Real Work or Just More Rhetoric?
The welfare reform debate in Washington offers the country clear choices - two competing Senate Republican block grant proposals and the "Work First" initiative from Senate Democrats. Both Republican proposals abandon real work-based welfare reform for budget cutting. In contrast, the Democratic initiative offers a radical but responsible plan that will move welfare recipients into private sector work.
GOP congressional leaders, who had been working with Democrats in the last Congress on true welfare reform - have shifted to a block grant approach this year not to encourage work, but to reach a balanced budget by the year 2002. At the same time, Republicans are avoiding tough decision-making to merely satisfy GOP governors' demands for flexibility.
The Dole-Packwood proposal - the most likely to pass of the two Republican bills - simply fails to reform the welfare system. It has four major flaws.
Republicans save billions of federal dollars from budget cutting but pass much of the cost of their so-called reform to the states through unfunded mandates. Gov. Roy Romer has correctly stated that welfare reform must include child care funding if self-sufficiency is to be achieved. Without resources for that critical support system and transitional health care, combined with requiring states to triple the number of welfare recipients enrolled in a JOBS-like program, the states will be sure to fail.
The GOP proposal generates massive federal budgetary savings but shifts and shafts $34 billion of unfunded mandates onto the states. Right here in Colorado, the legislature will be forced to come up with an additional $288.9 million.
The GOP proposal creates phony work requirements. The Dole-Packwood bill imposes stiff work requirements without offering states the mechanisms and money to meet them. Compliance will be very unlikely without shifting needed funding from food stamp and training programs.
Furthermore, Republicans offer states an awful disincentive by making it cheaper to swallow penalties for failure to meet work requirements than for actually putting welfare recipients to work. Finally, the proposal does not require work until 24 months have passed.
Republicans do not "make work pay" more than welfare. GOP budget constraints make it impossible to make work pay for welfare recipients because real money for child care and health care benefits are withheld. To make matters worse, other Senate Republicans have further discouraged work by demanding deep cuts in the earned-income tax credit - a tax break that supplements the wages of the working poor who have full-time jobs.
This proposal also arbitrarily cuts teens and children from the welfare rolls. Senate Republicans are including punitive measures that allow states to turn their backs on unwed teen mothers and their children without giving these families a chance to turn their lives around. Worse yet, teen pregnancy is only addressed after the fact. Dole-Packwood will increase the abortion rate while doing little to prevent teen pregnancy.
Republicans have abandoned work-based welfare reform entirely. Their proposal merely shifts the current system from the control of federal bureaucrats to their counterparts in the states with less money and no direction.
As the Republican Party deserts work-based welfare reform, Democrats are embracing it. President Clinton has joined with Senate Democrats in endorsing the "Work First" plan.
Work First - which takes its name and substance from the DLC's March 1995 proposal - makes cash welfare payments temporary and dependent on rapid movement toward full-time, unsubsidized employment, reinforced by time limits.
It will also radically change the culture of the welfare system by replacing its two big failed programs (Aid to Dependent Children and Job Opportunities and Basic Skills). In their place will be an employment system linking welfare recipients to private labor markets through placement firms and nonprofit organizations in competition with government agencies. Work First also requires recipients to engage in work activities as soon as they receive assistance - as opposed to the 24-month Republican waiting period.
In addition, states would have nearly as much flexibility as a block grant but would be held accountable for results - earning performance bonuses for succeeding in placing and keeping welfare recipients in jobs and suffering sanctions if they do not. Also included are new tools for linking recipients with private sector opportunities - including job placement vouchers.
Just as important, this proposal offers a tough but sensible strategy to prevent teen pregnancy, as well as a plan to give unwed teens and their children another shot to improve their lives. Teen mothers from unsafe or unstable homes would get a fresh start in supervised group residences called "Second Chance Homes" while they and their children attend school.
Finally, Work First is funded entirely though savings created from cuts in existing welfare spending, saving an additional $15 billion over seven years for deficit reduction.
In sharp contrast to the Dole-Packwood proposal, Work First represents true progress. As recipients make the transition from welfare to work, states and taxpayers will realize the savings.
The American people want what Work First offers - a total overhaul of the welfare system that gives recipients real opportunities to work. Congress should give it to them.
Jim Gibson is Executive Vice President of the Colorado Democratic Leadership Council, a think tank that advocates new public policy ideas and the Democratic Party's historic commitment to economic growth, personal responsibility, individual liberty and equal opportunity.