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Welfare reform was the most spectacular public-policy success of the 1990s, prompting single mothers to join the work force in droves and hence improve the lot of their children. But Congress is preparing, in effect, to send these mothers back onto the dole.
Montana Sen. Max Baucus's Work, Opportunity and Responsibility for Kids Act represents all the best thinking on welfare policy circa 1973. "It overturns or takes big, gnawing bites out of all the principles of the 1996 reform," says the Heritage Foundation's Robert Rector, one of the chief architects of that law. The template for welfare reform was set by Wisconsin in the early 1990s, when the state began demanding that all welfare recipients work. During the decade, Wisconsin's welfare rolls fell by about 90 percent, and child poverty by about half. The 1996 federal law pushed states toward the Wisconsin "work-first" model. It encouraged states to reduce their caseloads and get welfare recipients in jobs, while creating a five-year time limit for receipts of federal welfare payments. Nationwide, the caseload fell by about half, as the employment rate for the most disadvantaged single mothers soared by somewhere between 50 percent to 100 percent. The black-child poverty rate dropped by a third, reaching its lowest levels ever. This was not a function of the booming economy. Since 1950, according to Rector, there have been nine periods of rapid economic growth in the United States, but the welfare caseload fell in only one of them — the 1990s, after passage of welfare reform. But the 1996 law needs a tune-up. Its work requirements have become obsolete, as states have met the bill's mandates by cutting caseloads, leaving them free to do with the remaining welfare recipients as they please. Baucus wants to keep it that way. His bill supposedly requires 50 percent of welfare recipients to engage in work, education or other activities by 2005, but this requirement is so shot through with exemptions — about 20 states would be relieved from it altogether — that it is meaningless. The bill would make Wisconsin and New York City's successful experience with compelling community-service work in exchange for welfare benefits almost impossible to duplicate. Such community-work programs would be subject to the full panoply of onerous federal employment rules, effectively deterring states from trying them. When President Clinton attempted a similar move after the 1996 law's passage, he had to back down under a chorus of complaints that he was trashing welfare reform. Baucus also eliminates the 1996 law's highest-profile provision — the five-year time limit on federal handouts — by allowing recipients to receive federal housing vouchers beyond the deadline. Passed out of the Senate Finance Committee with the support of liberal Republican Olympia Snowe and nominally conservative Republican Orrin Hatch, the Baucus bill is a return to the pre-1996 model of welfare: handing benefits to single mothers while giving them only the mildest of nudges toward voluntarily participating in training and education programs. But all studies find that it is only actual work that helps single moms. The best antidote to poverty, of course, is not to have single mothers in the first place. To that end, President Bush has proposed $300 million for a model program encouraging marriage, but Baucus has gutted the proposal by making anything — housing grants, transportation assistance, etc. — count as marriage promotion. Baucus proposes his own $150 million model program — to pay single mothers to provide day care for their own children under age 2. In other words, the old federal handouts to pay — and reward — single moms for being single moms. If Bush wants to change the subject in Washington from the corporate scandals, this retrograde bill offers a perfect opportunity. Bush should threaten to veto it, because — despite what Senate liberals might think — a falling black-child poverty rate is worth preserving. © 2002 by King Features Syndicate |
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omeone
should ask liberals what it is about falling black-child poverty rates
that they don't like.
