Get a job - Bill Clinton's plan to employ welfare recipients in government-sponsored jobs - Editorial

National Review, Feb 21, 1994

PROMISING, in his State of the Union message, to end welfare as we know it by putting welfare recipients to work after two years, President Clinton added, almost in passing, the key qualification--that the work should be in the private sector by preference, but in "community service" if necessary. So he plans to shift people from welfare to welfare jobs--2.3 million of them, according to a preliminary HHS estimate that leaked to the papers later in the week.

Our most recent experiment with federally sponsored make-work was the Comprehensive Employment and Training Act, or CETA, a Nixon Administration program which flowered under Jimmy Carter. The unions' fear of competition prevented the CETA program from doing much heavy lifting, so the program became a form of patronage, a clumsy national Tammany--paying people to sit in the offices of pols or politically connected activists, and watch other people type--until Ronald Reagan ended the program.

The Clintonites have taken alarm at their own numbers, which imply a price tag of as much as $20 billion a year. Michigan Governor John Engler expressed a common fear that the states might be stuck with an "unfunded mandate." The devil is not in the details, however, but in the concept. The Clintonites nourish a Rooseveltian daydream of putting America to work in a new WPA. They forget that what put America to work half a century ago was not Roosevelt or the WPA, but World War II.