To End Welfare as We Know It?

May-June 1993

WASHINGTON, D.C.—President Clinton has promised to end welfare as we know it. Can he be serious? How quickly can that take place? What has to change?

At this moment, most federal eyes seem to be focused on trying to reform the health-care system and to reduce the budget deficit. Those two nuts will be hard enough to crack. The welfare system —including food stamps, Aid To Families with Dependent Children (AFDC), Medicaid, and more—is something else. It does not cost the federal government very much—at least when compared with the cost of health care. But then again, one of the big health-care costs (Medicaid and emergency treatment of those without health insurance) results from poverty and unemployment. Further, the welfare system itself is dependent on many outside influences over which government has little or no control—family breakdown, youth pregnancy, ghetto alienation, and hopelessness.

Therefore, to end welfare as we know it will take more than government action. People must change. This was the message of both John Perkins and Linda Chavez at a panel discussion sponsored by The Heritage Foundation here on March 5. Ms. Chavez—former director of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, who worked for a time in the Reagan White House—stressed the failure of bureaucratic attempts to overcome poverty. The War on Poverty started with a mistaken, overly optimistic view of human nature and ended up reducing individual and family responsibility, she argued. Government has helped to foster a culture of dependency that simply produces more poverty. Consequently, families, communities, and cultures must change to produce young people with a work ethic, with self-confidence, and with initiative that drives them away from dependency toward independence. The Clinton administration's talk about change is not radical enough from Chavez's point of view. She is not optimistic about any quick resolution of the welfare crisis.

John Perkins, publisher of the new magazine Urban Family, is an outspoken Christian who has labored most of his adult life in community development efforts among poor people—first in rural Mississippi and now in Pasadena, California. Dr. Perkins stressed the constructive steps that must be taken to change people's lives. Most poor people do not want to be on welfare and do not feel good about being dependent. The family is the key to the future of cultural change, said Perkins. Building and rebuilding strong families so that children will grow up seeing healthy role models and knowing what it means to be loved is not something that government programs can cause to happen. [This point is also argued at length in an article by Barbara Dafoe Whitehead in the April issue of The Atlantic Monthly, titled "Dan Quayle Was Right."]

One of the stories in the spring issue of Urban Family [P.O. Box 40125, Pasadena, CA 91104] is by former President Jimmy Carter whose experience in worldwide aid efforts through the Carter Center finally helped awaken him to the contradictions in his own backyard. A visit to an Atlanta hospital, he writes, "brought home to me a hard fact: more of our young babies were dying in my own state than any other place in the United States." Carter is now promoting the Atlanta Project, one of the largest private, voluntary initiatives ever undertaken to address the urban crisis.

But private initiatives do not stand alone. Movements are afoot in many states to encourage constructive change. Virginia's Governor Douglas Wilder signed into law on March 31 a pilot program that will place 600 welfare recipients in jobs that will pay them enough to end their need for welfare payments of any kind. Government along with individuals, families, churches, schools, and businesses all bear some responsibility for ending the welfare crisis. Now is the time to reexamine the nature of this shared responsibility and to seek reforms in state and federal laws to reflect a properly proportioned distribution of responsibilities.

—The Editor