Boon Or Bane Con Bob Herbert And Tony Snow Offer Conflicting Statistics And Views On The Efficacy Of And Need For Social Welfare Programs.
Republicans love to describe their ascents to power as “revolutions” - the Reagan Revolution, the Revolution of 1994, etc. But the party has a long way to go before it can lay claim to reinventing America. It must persuade people its partisans have hearts.
The test will come when the GOP tackles welfare reform. Foes have their arrows ready: The New York Times says compassion died as an ideal when voters tossed liberal Democrats into the history books. And David Kamp, GQ magazine assistant managing editor, went ballistic: “Republicans, like Vladimir Zhirinovsky, Heather Locklear and the Sex Pistols on their 1978 tour of the United States, recognize the entertainment value of flagrant villainy. Evil is fun. … The GOP stands poised to dominate politics for the foreseeable future because its members are more comfortable than Democrats with being feral jerks.”
Many Americans suspect, like Kamp, that Republicans serve as the willing shills of the rich and soulless. But hard statistics allow a facerestoring effort by right-wingers. Statistics expose the welfare experiment as the most barbaric exercise in governmental stupidity since the mandatory sterilization of Southern blacks at the beginning of this century.
A study published last October by the National Center for Policy Analysis describes the debacle.
The report by John Goodman, Gerald Reed and Peter Ferrara notes that the federal government spent $5 trillion (in 1992 dollars) over the past 30 years in its war on poverty. The budget will set aside $350 billion this year for means-tested programs designed specifically to help low-income citizens. That’s the highest level of social outlays in history. Taxpayers pay three and a half times as much for such programs as when Ronald Reagan took office, devoting more resources to this failed battle than to defense.
But we don’t get our money’s worth. Robert Rector of the Heritage Foundation says poverty rates declined sharply from the end of World War II until the beginning of the Great Society (1965), at which point progress almost immediately stopped. Todays’ poverty rate stands slightly higher than 1965’s. Not everybody suffered, of course. Transfers to the poor have tripled in real terms since 1972, but almost all that increase has gone to bureaucrats, not the needy. Milwaukee discovered a few years ago that only about 33 cents of every welfare dollar went to an aid recipient. The rest paid case workers, contractors and others.
Conservatives have insisted for years that key welfare programs actually encourage idiotic behavior. Contemporary data seem to prove it. Economists Anne Hill and June O’Neill discovered that women tend to leave the work force and go on the dole when government fattens benefits packages. The two scholars discovered that a 50 percent increase in the monthly payment for Aid to Families with Dependent Children produced 75 percent hikes in the number of women on AFDC and the average length of time spent in the program.
Conversely, people seek work when government encourages them to do so. After budget cuts in Reagan’s first year as president, (the only time a Republican president has cut the welfare budget), more than 1 million people went out and got jobs. Michigan Gov. John Engler discovered the same thing when he cut off the state’s main general assistance program. Michigan State Sen. John Kelly, a Detroit Democrat, recently told The New York Times, “I was in the trenches trying to figure out ways to humiliate them about their lack of compassion. But I must admit in retrospect three years later, the number of complaints other than by providers was small.”
Conservatives can lay the framework for a revolution if they publicize the facts and describe themselves as the folks who want to liberate the poor from the government’s suffocating compassion. Nobody will care what the angry left has to say in response if conservative programs actually make America less poor - in income and spirit.
xxxx ” Boon or Bane Pro Bob Herbert and Tony Snow offer conflicting statistics and views on the efficacy and need for social welfare programs.”
Tony Snow is a columnist for The Detroit News.