For welfare reform to work, it must focus on the root behavioral problems of illegitimacy, divorce and non-work - not merely on the superficial symptom of welfare dependence.
But despite a rhetorical commitment to "end welfare as we know it," the Clinton administration appears unprepared to take the serious steps needed to deal with this "behavioral poverty."Despite its rhetorical commitment to dealing with "root causes," the White House's reform rhetoric poses the problem of welfare backwards.
It seeks to devise schemes to prod and assist individuals to leave welfare rather than seeking to reduce the self-destructive behavior that leads to dependence in the first place.
This approach is self-deluding, and it won't work. No array of government programs is going to make a 20-year-old woman with little or no education who has had one or two children out of wedlock "self-sufficient."
Nor, despite her best efforts, is that single mother likely to be able to provide a truly healthy social environment for her children.
Societies through the ages have recognized that it takes the efforts of at least two people, a father and a mother, to provide the economic and psychological support needed to raise children.
That's why societies historically have gone to great lengths to encourage marriage and, conversely, to discourage illegitimacy.
Current U.S. welfare policy reverses this wisdom by aggressively subsidizing single parenthood and penalizing marriage. The results of this experiment have been disastrous.
For the well-being of American children and the safety of society, a sense of responsible parenthood must be restored, based on the principle that it is immoral to have children unless you are fully prepared to raise them.
To be fully prepared to raise children means three simple things:
First, the mother and father must be married and committed to a life together.
Second, the parents must be mature and psychologically ready for the difficult task of raising the young.
And third, the parents should be economically productive and self-sufficient, able to sustain a family without large amounts of ongoing financial support from outside sources.
The welfare system mainly involves failed attempts to pick up the pieces for an ever-increasing number of individuals who have violated the above rules.
Government policy not only must stop subsidizing and promoting such irresponsible behavior, it must actively discourage it. To do that, we need to pursue three goals:
- We need to promote individual responsibility by converting welfare from a one-way handout into a system in which recipients are expected to contribute something back for temporary aid received.
- We need to control welfare costs.
- Most importantly, we need to dramatically reduce the illegitimate birthrate and increase the marriage rate.
Achieving these goals will require a broad array of policy changes. In some cases it will require eliminating welfare benefits that promote harmful and anti-social behavior.
In other cases it may be sufficient to require welfare recipients to perform community service work in exchange for benefits. In some circumstances, welfare benefits may be converted into loans, which the recipient will be expected to repay at a future time.
Serious reform also should include new incentives that encourage positive behavior.
All welfare reform must be undergirded by firm budgetary controls on the growth of future welfare spending. Welfare bureaucracies are prolific in inventing new programs that allegedly promote self-sufficiency but accomplish nothing or actually draw more people into welfare dependency.
Without definite limits on the funds flowing into the welfare system, such counterproductive "reforms" will merely produce more of what we have today: a War on Poverty that can't be won.