Get To Work On Welfare Reform

Washington state boasts one of the nation’s more generous welfare programs, its least accessible college system and a notoriously hostile business climate. Our government is sending the wrong message.

Republican legislators want to get started on a course correction, redesigning the state’s welfare system.

Public opinion should, and will, applaud the effort. The state cannot continue business as usual. Federal block grants will shrink the supply of welfare dollars, and for the recipients’ sake, not a cent can be wasted.

Washington’s prior welfare debates have focused on whether benefits were adequately generous. This drained funds from education and created a punishing tax climate for business. Behind the scenes, the real battle was over job security for the layers of unionized state paper-pushers, who fill Olympia office buildings, vote Democrat and cause welfare’s high overhead costs.

In 1996 the focus of the debate, and of public assistance, must change.

The Cato Institute has evaluated every state’s welfare package in terms of an hourly wage. Washington’s package, 15th highest in the nation, is equivalent to the after-tax earnings of a $9.75-per-hour job. Where’s the incentive to work?

Welfare must be redefined - as temporary, bare-bones relief for people who are acquiring whatever it is they need to enter the work force.

Therefore Republicans propose, as 29 states already have done, that Washington require welfare recipients to sign a contract defining steps they’ll take to equip themselves for self-sufficiency. At the end of the two-year contract period, benefits gradually would phase out.

There would be, and should be, exemptions from the time limit for persons who are incapacitated. Here lies a challenge. How will the state identify and handle the mentally ill, the chemically addicted, the sociopaths, the merely unmotivated? A recent state study found that a majority of welfare recipients can re-enter the work force after vocational training. So a time-limited contract could motivate and guide many. But the exemptions, while necessary, may invite abuse.

This makes an adequate number of front-line caseworkers essential. The contracts must fit the recipients. People are complex; intelligent aid requires more discretion than rules. The Legislature will have to empty Olympia of its middle-management paper shufflers and transfer staffing to the front lines.

Finally, reform would be a cruel hoax without vocational training and a business climate that encourages the creation of jobs.

We’ve spent enough years, and too much money, fussing over entitlements. It’s time to create a climate that welcomes, and insists on, work.

, DataTimes The following fields overflowed: CREDIT = John Webster/For the editorial board