THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, August 11, 1996 TAG: 9608100016
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J5 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Opinion
SOURCE: PERRY MORGAN
LENGTH: 62 lines
The surest thing that can be said about the welfare legislation approved by the Congress and the president is that it represents a decision to decide. It was time for that. The consensus for change was clear and long-standing.
When Bill Clinton said he would sign the reform measure, after vetoing two earlier bills, the House approved it by a margin of 3-to-1 with Democrats splitting evenly. As Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan observed, a strident defense of the status quo over the years had proved counterproductive. Charges of ``racism'' and ``slavefare'' could no longer deter change in a system identified with idleness and illegitimacy and seen as subsidizing what Clinton called a culture of poverty.
More than 4 million single mothers, half never married, receive checks in the form of Aid to Families With Dependent Children. Grass-roots pressure for change was evident in the insistence of governors that the states, given their head, could exert constructive discipline. So the federal entitlement to welfare is ending, and power to shape the program, and money to fund it, is going to the states.
But if the politics of change was clear, results can only be guessed at. Thinking a bad system can be made worse, and will be, Moynihan foresees millions of children made hungry. The opposite view is that insistence on work will take hold among recipients and self-sufficiency will grow.
No one knows; the most-informed decisions are prophecy. The rationale for change, after all, is experimentation.
Results in hand from experiments thus far are not definitive. A report in The Wall Street Journal says ``current efforts to make welfare recipients work their way off the dole have largely failed.'' The same report includes a counterargument from Republican reformers that these efforts reflect a mistaken emphasis - on recipients training for jobs rather than taking those available. Says Rep. James Talent of Missouri: ``We're saying: If you want your $350 from welfare each month, get a job at McDonald's.'' (Cash benefits range from $187 in Mississippi to $655 in Vermont.)
It is hard to follow the argument of opponents of reform that not enough is known to assure productive change. For one thing, there's the question of what is enough and how it is to be learned. For another, political reform is not something to be dialed upon demand. It is a live question whether Bill Clinton, decrying certain features of the bill, would have gone along with reform in a different year. Finally, the country is accustomed to feeling its way (and often fumbling) toward social ends as with the New Deal, the Great Society and a panoply of writs and laws affecting civil rights.
The stakes are higher this time. Children are being put at risk. One-eighth of all children depend on welfare. Funding is being reduced. Rule-making is being given over to states with varying reputations for competence and compassion. And the economy which supposedly is ready to provide all the jobs needed is an inconstant force.
This gives special point to the remark of one architect of reform that ``we will have to watch the states like a hawk.'' But who will watch?
When budget balloons and tax schemes are gassed up and released, and partisan yells echo over the ideological divide, the public can count on the Congressional Budget Office for honest scoring. How the effects of welfare reform are to be monitored and assessed is an important and unanswered question. The welfare debate has seen more than enough prophecy and easy assumption; priority now should go to comprehending the human consequences of reform. Work will be measured. So must want. MEMO: Mr. Morgan is a former publisher of The Virginian-Pilot. by CNB