Contrary to predictions, welfare reform helps nation's poor

About 15 months ago, the passage of the landmark welfare reform bill was met with significant hue and cry about the government abandoning those who needed help the most. Some of the more dire prognostications included an Urban Institute study that predicted that the new law would impoverish 2.6 million people, including 1.1 million children. If you haven't noticed, this apocalyptic rhetoric has been curiously absent in the last few months.

And the reason for this silence is a darn good one. Welfare reform is working. The results of the first year under the bill have started to come in, and the numbers tell a convincing story. By early September, one year after Clinton signed the bill into law, welfare caseloads had been reduced by approximately two million, a whopping 18 percent.

According to Bruce Reed, a Clinton assistant, in the Sept. 1 edition of The New Republic, these numbers "are totally unprecedented in the history of welfare." And, more importantly, most former welfare recipients are not turning to crime or going hungry; instead, they are defying the nay-sayers and becoming contributing members of society. Corporations and local governments are taking the lead, instituting welfare to work programs which feature job training tailored to the needs of those who haven't worked recently. Even the Urban Institute has conceded the success of the bill, calling its results "significantly different than predicted."

It would, however, be an oversimplification to attribute the decrease in welfare roles solely to the change in welfare law. A bustling economy is the most obvious factor; but no other economic boom has been accompanied by results nearly as significant as these. In fact, caseloads have fallen by more than 250,000 in a single year only twice in the history of welfare.

Another possible contributor to the startling results is the 1988 Family Support Act, which allowed states to institute work requirement programs for welfare recipients. This earlier measure surely got the ball rolling in the right direction, but the truly prodigious results didn't occur until last year.

Thus much, if not most of the credit, must go to the visionary initiative worked out between Clinton and the Republican congress-an initiative that ended the spurious notion of welfare as a cash entitlement and brought the mushrooming program one step closer to the emergency relief measure that it was created to be. It admitted that the big government solution is not always the best one-giving much of the power to decide who did and did not deserve aid back to the states.

Despite its traditionally untouchable status, the modern welfare system must be held accountable for helping to create the self-perpetuating triad of unemployment, crime and illegitimate births which have reduced our inner cities to pockets of despair. Any criticism of welfare, though, was seen as insensitive-attacks on welfare were misconstrued as attacks on the poor.

In reality, critics chide the mechanics of a system that fosters a sense of entitlement and dependency among its recipients and places too much control in the hands of a federal bureaucracy far removed from the differing realities of each community. When the reform bill passed, many Democrats worried about provisions allowing states to apply for waivers enabling them to stop giving food stamps to unemployed adults. They fell victim to one of the great fallacies of America's modern consciousness: If the federal government doesn't do something, no one will. What the success of this bill has proved is that state governments, local churches, businesses and individuals are actually capable of doing more than take orders from Washington. No one, not even conservatives and state politicians, wants to see people starve to death.