Cash advance sacramento

The welfare paradise - conservative policies on welfare reform

The Welfare Paradise

FOR thirty years conservatives have decried the fact that the welfare state leads to continuing poverty, economic dependency, broken homes, illegitimacy, juvenile crime, and assorted other social pathologies. Lately they have found themselves in a position to do something about it. And they've come up squeamish.

Consider California. One in five Americans on welfare lives here -- 2.3 million on Aid to Families with Dependent Children (or its post-1996 equivalent) alone. And while Democrats have majorities in the state Assembly and Senate, Republicans claim strong legislative contingents, a reform-minded governor, and a solid majority of the electorate favoring welfare reform.

Indeed, for a while things looked promising. After last summer's landmark federal reform bill tying grants to strict work requirements, Gov. Pete Wilson proposed an overhaul of the system under the guidance of his Social Services Director, Eloise Anderson -- previously the architect of Wisconsin's successful welfare-reform plan.

However, Democratic leaders responded with a plan deceptively entitled "California Works," which expanded the existing no-work system. Negotiations proceeded behind closed doors, and a "compromise" emerged with the full support of the Republican leadership. The governor signed the bill.

Unfortunately, the compromise provides for a "child-only safety net," which turns out to be the welfare state's shield against any real reform. The theory is that only adult welfare recipients should be penalized for failure to work in return for benefits -- and not their children. In practice, the child-only net undermines the power of work requirements. For instance, an unwed welfare mother with two children who flatly refuses to comply with such requirements -- as well as requirements to send her children to school, stay free of drugs, etc. -- will continue to receive food stamps, free medical care, often a rent subsidy, and $456 in cash per month (down from $565). In addition, she will continue to get other government services like supplemental nutrition programs, and private charitable offers of more food, clothing, shelter, etc.

Wisconsin has demonstrated the success of real reform: supplying cash benefits only in direct proportion to the number of hours recipients show up for work. Those who don't show up at all get no cash or food stamps at all. However, in California even the very worst welfare scofflaws will have their checks reduced, on average, by only $109 a month -- that is, less than 25 per cent. Needless to say, many will decline to seek employment.

By introducing this "child-only safety net" policy-makers not only refused the opportunity to initiate real reform, they established a state welfare entitlement to replace the federal entitlement that was eliminated in last summer's reform. Why? They say the alternative -- that the state would be forced into the business of placing large numbers of children in foster homes -- is too cruel.

However, Wisconsin's experience refutes this false dilemma: faced with significant reductions or even termination of cash benefits, most welfare recipients alter their behavior -- whether by performing community service, moving in with relatives, getting married, obtaining a private-sector job, or some combination of these. And Wisconsin's welfare rolls have fallen 60 per cent.

Furthermore, although some able-bodied welfare parents will undoubtedly resist all prodding and punishment, in those cases placing the children with other relatives or in foster homes is a less cruel alternative to leaving them with demonstrably negligent, indifferent parents.

Why do so many conservatives, many of whom can cite chapter and verse from Robert Rector or Charles Murray on the evils of the welfare state, become unmanned by the prospect of actually putting a stop to it? The most common rationale offered by conservative legislators in Sacramento is that welfare reform is a "losing issue." And in fact, it may be the case that, given the liberal lock on the legislature, conservatives couldn't make more than a few dents in the armor of the welfare state. But that doesn't excuse the conservative leadership for abandoning the larger argument, or claiming success by agreeing to this "compromise."

A few years before the American Revolution, Benjamin Franklin distinguished America's democratic welfare system from England's paternalistic model: no country, he said, had more anti-poverty provisions than England, "with a solemn general law made by the rich to subject their estates to a heavy tax for the support of the poor"; but at the same time "there is no country in the world in which the poor are more idle, dissolute, drunken, and insolent." "In short," Franklin concluded, the English aristocracy "offered a premium for the encouragement of idleness, and . . . we should not now wonder that it has had the effect of an increase in poverty." In America, on the other hand, the purpose of welfare had been "not making [the poor] easy in poverty, but leading or driving them out of it."

For Franklin, welfare policy was of a piece with the question of the regime, of what a nation is and means. A self-governing democracy requires self-governing citizens; a limited or constitutional government must treat its citizens as responsible adults rather than helpless children.

Unfortunately, many conservative legislators today are too young to recall a time when the staunchly democratic principles of Franklin still held sway. Today, real welfare reform appears more revolutionary than conservative. However, insofar as welfare statism has transformed our regime to the paternalistic model decried by Franklin, true welfare reform becomes a kind of refounding. And refounding, like founding, requires a firm grasp of first principles.

If conservatives are to live up to their names -- conserving what is best in America rather than trying to become more efficient caretakers of the welfare state -- they better start hitting some older books.