What to Do About Welfare

Mr./Ms. President:

Welfare reform is properly the business of the states. Why? Because dependent poverty, though it exists across the nation, has stubbornly local roots. The forces that lead people in rural California to file for public assistance to provide for themselves and their children have to do with the cyclical, weather-contingent nature of low-wage agricultural employment. Welfare generally has a different face in rural states than in urban ones, where failures of education and school-to-work preparation and, no doubt, "culture of poverty" effects lead people to seek public assistance.

To deal with local roots, local remedies are needed. Wisconsin, Massachusetts, and Maryland, among other states, have launched locally responsive experiments in welfare reform. Tennessee has brought managed care to Medicaid -- the health-insurance program for the medically indigent.

Thus far each state has had to seek waivers from the federal government to permit these experiments. Let's end the federal role altogether, Mr./Ms. President. Let's systematize policy innovation. Let the states set up their own versions of AFDC and Medicaid. Let's end welfare as a federal entitlement.

Critics charge that the states would treat children and the sick much more callously than the federal government does; that in recessions states would cut benefits, making women and children homeless. That is a libel on the states. Yes, in the days of segregation, many states could not be trusted to deal humanely with minorities among the dependent poor. But those days are over, surely. In post-racist America, real federalism would not be an instrument of white supremacy.

Let the states decide, Mr./Ms. President. The objective of welfare reform is to get recipients back to work without disrupting family formation or hurting children -- and the states can find their different paths to that single overriding goal.

Mr./Ms. President:

Everyone is unhappy with the current welfare system. Most who are on welfare want to get off, but either can't find a job or can't find one that compensates for the loss of health care and child care. Those who pay for welfare with their taxes resent those who are on the government dole. What we need is a system that encourages people to enter the workforce while still providing them with a safety net. The reform now being discussed by Congress would turn welfare from a federal entitlement into a block grant given to states, with few limits on how they spend the money. States would be free to lower their own contributions to the welfare system by as much as fifty percent. It's not hard to guess what system this would create -- one of migrations to states with comparatively generous welfare benefits.

According to William Julius Wilson, who was brought in to advise you on this matter, if you really want to solve the welfare problem, you need to look back to its root: poverty. The lack of jobs, decaying inner cities, and poor schooling systems that all define poverty have created a climate in which public assistance is necessary. In our country, welfare recipients are often despised, while the poor as a group elicit sympathy. A survey conducted by the National Opinion Research Center from 1983-1991 showed that while a "substantial majority felt that too little was being spent to help the poor, only slightly more than twenty percent felt that too little was being spent on welfare programs." Your job is to persuade the public that it's not just welfare we need to reform, but our prescriptions for poverty itself. This will be a big and expensive task, but in these post-Cold War times we have the resources to accomplish it.

The proposal I'm about to suggest will be difficult to enact, unless you are able to sell it as an attack on the causes of poverty rather than simply as welfare reform. The country will need to rethink its view of poverty as the result of individual failings and realize that much of it is caused by big social and economic forces beyond an individual's control. You will have to lead a return to the attitude, prevalent during the days of the New Deal, that poverty and inequality can only be eliminated through enlightened public policy.

We cannot approach this without addressing the lack of opportunities for unskilled workers. Changes in the economic climate during the past few decades have resulted in fewer jobs for unskilled workers, and the remaining jobs pay much less in today's dollars than their counterparts of thirty years ago. Millions of low-wage jobs have been replaced by mechanization and computers, or have been lost to the international labor market. Why focus on getting people off welfare if there aren't enough jobs for them?

Following a proposal by Mickey Kaus of The New Republic, you should implement a neo-Works Progress Administration program that would provide a job, with pay slightly below minimum wage, for anyone who wants one (not just welfare recipients). These jobs would not compete with existing ones in the private or public sector. Instead they would provide services that have fallen through the cracks during the government belt-tightening of the eighties and nineties: repairing the infrastructure in older cities, keeping libraries open at night, maintaining public schools and parks, and cleaning streets more than once every several weeks.

Guaranteed health care and child care would necessarily be a part of this plan, as would a continuation of the earned-income tax credit for those in low-paying jobs. Otherwise, financially strained parents would face the same choice they do today: stay on welfare or look for a job that does not provide enough support for their families. Because of the below-minimum-wage pay, the WPA program would encourage people to seek other, higher-paying jobs, while providing them with basic training for jobs in the real world. You might also want to look into a transportation initiative that would increase transportation from inner-city neighborhoods, either through extra buses or carpool systems, so that people without cars could work outside their immediate area. With the above guarantees you could limit the amount of time able-bodied people are allowed to receive welfare, without consigning them to deeper poverty. People would be working for their money and answering the critiques of those who deride public assistance recipients as lay-abouts. A program like this, which would provide viable employment opportunities for those trapped in poverty, is much more expensive than simply handing people money -- it would cost an estimated twelve billion dollars to create one million jobs. Support this plan, Mr./Ms. President. The long-term benefits of reducing poverty while giving something back to communities should outweigh the cost.