Herr kept hammering that last point. She introduced me to women – just barely competent, just barely composed – who’d been taught to do the basics: to get their children to school on time, to feed and clothe them adequately, to get them vaccinated. She’d set up a series of small rewards for them. Women who volunteered at the Head Start center were cited on an honor roll. Herr seemed particularly pleased by these tiny triumphs, but I wasn’t too interested; I was fixed, as the public debate has been, on getting these women to work. I refused to see what I was seeing: that a significant number of women on welfare simply don’t have the intellectual or emotional wherewithal to work, that the best we can do – with no small effort – is to help them be better mothers. To demand anything more, to put them on a strict timetable, to cut them loose if they don’t respond in two or three or five years, would be a monumental act of callousness.
The politics of welfare reform has little to do with the reality of Project Match. It is driven by a mistaken public impression, fed for a generation by political demagoguery, that we have a budget deficit solely because we are spending huge amounts of money on the poor (who are assumed to be black, though most aren’t). The truth is, we don’t spend nearly as much on the poor as we do on the elderly or in subsidies to various (often corporate) special interests. Bill Clinton launched the current public debate with slogans – ““End welfare as we know it’’ and ““Two years and off’’ – intended to finesse an issue long abused by Republicans. (Remember Ronald Reagan’s fictional, Cadillac-driving welfare queen of 1980?) But when I asked the governor of Arkansas, in March of 1992, just exactly how he would change welfare as we then knew it – specifically, the Family Support Act of 1988, which he helped write and lobbied for – Clinton could only say that states like his, which took reform seriously, should be entitled to unlimited ““matching funds’’ from the federal government.
The current welfare system is an abomination. It is inflexible, bureaucratic, heartless. It is incompetent to deal with a new sort of poverty – cross-generational dependency, poverty that has its roots in behavior more than economics – that began to manifest itself in the 1960s. It is a system based on an assumption that has proved mistaken: that social work is a profession. It isn’t. It is a calling. The work of caring for the poor is best done by inspired individuals and institutions, not career government workers. Even the best-intentioned can do it well only for a brief time (all but the saints burn out). We have tried to bureaucratize charity, and failed miserably. We need to experiment with other methods.
The ““reform’’ legislation passed last week, to be signed by the president, simply doesn’t acknowledge the full range of the problem. It does address the vast majority of women on welfare: those who can, and probably should, go to work. It sends a clear message that responsible behavior is expected, which is all to the good. But there are other sorts of women on welfare, and this bill promises only cruelty for them. There are the women I saw, but didn’t recognize, at Project Match – the ones who simply can’t work: many of them, no doubt, will be placed on ““disability’’ or supported surreptitiously. But there is no guarantee that some won’t be hurled into the street with their children. And very few will find the support they need from programs like Project Match.
There is another group ill served by this bill: teenagers who become pregnant. There is no acknowledgment in the legislation – none – of recent studies that show significant numbers of these children are the victims of statutory rape (one study indicates that the youngest girls, the 11- and 12-year-olds, are hit on by the oldest guys). In far too many cases, the sexual predator is Mom’s boyfriend or a ““cousin’’ down the hall. Experts like Katherine Sylvester of the Progressive Policy Institute and James Q. Wilson of UCLA believe that a system of ““second chance’’ group homes is needed for such girls; Wilson believes the homes should be mandatory – and he may be right. Certainly, the idea should be tried somewhere. But the money for ““second chance’’ pilot projects was stripped from the final bill. ““It just doesn’t deal with very young mothers who won’t have any safe place to go,’’ Sylvester says. Indeed, liberals and conservatives alike persist in the fatuous, barbaric generalization that teens who become pregnant must live at home in order to receive government support.
The argument is made that the demolition of the old, awful system will allow the creation of something better. The president said the bill was a new beginning, not an end. Let’s hope so. But history shows that Washington operates differently: Democrats and Republicans can now say they’ve ““solved’’ welfare reform. It will drop from the political radar screen. And there are few lobbyists who’ll bother to fight for the 11-year-old who doesn’t know what awaits her in bed tonight. Think about her. Imagine her eyes. And then, Mr. President, sign this bill. If you can.
