A Democratic triumph - Bill Clinton approves welfare reform - Editorial

Progressive, The, Sept, 1996

For all those who still cling to the idea that it's vital to have a Democrat in the White House, consider the Democrat who lives there now, and the assault on the poor he is waging.

By signing the bill that will destroy our nation's sixty-year-old welfare system, Bill Clinton is consigning a million poor children to poverty. He is taking $28 billion in food assistance from poor women and their children. He is depriving hundreds of thousands of disabled children of the supplemental-security income they rely on. He will immediately cut off disability aid and food stamps to hundreds of thousands of legal immigrants.

Why is he doing this? Because he suffers from a tragic flaw--opportunism. He has an uncanny knack for knowing what's right, and doing what's wrong.

How does Bill Clinton sleep at night?

How does Hillary Rodham Clinton, formerly of the Children's Defense Fund, sleep at night?

Bill Clinton got the nasty welfare ball rolling when he ran for President in 1992. He knew back then that a majority of the American public, feeding on racial stereotypes, resented people on welfare. Like any demagogue, he played on those sentiments.

Had a Republican candidate run on the pledge to "end welfare as we know it," liberals would have denounced that candidate loudly and clearly.

But when a Democratic candidate ran on that pledge, many liberals cheered--or comforted themselves with the fiction that Clinton didn't really mean what he said.

Well, it turns out he meant it. First, he allowed forty-one states to obtain federal waivers to tamper with the way they administered their federal welfare dollars. And now he's gone ahead and signed this bill that will do away with the guarantee that poor women and children shall not starve to death.

At present, there are four million poor parents on welfare--the vast majority are single women--and nine million children. Half of these families have incomes under $6,300 a year. These are the people who will suffer.

There will now be a five-year lifetime limit for welfare recipients. If they still can't find work after their five-year allotment is up, too bad. And if there is a recession or a depression, they will still be out of luck. This passes for compassion in 1996.

Bill Clinton and the Republicans who goaded him claim that dismantling welfare will be good for the people on welfare.

That is a cruel hoax. Our economy does not have enough jobs for everyone. The jobs that are available for most people currently on welfare do not pay a living wage. The costs of child care will take a huge chunk out of that measly paycheck, so mothers and their children will be worse off than they were under the old system.

This bill does not end poverty. It simply ends welfare. But poverty will deepen for millions of Americans.

The result: a level of desperation and need we have not seen in this country since the early 1930s, when the crisis of mass poverty caused the government to institute the welfare system in the first place.

The new system gives states broad powers to administer welfare programs as they see fit, but gives them less money to do it with. The bill slashes $55 billion in welfare spending over the next six years.

Under the new block-grant system, states will get a lump sum to dole out pretty much as they please. And they are permitted to cut the amount they spend on the poor by 25 percent from the 1994 level. In this era of tight state budgets, most will probably do so.

States like Wisconsin, which has already begun purging people from the rolls, are not solving the problem of poverty; they are making it worse. The new program called Wisconsin Works will leave 75 percent of participants with less money than they have now, according to an analysis by the bipartisan Legislative Fiscal Bureau. Once a month, they will receive a lump-sum grant as payment for forty hours of work, but the amount of that lump sum turns out to be less than the minimum wage.

In Wisconsin during the month of June, 1,200 participants in a small-scale welfare-reform experiment were cut off welfare and had their food stamps reduced to $10 a month because they missed an appointment with a caseworker or a job-trainer. Only the most dire of emergencies were accepted as legitimate reasons for an absence. Social-service agencies in Milwaukee report a rise in homelessness and hunger as a result of the cutoffs.

Other states now will no doubt follow the Wisconsin example, tossing people into the street for failing to clear the most minor administrative hurdles. Purging the rolls--not improving people's lives--seems to be the only goal of today's welfare games.

Such an assault on the poor would never have occurred under a Republican President. The Democrats in Congress, and liberals around the country, would have been up in arms. They would have exerted so much pressure that the Republicans would have had to back down.

Only a nominally Democratic President could have scored such a devastating victory. He co-opted and immobilized many of those who should have been clamoring for the poor, he legitimized the bashing of people on welfare, and he brought Democratic Senators and Representatives along with him.