Reforms Aim To Break Cycle Of Dependency

Accountability. Pulling your weight if you can. Getting help if you can’t. Paying a price for not trying.

From what I can glean, these are priorities of the business community for welfare reform.

The intent is not to be mean.

Business people just don’t want to keep wasting their time, their effort, and their concern on a system that dehumanizes and enslaves millions of fellow Americans.

The core issue is not money.

It is eliminating incentives that make welfare more profitable than work and single motherhood more attractive than marriage, perpetuating intergenerational poverty, hopelessness, anger, antisocial behavior and crime.

In that vein, President Clinton himself has acknowledged, “Nothing has done more to undermine our sense of responsibility than our failed welfare system.”

Adds House minority leader Dick Gephardt: “Even most people on welfare think the system stinks.”

A New York Times poll shows, “Americans feel so strongly about the work ethic that 59 percent say they are willing to pay more in taxes to provide job training and public service jobs for people on welfare so they can get off welfare.”

And Walter Cronkite reports most Americans would willingly spend more to help the truly deserving, but not the way it’s being done now.

Polls repeatedly show two-thirds of the populace thinks government spends too little to help the poor, says the exanchorman. But only one-fourth thinks more should be spent on welfare.

Consistent with that, most business people with whom I have spoken would be willing to pay more for reforms which actually work to help welfare recipients back into the mainstream of American work life.

And, though a House Republican bill now working its way through the Legislature enjoys strong business backing, behind the scenes concern has been raised. The measure calls for:

A two-year limit on benefits.

No cash income increase for the birth of another child - in effect a cap on families.

And no benefits for new mothers under 18. Period. The reasoning: Anything you subsidize you get more of.

All of which, some charge, make this the harshest approach yet in the nation.

So, does the bill need some softening to make it more compatible with what people say they want from reform? Or is it OK as is?

Well, we’ve all made a mistake or two.

“I fear it is counterproductive to cut off teen moms,” says Susan Meyer, executive director of Momemtum.

“I seriously question whether that will prevent problem teens from having sex” added Meyer, speaking as a “taxpayer” and not on behalf of the Spokane business-supported economic acceleration organization.

“I think if someone makes a mistake,” said Meyer, “we still must offer them the opportunity to overcome the setback and have a future.

“Not to do this,” she warned, “will cost us more long term, I’m afraid, than we can even imagine.”

All who can, she believes, should be required to get the education and training to work their way off welfare in the private sector, with assistance in the transition.

Hardcore unemployables, she suggests, should be required to work in the community to earn their paychecks while making neighborhoods and streets clean and safe or working at other needed endeavors.

“It will take years of change,” says Meyer, “but we have to begin changing generations by starting to do it.”

Don Brunell, too, says, “We want to make sure we don’t unfairly penalize people caught in the welfare trap who need time to get free.

“But,” says the president of the Association of Washington Business lobby, “I don’t think you can change this system substantively without impacts that some people won’t like.”

Sen. Phil Gramm, R-Texas, longtime advocate of strict reforms, is among the most outspoken. “There are some people riding in the (welfare) wagon,” said the presidential aspirant in a published interview, “who are going to hate us for it.

“But their children and grandchildren will love us for it,” he said. “We’re going to lose our country if we don’t do it.”

xxxx