Frank, here is a little reality meant for all the liberals who sucked up those Clinton speech lines taking credit for reforming welfare.
Article.....
Apologize to Newt
Wall Street Journal
wallstreetjournal.com
These columns take regular whacks at politicians and government for their regular blunders. So let us now applaud that rare and wonderful thing, a public policy reform that has actually worked.
We are referring to the welfare reform of 1996. At the time, opponents said it was a cruel attempt to scapegoat the poor, a gamble that would produce a "race to the bottom" among the 50 states. Georgia Congressman and Democrat John Lewis blew a gasket and cheapened his moral authority by claiming the bill would "put one million more children into poverty." Not so subtly raising the specter of fascism, Mr. Lewis screamed, "They're coming for the children. They're coming for the poor. They're coming for the sick, the elderly and the disabled."
President Clinton vetoed reform twice before Dick Morris told him he had to sign it or risk losing to Bob Dole. It passed the House 328-101, but Democrats split down the middle, with 98 voting against it, including all three of their current leaders, Robert Menendez, David Bonior and the man-who-would-be-speaker, Dick Gephardt.
They all owe Newt Gingrich an apology. The facts now rolling in reveal that the Republican welfare reform has done more for the poor than the Great Society ever imagined. The latest data have been usefully compiled by Ron Haskins, a GOP welfare expert for the House Ways and Means Committee who all sides acknowledge to be a fair-minded analyst.
Start with the stunning decline in the welfare rolls, over five consecutive years and 49% nationwide through June of last year. "This caseload decline is without precedent in the history of welfare programs," writes Mr. Haskins. The standard liberal response is that this is all merely the result of the booming economy.
Not so. During the boom of the 1980s, when the economy created 18 million new jobs, welfare caseloads actually increased by 12%. And during the first three years of recovery this decade, welfare caseloads grew by 700,000 families. Only in 1994, amid rapid state welfare-reform experimentation, did the rolls begin to decline, going into free-fall after 1996. And they've fallen fastest in states with the most aggressive reforms, such as the more than 80% decline in Wisconsin.
And what about the "pressure" each state would be under "to lower the bar so that you can squeeze people even more," as Democratic Representative Patrick Kennedy demagogued in 1996? Well, thanks to welfare reform, the states actually have more than twice the money available per family than they did under the old AFDC and child-care programs. Many states have expanded benefits, while disbursing them in ways that better encourage work and self-sufficiency.
One hopeful result is that more welfare mothers have entered the work force. The share of never-married mothers now working grew by nearly 50% from 1993 to 1999, and it climbed by 25% among all single mothers, Mr. Haskins reports. This is big news, a crack in the notorious and supposedly unbreakable "culture of poverty" that has trapped one generation after another.
Also refuting Mr. Lewis is the fact that poverty has declined even in states where the welfare caseloads have declined the most. "Not only did the poverty rate fall by nearly two [percentage] points in states that had big caseload declines," Mr. Haskins says, but that decline was "six times greater" than in modest reform states. This doesn't mean that welfare reform caused poverty declines. But it does mean that many of those leaving welfare are also leaving poverty.
We aren't claiming that the welfare rolls will ever get to zero. Some families are too shattered by drugs or booze or illness to make it in the working world. The answers to those cases are several, but surely one of them isn't to go back to the pre-reform days of a work-free welfare entitlement.
What's needed is continued vigilance and state experimentation, a combination of carrots and sticks, ideally buttressed by further federal reform that would let states bring Medicaid and food stamps into their welfare-incentive mix. One remedy also worth trying is to mobilize the charitable impulses of religious groups the way George W. Bush proposes.
Which brings us to the politics of welfare 2000. Democrats are bidding to take back the House with an implicit promise that they've learned something from their six years in the minority. But we're still waiting for any recognition that they were wrong about welfare reform. Instead, every chance they've had since 1996 Democrats have tried to chip away at the flexibility that lets states experiment with anti-dependency solutions.
As liberal welfare writer Mickey Kaus has noted, this is a legitimate campaign issue for Republicans, and especially House Republicans, to raise. Voters deserve to know if the Gephardt-Bonior-Lewis Democrats still reject the most successful federal law of the 1990s. |
