A Success to Trumpet, and Protect - welfare reform

National Review, Feb 21, 2000 by Stephen Moore

THE results are in: Welfare reform is one of the greatest public-policy successes of modern times. There are now only half as many families on welfare as there were in 1994. Some states, led by innovative GOP governors, have shrunk their rolls by more than 80 percent. And almost everyone now agrees that the former welfare recipients have moved upward into the labor force, not downward into bleaker poverty. According to the New York Times, "the most comprehensive study of the new system says more and more [ex-welfare mothers] are going to work."

Conservatives should trumpet these accomplishments. We should say (adapting a phrase from James Carville) that we were right, and that our opponents were wrong.

How wrong? Recall the welfare-reform debate of 1995-96. Welfare advocates jeered at conservatives who were trying to fix the system. The Nation editorialized: "The welfare bill will destroy America's state of grace. In its place will come massive and deadly poverty, sickness and all manners of violence." That's not all. "People will die, businesses will close, infant mortality will soar." Rep. John Lewis of Georgia compared welfare reformers to Nazis, quoting Martin Niemoeller-"In Germany they came for the Jews and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Jew. Then they came for the trade unionists and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a trade unionist"-and then bellowing: "Read the Republican Contract. They are coming for the children. They are coming for the poor. They are coming for the sick, the elderly, and the disabled." The anti-reform movement, led by groups like the Children's Defense Fund, forecast disaster-repeatedly and loudly.

But no disaster ever came. Incentive-based reform measures-such as work requirements, time limits for welfare, no extra payments for having more children, and aggressive job-placement efforts-appear to be having exactly the desired effect.

For almost three decades, the real-world impact of welfare confirmed what any sensible behavioral psychologist would have predicted from the outset: If you pay unwed teenage girls to have babies, they will have babies. If you say that a welfare check is an adequate substitute for a father's paycheck, then fathers will be expendable, and fewer fathers will stick around. And if you tell people that the checks that sustain them will keep arriving-unless and until someone in the household starts working and bringing in income-no one in the household will work.

Furthermore, even though welfare had always been sold to the public as a "temporary" safety net for the needy, by the end of the 1980s the average welfare recipient was staying on the rolls for twelve years.

In the early 1990s, some states launched elaborate systems of penalties and rewards in order to encourage welfare recipients to leave public assistance and engage in more productive activities-work, school, or training. Wisconsin governor Tommy Thompson mandated that all able-bodied welfare recipients work in order to receive benefits. In 1987, the number of welfare households in Wisconsin was about 100,000. Now it is below 10,000.

Many other states tried similar experiments. But it wasn't until the federal reform laws were enacted by the Republican Congress and signed into law by Bill Clinton (after two vetoes) that the national welfare system was reconstructed. This reform bill included all the provisions that the welfare lobby had vigorously opposed: work requirements, time limits, and a green light for state-level reforms. When Clinton signed the bill, Children's Defense Fund president Marian Wright Edelman castigated him for approving "the biggest betrayal of children and the poor since the CDF began."

For the first time in almost two generations, though, even most congressional Democrats had to concede that a major pillar of the New Deal/Great Society structure had failed. The initial success rate of welfare reform further exposes just how flawed the Great Society programs really were.

So where do conservatives go from here? First, we have to recognize that a lot of work remains to be done on welfare reform. Despite the encouraging trends, there are still 7 million people with an umbilical cord to the welfare state. How do we get this hard core off welfare and into the workforce?

The same crowd that opposed welfare reform in the first place (Bill Bradley is one of them) now argues that to end welfare for hard-core recipients, taxpayers will have to ante up a lot more money. The Democratic pro-welfare counteroffensive is based on a politically clever pro-children theme. Liberals are designing a new welfare state that looks suspiciously like the one Congress voted just a few years ago to get rid of; this time, their selling point is that welfare is not for the parents but for the kids-who, after all, can't possibly be held responsible for their parents' refusal or inability to work.

"Compassionate conservatives" will find it hard to resist this fluff. So we could end up with free medical care, free day care, free pre-school, and so on, for children. Bill Bradley's health program would cost at least $60 billion a year-a price even Al Gore attacks as excessive.