Why can't GOP stand, deliver against Clinton?

0 Comments | Insight on the News, August 11, 1997 | by Douglas J. Besharov

One of the few real legislative accomplishments of the last Republican Congress was welfare reform. The new law substituted wishful thinking about job training and public-service employment -- both elements of the failed Clinton plan -- for a hard-nosed emphasis on getting recipients into jobs, any jobs, and in requiring those who do not find jobs to work in return for their welfare benefits that would be time-limited.

But now, through a series of seemingly unrelated but adroit maneuvers the president and his congressional allies are on the verge of reshaping the welfare law in the image of his original bill -- and the congressional Republican majority seems helpless to stop them.

The new welfare law created a capped block grant that encouraged states to reduce welfare rolls: mandated that, by the year 2002, 50 percent of families either must be engaged in work activities (for at least 30 hours a week) or have left the rolls; placed a five-year limit on family benefits (for all but 20 percent of the state's caseload); and provided $600 million a year in new funding for child care. However, the law provided no new money for job training.

Thus, the Republican-sponsored law rejected past approaches that tried to make work more attractive than welfare -- by attempting to raise earnings through job training and wage subsidies. Instead, the law sought to make welfare less attractive than work -- by placing work obligations on recipients. New applicants would be required to look for a job, and those already on the rolls would be required to work in return for time-limited benefits (work-for-welfare).

The idea, supported by various research studies, is simple enough: If welfare recipients have to choose between working for their benefits or getting a real job, many will choose the later. Research also suggests that a work requirement plus time limits would change other aspects of behavior as well: Some single mothers would get married or move in with family or friends. And such new rules could deter unwed mothers on welfare from having more children and their younger sisters and friends from having a first baby when they see that a life on welfare no longer is possible.

The welfare law is immensely popular with the American public. According to a Feb. 7, 1997, Los Angeles Times poll, 75 percent of the public say they "favor" the new law. Moreover, the early evidence is that the law may be working. Nationwide, the number of families on welfare has declined 21 percent since March 1994. The decline began before passage of the welfare-reform bill and has been abetted by a strong economy that has created many entry-level jobs.

Still, the emphasis on mandatory work in the Republican welfare law and in the earlier waivers granted by the Clinton administration is widely credited with helping reduce welfare rolls. And one only has to visit innercity neighborhoods to hear recipients and young people not yet on welfare talking about the need to find work.

Some people fear that work-for-welfare strategies are unfair or punitive. But various studies have shown that they can lower caseloads without causing undue harm to recipients. An evaluation of Iowa's welfare-reform program, for example, found that even families that had their entire Aid to Families With Dependent Children grant terminated for not complying with the program's requirements experienced a $13 average increase in total monthly income (including earnings, cash assistance and food stamps). Although about half of the families lost some income, the evaluators observed "little systematic evidence of extreme deprivation during the period of no cash benefits."

This apparent success of welfare reform is what makes Republican powerlessness in the face of Clinton's recent efforts to water down the work provisions of the welfare law so astonishing.

First, the president gained Republican support for his $3 billion "Welfare-to-Work Grants" program--in return for his support for additional middle-class tax cuts, it is whispered. The grants would be targeted to long-term recipients in high-poverty urban communities and could be used for private-sector wage subsidies, on-the-job training, job-placement services, job vouchers and job-retention services.

Unfortunately, despite the program's ambitious title, most of the services that would be funded under it have been tried many times before without real success, and there is no reason to think that they will work now. In fact, no serious student of welfare reform has come forward to defend the president's plan--which is an unabashed attempt to placate his liberal critics (especially in the big cities and among African-American leaders) who complained mightily about his having signed the welfare bill in the first place.

In defending the Republican support for the president's program, one Republican staffer said, "What's the harm? It's only money." Besides being offensive to taxpayers, the statement seriously underestimates the opportunity costs of adopting the wrong approach at this key juncture. This $3 billion will draw needed attention, energies and funds away from the crucial effort to make workfare programs succeed. Instead of being used for doomed job-training programs, this $3 billion could have been used to more than double the funds available for child-care programs--the highest-cost element of mandatory work programs. But, the current bill actually prohibits using the funds for child care.