. And this understates the real decline, since the economy was recovering from a recession in 1993. In 1988, a year more like 1973, the black welfare rate was 29.8 percent, a fifth lower than in 1973. If welfare is the cause of everything going wrong in black America, how come black welfare dependency has been declining while everything else (crime, drugs, illegitimacy) is getting worse?
And who is it that we are trying to reach when we reform welfare anyway? The answer, of course, is women, who head up 95 percent of welfare families, and who will, under the congressional reform plans, have to go to work. The men, by contrast, get little attention. Yet, as James Q. Wilson noted recently, ``it is fathers whose behavior we most want to change.'' They're the ones dealing drugs and terrorizing urban neighborhoods. Most Americans would be happy to let poor mothers stay at home with their children if the fathers were out there doing something constructive with their time.
Many of them aren't, however. In just the past 10 years, the black male incarceration rate has doubled. According to a recent study, 23 percent of all black males ages 20 to 29 are in prison, on probation or on parole. In Washington, it is estimated that 70 percent of all black men will have been arrested and served time in jail at least once before reaching the age of 35. Yet our welfare-reform efforts continue to ignore the fathers, even though they represent a much greater threat to society, and they're the ones for whom things are getting worse. At a minimum, we should find a way to include them in the work program coming as part of welfare reform.
Fortunately, we are told, there's light at the end of the tunnel. We're going to end welfare as we know it, says President Clinton. End welfare, period, say the Republicans. This kind of talk may go over big with a frustrated electorate, but there's really little grounds for believing it.
Many welfare mothers are in poor health or are addicted to alcohol or drugs. Most score quite low on tests of functional literacy, so they will have trouble finding jobs or keeping the ones they do find. That doesn't mean we should give up on them, but we do need to be realistic. We can train welfare recipients and require them to work (which we should), but unless we're prepared to put them out in the street (which we aren't), many will still end up relying on government help in one form or another.
The fact is we don't have a lot of brilliant new ideas on how to fix welfare. No one knows how to educate and train the sons and daughters of dysfunctional families. No one knows how to raise wages for those with few skills. And most important, no one knows how to reduce out-of-wedlock births. For example, House Republicans argue that cutting off all benefits will teach poor women to stop having babies. But four weeks ago, three eminent conservatives (William Bennett, Glenn Loury of Boston University, and James Q. Wilson of UCLA) told the Ways and Means Committee that there's little reason to believe that, either.
None of this seems to matter much to the current Republican reformers. Not only will they reform welfare, but at no cost to the taxpayer. Indeed, says Michigan Gov. John Engler, ``reform must save money.'' That would be some accomplishment, since day care and transportation are expensive, as is providing public jobs for those who can't find private employment. No problem, say Engler and Gov. Tommy Thompson of Wisconsin. Just give us the federal dollars with no strings attached, and we'll increase efficiency so much that there will be more than enough money.
This is silly. It's true that if the federal requirements were lifted, some of the inconsistencies between welfare, food stamps and Medicaid could be eliminated, saving some money. Moreover, states could realize some additional savings by dropping the currently required audits aimed at detecting errors (they'd be crazy to do it). But that's peanuts. Recently a group of state welfare directors was asked how much could be saved if federal regulations were eliminated. The estimate: 5 percent.
If anything useful is to be salvaged from the current welfare-reform effort, we'll have to address the subject with a little more honesty and humility. The existing welfare system is not responsible for all our ills, and reforming it won't solve all our problems.
That doesn't mean we shouldn't try, though. The place to start is the proposal made last year by President Clinton, which was really an expansion of the Family Support Act passed by Congress in 1988. But let's understand that reform will cost money and that its benefits will be modest. That may lack the drama of the current reformers' call to action, but it's the truth. MEMO: Mr. Offner is a legislative assistant to Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan.
by CNB