4A
Wednesday, November 16, 1994
OPINION
UN I V E R S I T Y D A I L Y K A N S A N
VIEWPOINT
Welfare reformists need to look for middle ground
It is apparent that the welfare system in America is not working. More people are taking advantage of a system that offers no incentive to work, or even to seek work.
Unfortunately the welfare "reform" plans proposed by politicians on every side are not reforms but limits and shifts.
In three parts the Editorial Board would like to address the main issues of welfare reform and to suggest a compromise that would allow Congress to obtain its real goal of creating a new welfare state that would encourage and subsidize work and discourage abuse of the system.
One of the first items on the agenda for this year's Congress will be welfare reform.
Both political parties agree changes need to be made in the current system. But a great deal of partisan exists concerning what those changes should be.
Nevertheless, politicians on both the left and the right should put aside their differences in favor of the reforms that most Americans can agree upon: placing reasonable limits on the length of time full benefits can be received and changing the current system's skewed incentive structure.
President Clinton's reform proposal attempts to address the first point. His plan allows welfare recipients two years of public assistance. After that, they must enroll in a work program and actively seek a job in the private sector to receive any further benefits. In addition, it would require 400,000 welfare recipients to join a work program by the year 2000. And it would limit aid for legal immigrants.
However, the Clinton plan does not address the damaging incentives in the current welfare system, which increases benefits when additional children are born to families already unable to support themselves.
In contrast to the Clinton plan, Rep. Newt Gingrich's reform proposal is much more ambitious in its attempt to fundamentally alter the welfare system. The Gingrich plan would attempt to address the harmful incentives that are created under public assistance. The plan
WELFARE REFORM Limits and incentives
would allow states to abolish welfare benefits for unmarried, underage mothers.
Gingrich's plan also would allow states to establish an upper limit of two years on welfare, proposes cuts of $40 billion in several other food and housing programs, and denies aid to legal immigrants.
The plan further suggests that some of the savings resulting from its implementation would be used to build orphanages to care for the children left destitute by welfare cuts. Though Gingrich's proposal clearly seeks to establish limits on welfare and change the current system's harmful incentive structure, members of his own party have labeled the plan "unduly harsh" and even punitive.
What is really needed is a bipartisan amalgam of the Clinton plan and the Gingrich plan. This joint effort should ensure that the welfare system provides a helping hand to lift recipients into the work force as quickly as possible. And it should eliminate the problematic incentives that can encourage families to disintegrate and children to have children.
A further advantage of a bipartisan welfare reform plan is that it would limit the abuses that are likely under Clinton's big-hearted, big-government proposal.And it would also soften the harsher aspects of Gingrich's proposal, which is likely to harm many of the more than the 9 million children who rely on Aid to Families with Dependent Children.
JASON McCLURE FOR THE EDITORIAL BOARD
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Welfare system helps invisible poor
Not that I will ever have the opportunity to title my own columns, but if I did, I would call this one "Confessions of A Welfare Baby." Welfare is a hot topic right now for politicians at all levels and in all parties. One could argue that the supposed welfare crisis is the most pressing domestic issue on the current political agenda. Don't believe the hype! The only crisis is in the paucity of ideas that are available to today's crop of politicians. When all else fails, bag on the poor. And why not? It's easy to do and there are no repercussions. The poor are, politically speaking, invisible. Well here's a personal approach to the issue of welfare.
First of all, there is nothing easy or glamorous about being on welfare. With items like food stamps and the medical card, you might as well have a nice big "W" stamped on your forehead or maybe an "L" for lazy. Because we all know that everyone on welfare is lazy, right? The men, if they are around at all, don't work. The women are usually pregnant and unemployed. And as for the children, they are thrown into a cycle of poverty and sloth that serves only to perpetuate their socioeconomic status, right? No! In fact that facile explanation is just a huge, steaming crock of bull that Republicans want you to believe.
COLUMNIST
NICOLAS SHUMP
Alas, these are some of the prejudices that welfare recipients have to wade through on a daily basis. No one stops to consider that the current regulations encourage pregnant women either to remain single or to claim that they do not know the whereabouts of the father of their child. To do otherwise is to risk not receiving good prenatal care. No one thinks to consider that some parents have no other choice but to go on welfare to ensure
that their children will have adequate day care. And why is this the case? Because those who have money don't give a damn about those who don't, unless they can get a tax write-off out of it. Ronald Reagan may be gone, but it's still a trickle-down world. And the only thing that trickles down these days is a constant stream of excrement emanating from the mouths of millionaire politicians who don't have a clue or give a damn about the consequences of their rhetoric in human terms.
The reality about welfare is that it is a good program that allows people like me, who were born into a poor single-parent household, to have a chance to better myself. The truth is that welfare gave my mother a feeling of security because she knew that I had a hot lunch every day. Welfare allowed me and my brothers and sisters to have decent medical care from our own family doctor, rather than having to spend interminable hours in some emergency room or free clinic where you would probably see a different doctor every visit.
