— The historic welfare reform of 1996 was a smashing success from the standpoint of taking welfare recipients capable of working off their couches and into the labor force, but there’s more to be done (Welfare reforms facing their toughest challenge)
A new University of Michigan study shows that while the welfare population is shrinking, those who remain have a greater concentration of social problems. Its examination of 2,000 women found that those who had been on welfare longer were 41 percent more likely to have no job skills, 67 percent more likely to have no car or driver’s license, 56 percent more likely to have mental health problems, 53 percent more likely to have physical health problems, almost three times as likely to have children with health problems and 67 percent more likely to have substance abuse problems.
The debate in Washington over welfare re-authorization seems to be shaping up between a faction that wants to stay the course while adding some minor tune-ups on the marriage promotion side and a faction that wants to restore the old system that provided the Democratic Party with a steady stream of new voters dependent on hand-outs from the government.
The question that the old welfare system raised for me was why we insist that people who aren’t capable of holding down even a menial job should be raising children in the first place. Don’t we all believe that raising children is the hardest job there is, and don’t we all believe that doing it “for the children” is the essence of sound social policy? There needs to be a set of alternatives to biological mother-custody in cases where mom can’t perform basic self-maintenance tasks, and they need to be as kind as possible. But this debate was poisoned by Newt Gingrich prattling on about orphanages last time around, so we’ll only get there years from now. In the meantime, the administration’s marriage-boosting proposals are a step in the right direction.