THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Friday, July 7, 1995 TAG: 9507070001
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A14 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Editorial
LENGTH: Medium: 74 lines
State welfare reform begins this week with something surprising going for it: the support of both Virginia's Republican governor and a Democratic president.
With no time to spare, Bill Clinton announced his administration's approval Saturday of the federal waiver necessary to start Virginia's attempt, in the president's oft-quoted words, to ``end welfare as we know it.'' Or, as Governor Allen put it, ``to break the debilitating trap of dependency in our current failed welfare system.''
Key to Virginia's reform is work in exchange for benefits, preferably paid work in the private sector; funds have been shifted from direct welfare payments to employer subsidies to facilitate this goal. Studies show that the programs most successful in moving welfare recipients to gainful employment are those which require recipients to take whatever job they can find; taxpayers then supplement their wages and provide health and day care for a time.
Some critics insist, however, that welfare recipients shouldn't have to work unless their wages equal or exceed their welfare benefits. That's backward: A person shouldn't be able to make sitting home on the dole as much as or more than a person working 40 hours a week. Failed welfare as we know it will not end so long as the combined benefits to welfare recipients - not just Aid to Families with Dependent Children but food stamps, WIC, medical care, housing, job training, education, etc. - not only come in lieu of work but pay as well as or better than work.
A full workfare policy is, politically, down the road. Meantime, last week's floods demonstrate unending opportunity for community service in exchange for welfare pay. With Governor Allen's support, officials in the counties damaged by the storms will try to match workfare recipients to cleanup needs. One critic protests that ``flood relief should be an effort by the entire community.'' It is: The entire community pays welfare recipients, and they and the entire community benefit from recipients' flood cleanup efforts.
The notion, long-ingrained in recipients and their advocates, that welfare benefits are an entitlement for which the recipient owes nothing in return - not work, not personal responsibility - is precisely the attitude welfare reform must overcome. To combat it, the state's reforms offer a stick - limiting welfare benefits to two years - and two carrots: extending health care for one year past the welfare cutoff and funding child care and transportation while the recipient, within 90 days of drawing welfare, begins work or training for work. Good.
Even so, reform has been scaled back to non-urban localities where dole dependency and unemployment are relatively low, rather than dropped on inner cities rife with welfare and unemployment. And even then, more than half the welfare recipients in the initial localities needn't participate.
Still, a 50 percent participation rate would be a vast improvement over the so-called workfare reform hailed by the Democratic Congress in 1988: It put fewer than 4 percent of welfare recipients to work.
Just as crucial to ending welfare as a lifestyle over generations are the state reform program's more controversial provisions: denying additional payments for children born while a recipient is on welfare and requiring unwed teenage mothers to attend school and live with a parent or guardian.
The success stories of single moms who complete school, get a job and get out of the inner city are as rare as they are heartwarming: As many as half of single mothers on welfare are stuck not only on the dole but in a culture of non-marriage and non-work that has overtaken low-income, urban black communities and has risen alarmingly in Latino and white communities. It helps nobody - not those mothers, their children, their fathers or society at large - to stick with a system that leaves the rules of that culture unchallenged, its children untended and the resentment of working America unaddressed. The sooner reforms take hold, the better for all concerned. by CNB