February 26, 2018 at 4:09 p.m.
Reform welfare, yes, but don't punish the poor
Reform welfare, yes, but don't punish the poor
On the positive side, the legislation, sure to be signed by the governor, embraces the fundamental principles of a sound welfare system.
First, welfare should be not be too generous, so as to incentivize laziness, but it should provide a real safety net. Second, welfare should be temporary, and eligibility for welfare programs should ensure that only the truly needy qualify for benefits.
Finally, welfare programs must require recipients embrace personal responsibility and accountability in their lives.
In many ways, the proposed legislation moves toward these goals. Able-bodied people would be required to work, or train for work. Eligibility for certain programs would have an asset cap, so owners of upper middle-class homes and expensive cars would not qualify unless there was an emergency, such as job loss. That has not always been the case.
Photo IDs for food stamps would have cut welfare fraud - that was rejected by the Senate - and welfare beneficiaries should have no qualms about drug-testing, for that demands personal responsibility and accountability. If you want the safety-net benefits, you have to be or try to make yourself drug-free, and the state will help those who flunk the tests.
Liberal critics have pointed out that recent changes in the food stamp program resulted in 3.5 recipients losing benefits for every one who secured a job. That sounds horrible, but in fact the food stamp rolls have been loaded with people who never should have had them in the first place because of too generous eligibility requirements, or should have had them only temporarily in the recession.
As those people are weeded out, the ratio will level out. The growth of food stamps during the Bush and Obama eras was due in part to economic collapse under Obama and to expanded eligibility under both.
All that said, it's not all utopia in welfare reform land.
For one thing, as various disability rights groups point out, the Republicans leave too much decision making in the hands of bureaucrats when it comes to determining who is able-bodied and who is disabled, which could leave many with autism or other not-readily-apparent disabilities without benefits.
We have no idea how the term "able-bodied" should be defined, but the Legislature should have yielded to the requests of those groups and brought them to the table to sort out eligibility criteria, as they requested.
The Republicans also seem obsessed with putting nanny-state controls on benefits such as food stamps. A separate proposal would require the state to identify foods and beverages that lack nutritional value and restrict the use of stamps to purchase them.
That's wrong. How will people ever learn personal responsibility if the government makes every single decision for them? Conservatives should know better than to empower bureaucrats to tell people what foods they can and cannot buy.
Either you should qualify for food assistance or not, but if you do that should not allow the government to send bureaucrats to the grocery store with you. That's just like the federal government giving states highway funds and then telling them what the drinking age or the speed limit should be, which conservatives detest.
Indeed, the next step in truly conservative welfare reform would simply be to offer a benefit package of certain amounts to eligible households and distribute part of that amount in untethered cash grants.
That means moving in the opposite direction from the big-government Republicans. As Robert VerBruggen, the managing editor of The American Conservative, pointed out in 2016, the very poorest families in America have less cash than they used to have, even if other benefits have helped to make up the difference.
It is hard to get by with little cash even when you have benefits that pay for things like food or housing, VerBruggen wrote: It's tough to look for a job, repair the car, buy clothes, or sometimes buy a little treat for the kids, which is important even for poor kids, and maybe especially so.
As such, some form of cash assistance should be made available to poor families, even as we require drug testing and work. Refundable earned income tax credits and child tax credits should also be part of the mix.
More also needs to be done to address the so-called welfare benefits cliff, which takes more from families who go to work than they currently take in in welfare. Too little thought has been given to how to address what should be an essential element of welfare reform.
The bottom line is, welfare should not give the poor a middle-class lifestyle, nor should it be permanent, nor should it disincentivize work, but neither should welfare punish the poor or subject them to the oppressive thumb of a bureaucratic, nanny-state government.
Striking a balance is tough, but at the end of the day welfare should give those truly in need what they need to get back on their feet and to sustain their families while they do, all the while preserving fundamental choices.
For with choice comes responsibility, and a true road out of welfare. And that's what welfare reform should be about, empowering the poor to better themselves, not pummeling them while they are down.
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