WASHINGTON — In the world of politics, compromise is considered
an art. However, welfare reauthorization has been compromised, and
it is no masterpiece. The Senate Finance Committee, which handles
welfare reauthorization legislation, passed a bill that is the
furthest move from the House or administration’s reauthorization
proposals to date.
Most significantly, the committee bill proposes $6 billion in
new funding for child care over the next five years. Last year the
Democrats were pushing for $7 billion and the Republicans were
standing firm at $1 billion.
This generous concession by the Republicans comes in addition to
another billion dollar infusion to the Child Care Development Block
Grant and an increase in flexibility of TANF funds (i.e., those
provided by the Temporary Assistance to Needy Families program
created by 1996’s welfare reform law), freeing up money for child
care. With caseloads reduced by half over the last eight years,
states have roughly twice as much available spending per recipient
as they did in 1996. Already, left-over funds from previous years
can be used to fund child care for parents participating in work
activities. Why earmark additional billions for child care?
One explanation is that child care programs compete against
designer subsidies for general TANF dollars. For instance, the
Parents as Scholars program, proposed in the Senate bill, would
send welfare recipients to college. The committee is turning a
social service program, meant to serve as a means of temporary
assistance, into a scholarship program. In all the time spent
arguing about reauthorization, the senators have forgotten what
made welfare reform successful in the first place: work.
According to Senator Charles Grassley, chairman of the
committee, “I’ve compromised on extending the types of activities
that can count towards the work requirement. Senator Baucus has
compromised on the issue of federal funding for healthy marriage
promotion activities.” Conspicuously absent from his explanation
was the part where Republicans concede billions in new child care
spending only if they can get stronger work requirements.
The parties have traded pet projects. Liberals want to let a
broad spectrum of activities count as “work.” Conservatives want
the government to act as a marriage counselor. The answer that they
have arrived at is, “Why not both?” In the midst of a mounting
national deficit and state budget crunches, the committee has
decided to fund everything.
THE PROBLEM WITH THIS APPROACH is that it won’t work. The United
States has been throwing money at the welfare system for decades,
only to increase the need for and dependency on the system. The
expenditures for the “war on poverty” have run to over $9 trillion
(in 2003 dollars) over the last 40 years, but the greater cost has
been the effect of a huge federal welfare system on society: the
ballooning of welfare caseloads and out-of-wedlock births, the
deterioration of two-parent families, and no noticeable decline in
the poverty rate.
It was not until welfare reform — with the carrot of
self-sufficiency and the stick of time limits — that the
trajectory reversed. People began to leave the welfare rolls (by
almost 60 percent nationwide) and look for work, recognizing that
any job (even a low-paying one) would move them closer to
independence.
The “take-home message” of welfare reform should be that
expanding government social services does not work, but emphasizing
work experience and self-sufficiency does. Yet one looks in vain
for this lesson in the Senate’s welfare reauthorization proposal,
which waters down the definition of work, expands unproven
marriage-promotion programs, creates new education programs, and
throws money at a debatable “child care crisis.” And at a price tag
of over $1,000 per average taxpaying family (according to
WashingtonWatch.com), it is clear Congress does not intend to
reduce welfare spending.
Last month marked the ninth temporary extension of the 1996
reform, yet the House and Senate committee bills are as far apart
as they’ve ever been. States are desperate to know what is going to
happen. Are they going to have to appropriate money for workfare
programs or sending recipients to college? Are they going to have
to develop a network of marriage counseling services or additional
child care options? Welfare reauthorization needs to pass, but not
if it means reverting to the era of entitlements and
dependency.
Jenifer Zeigler is a policy analyst at the Cato
Institute.
