Early Indications Are Encouraging

For some reason, Idaho-bashing is in vogue.

The national media regularly parachute into Idaho in search of racists or to wring their hands about supposedly polluted waterways teeming with boaters and swimmers, or to find fodder for notions that the state spends too little on welfare and too much on prisons.

In April, the New York Times decreed that Idaho’s tough welfare reform has put the state “in danger of becoming another Mississippi.” Now, the Kensington Welfare Rights Union, an advocacy group for the poor, has described Idaho’s aggressive backto-work package as an international human rights violation.

What poppycock.

Idaho welfare reforms, labeled by the old guard as “harsh,” haven’t been in place long enough to say they’re a failure. Or an unqualified success, for that matter. However, the reforms, which went into effect a year ago today, seem to be moving the state in the right direction.

At this point, reformers, such as state Sen. Gordon Crow, R-Hayden, should study what happened to the 7,300 families that dropped off the welfare roll in the last year. Are they living in cars or nine to a trailer, as reform critics insist? Or have they become productive and confident by landing decent jobs, as Republican Gov. Phil Batt and a state Department of Health and Welfare study claim?

According to the Health and Welfare survey, 53 percent of former recipients who left the public dole in the first six months of reform said they’re working. And 74 percent of them are earning more than $6 an hour. Also, more than three-quarters of those who went off welfare still receive food stamps and Medicaid - an indication that state officials are sincere in trying to help families through the transition from dependence to self-sufficiency.

Despite the caterwaul from the usual suspects, Idaho’s new welfare laws may need nothing more than a few tweaks to prevent the truly needy from falling through the cracks. Batt believes the state needs to relax its two-year, lifetime cap on benefits. Maybe so. Two years is not much time to get retrained for a good job.

Perhaps diehard welfare lovers need Idaho as a whipping boy; perhaps they’re frustrated that reforms they opposed are popular and working in many states. In Florida, for example, a scientific study of welfare reform found “little systematic evidence of extreme economic distress, such as homelessness.” Instead, it discovered, most former aid recipients have found jobs.

The old system, which created generations of dependency and illegitimacy, is dead. Its backers would serve the poor better if they quit whining and helped patch the new system.