Tell me who is a greater threat to the poor, their friends or their foes.
The foes, at least, are straightforward: The poor will have to jump through hoops to get welfare, and even when they jump through hoops they won’t get it forever.
Illinois won’t give extra cash to mothers if they have more children. Teenage moms will have to live at home and stay in school if they want assistance. Parents of school-age children will be cut off if they don’t look for work.
The federal deal passed Thursday by the House would strip poor families from the welfare rolls after a five-year limit and give the states more control over how the money is spent.
Since the state law is done, and President Clinton wants to sign some kind of end-welfare-as-we-know-it bill, you would think that the friends of the poor would be busy preparing them for the day of reckoning, right?
Doesn’t look that way.
A few weeks ago I went to a forum on welfare reform sponsored by the University of Chicago and the Metropolitan Planning Council. They had about 75 people from business, labor, universities, community groups, social services and state government. All the bases were covered.
Most important, they had Sen. Frank Watson (R-Greenville), an assistant majority leader, and Sen. Steve Rauschenberger (R-Elgin), the chairman of the Appropriations Committee. Those two have their hands on the money.
After two days of talking about welfare, this group was supposed to craft an important report on how Illinois should remake the welfare system. This is an open question. Legislators voted to eliminate Aid to Families with Dependent Children in 1999; they haven’t decided what will replace it.
The report won’t shake the Earth. It probably won’t even shake the high shelf I throw it on, unless it sets off an avalanche of all the other important reports up there.
But that doesn’t matter. What mattered was that Watson and Rauschenberger and a few other legislators at this event were looking for some help to pull off the transition from welfare to work. And the friends of the poor blew it.
Instead of ideas, they launched a long and silly debate about why the word “welfare” should be banned from the report about welfare reform. Seems welfare leaves a bad taste in the mouths of taxpayers, so they don’t want to call it welfare anymore.
After they banned any mention of “welfare”–there actually was a vote to do this–they got into a long debate about banning the word “dependency.” Bad image. Throw it out.
Elated about ending welfare dependency just like that, they spent the next several hours deciding that a vast new hold-your-hand-from-cradle-to-grave, cost-be-damned welfa–sorry–economic support system should be erected to replace the one that is going, going, gone.
Before they finished, the Republican legislators who run the state were going, going, long gone.
As Strother Martin said in “Cool Hand Luke,” what we got here is a failure to communicate.
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The system formerly known as welfare is going to change. That’s out of necessity. Not so much economic necessity, because the cost of welfare is not as great as many people think it is. It’s out of social necessity, because welfare dependency has contributed to the many problems of the underclass.
Those who consider themselves the friends of the poor need to start dealing with the change, and they’re not.
Remember, not everybody will be forced off welfare. Congress would permit the states to exempt 15 percent of their cases from the five-year limit on benefits. President Clinton has vowed to veto that bill, so a final agreement with him might expand that safety net for hardship cases beyond 15 percent.
The rest will be, ah, persuaded to look for work. The friends tell us that the poor can’t possibly be forced off welfare until they are given extensive preparation to work. In many cases, that is true. But in just as many cases, it is not.
In Illinois, 51 percent of the adults who get AFDC have a high school or general-equivalency diploma, the first requisite for a decent entry-level job. Of those, 11 percent also have some college credit or vocational training. And 70 percent of them have work experience, so they’re not complete strangers to the concept. Give them a job, and they’d work.
The friends have to get serious about easing the transition in ways that don’t break the bank. They should be pressing for affordable child care–a must, since 47 percent of the children in AFDC are 6 or younger. They should be lobbying to save the Earned Income Tax Credit. As distasteful as it might seem to them, they ought to be supporting Republican measures to promote a business climate that brings new jobs.
Ah, the jobs. Now, that could be a problem. Sometimes the friends and foes of the poor have made sure there aren’t jobs for them. Last year, some legislators wanted to require that companies hire 5 percent of their workers from the welfare rolls as a condition for getting any state contracts worth more than $500,000. Business and labor combined to quash the bill. The contractors didn’t want the bother and the unions didn’t want the competition.
There’s something telling about that defeat. With all the talk about putting the poor to work, when a bill came along that actually held out a job for them, some of the most powerful, competing interests in this state worked hand-in-hand to kill it. It has to make you wonder if the real fear of welfare reform is that it might work.