Welfare A Catastrophe; Reform A Tiny Step

New York’s Democratic senator, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, denounces the welfare reform bill as “the most brutal act of social policy since Reconstruction.”

The head of the National Urban League, Hugh Price, declares angrily that “Washington has decided to end the war on poverty and begin a war on children.”

Contempt curling his lip, Rep. Charles Rangel, D-N.Y., says, “My president will boldly throw one million into poverty.”

Marian Wright Edelman, chairman of the Children’s Defense Fund, warns that if President Clinton signs this bill, it “will leave a moral blot on his presidency and our nation.”

In the weekend papers, one columnist describes the new welfare reform law as “mandated starvation”; another quotes with approval a welfare lobbyist’s prediction that Clinton “is going to fry in hell for this.”

In the Philadelphia Inquirer, cartoonist Tony Auth sketches “welfare kids” being sacrificed before the altar of “re-election.”

People: Get a grip.

This isn’t the end of the world. It isn’t the end of welfare. It is barely the end of welfare-as-we-know-it.

For all the keening and hysterics, the bill Clinton has promised to sign will make only modest changes in the federal program of cash assistance to the poor.

An unmarried woman who decides to have children she can’t support still will collect free money from the government. She still will get food stamps. She still will be covered by Medicaid. She still will be able to avoid work for up to two years - even longer if she can’t find day care. She still will be able to shield the identity of her children’s father(s) without forfeiting most of her benefits.

Welfare, all the screeching notwithstanding, isn’t being dismantled. It isn’t even being overhauled. It is being tightened ever so slightly.

The new law limits lifetime welfare eligibility to five years, keeps non-citizens from going on the dole and gives states more autonomy in shaping their assistance programs.

For this, Clinton should “fry in hell”? This is “the most brutal act of social policy since Reconstruction”?

What is hellish and brutal is the welfare state.

It has lured millions of girls and women into ruining their lives by bribing them to have children before they have husbands. It has subsidized an explosion of illegitimacy, detaching fathers from their families and teaching them to be predators, not providers. It has peddled the narcotic of something for nothing, poisoned whole neighborhoods with a bias against work and spread the delusion that the poor cannot - indeed, must not - help themselves.

This welfare reform bill, opponents cry, will generate social devastation and misery, especially among children. But have these opponents looked out their windows, seen what unreformed welfare is doing to children?

Over the past 3-1/2 decades, the percentage of American children on Aid to Families with Dependent Children has rocketed from 3.5 percent to 13 percent. The great majority of black children - more than 70 percent - spend at least part of their childhoods on welfare. The rate of births to unmarried teenagers has tripled from 15 per 1,000 in 1960 to 45 per 1,000 today.

And the growth of welfare has not ended child poverty; instead, it has fueled it. In 1970, 10.4 million children lived in households with earnings below the poverty line; by 1993, the number was more than 15.7 million.

This catastrophe wasn’t caused by war or plague or depression. It was caused by welfare as we have come to know it - by a well-intentioned, hideously misguided government policy of rewarding self-destructive behavior and paying good money for making bad choices.

When welfare was federalized in 1935, it was a modest program for helping widows with young children. Out-of-wedlock childbirth was rare then, deeply stigmatized and economically perilous.

But in the 1960s, as welfare benefits were increased dramatically, the taboo against illegitimacy began to break down. Having a baby out of wedlock - once a ticket to shame and misery - became a ticket to monthly checks, rent subsidies and food stamps. More and more women got hooked; more and more babies were being born without fathers around; more and more families sank into the underclass.

And almost nothing is worse for a child than being raised by a single parent.

Nearly 75 percent of children without fathers at home spend part of their childhoods in poverty. They are more than twice as likely as children from two-parent families to be held back in school and more than four times as likely to be expelled or suspended. They are likelier to die in infancy, likelier to need treatment for psychiatric problems, likelier to be injured in an accident, to score poorly on IQ tests, to abuse drugs, to become criminals, to commit suicide.

Above all, children born and raised out of wedlock are far more likely to get pregnant as teenagers and have children out of wedlock themselves - and thus begin the cycle anew.

The welfare state hasn’t cured poverty; it has incubated it.

As long as the government keeps churning out those checks, children will keep growing up dependent and dysfunctional. Welfare-as-we-know-it breeds despair, crime, addiction and abuse; it slowly is chewing the heart out of American society.

This new law is one tiny step toward repairing the damage. Those inveighing so shrilly against it are defending a terrible status quo.

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