Welfare gave my mother the ability to feed her children with good,
healthy food. In short, welfare allowed me and my family the opportunity to have the same basic necessities as other families but not without consequences. I wish that politicians like Jan Meyers would have to go grocery shopping with food stamps just once. Or I would like to see someone like Newt Gingrich go to the doctor and pay for his visit with his medical card. Few things are more humiliating than the doctor's receptionist saying in a loud voice "Do you still have your MEDICAL CARD?" The assumption being that your are somehow less deserving of medical care than someone who is not on welfare. Or maybe that is the point.
Maybe the bourgeois pigs want the poor people to just die out. It's the American take on Social Darwinism with a little Malthusian catastrophe thrown in.
All of this paints for me a picture of America as a huge, bloated dinosaur mired in economic recession. I would like to see it escape but not at the expense of those most in need.
Nicolas Shump is a Lawrence senior in comparative literature.
TWO APPROACHES TO CUTTING WELFARE SPENDING:
Sean Finn / KANSAN
Some of the tougher decisions are made for the best reasons
I went home to Colorado a couple of weekends ago.
Well, that's not exactly true. Colorado is not my "real" home.
My "real" home is 20 minutes down the road in Lenexa, Kansas. That home has a mom and a dad and a dog and everything else that a good, loving home should have.
But if home is where the heart is, then I feel very comfortable calling Colorado my home. It is the place where I am truly, totally happy. It is the place that I love. Everytime I see a picture of the mountains I see this: I was six when I took my first trip to Colorado. My parents had been looking for a cheap vacation, and Estees Park, Colo., fit the bill. I can still remember my dad and I sitting in the front seat of our car, watching the mountains get bigger and bigger as we got closer and closer. I can still remember how happy we both were and how stunned I was. I had never seen the mountains before.
COLUMNIST
So in love was I that I spent my first year of school there. In Fort Collins, to be exact. Home of the Colorado State Rams.
I was in love.
BRIAN ENGLAND
I had no reason to go to Colorado State other than it being in Colorado.
CSU is well-known for its great veterinary program, as well as for engineering.
It is not well-known for its theatre or its English program. Academically, it was not the best place for me to be. But I went there anyway. I didn't care how good the school was as long as I was in Colorado.
There just wasn't a good enough reason. Loving Colorado just wasn't enough for me.
But during my second semester there, I began to feel bad about the ridiculous amount of money my parents were spending on the tuition. I also began to recognize how poor the school was for my majors. I could not justify my being there.
So I transferred, choosing to be
practical. KU is a better, and cheaper, school for maiors.
I transferred, leaving the mountains and all the great friends I made behind.
Leaving Colorado behind.
Leaving my heart behind
I left all of that behind because I felt like it was the right thing to do. It was one of the hardest decisions of my life, one that I still question (believe me, I questioned it a lot that weekend.)
But sometimes in life, the right thing to do is not what we may want to do. Sometimes the best thing to do is the farthest thing from what we want to do. There are going to be times when we have to put our wants and desires behind and do what is best, what is right.
There are times when we may want to go out with our friends instead of studying for a test. Or we may want to stay dating people even though they are horrible for us. Whatever it is, the decision is seldom easy when what we want to do and what we should do are different things.
Just ask me about Colorado.
Brian England is a Lenexa sophomore in English and theater.
LETTERS TO THE EDITOR
Kansan should use its spelchek
Please lern to spell
Perhaps Stephen Martino and Christoph Fuhrmans need to be replaced if they cannot handle their jobs properly.
I hate it when I see hedlines like "Proposition 187 is commical at best" or "Volleyball team continues their loosening ways." Even a dummy like me knows that "comical" and "losing" are the good spelings.
Stephen Pendleton KU grajuate
Race irrelevant for scholarships
Eliminating race-based scholarships would be a significant step toward realizing Martin Luther King Jr.'s dream that children not be judged by the color of their skin. (In) scholarships, as with all other aspects of life, race should simply be irrelevant.
Dan Drees Hays Graduate Student
Republicans don't deserve the blame
It was interesting that Rick Sheridan (Nov. 10) blamed Republican politicians for sending large numbers of U.S. jobs overseas, especially because the Republicans haven't controlled both sides of Congress in 40 years. Besides, does Sheridan really believe that America should compete for low-skill, low-wage factory jobs, rather than for high-skill, high-wage jobs?
As for our one million prisoners, more than half of all U.S. prisoners are non-violent offenders. To users, many drugs are actually cheaper than alcohol, yet the dealers' profits can exceed hundreds of dollars per day. The minimum wage has nothing to do with this economic supply and demand.
HUBIE
As for violent crime, I challenge Sheridan to prove that midnight basketball has even the slightest preventative effect. I also challenge him to show where the Constitution authorizes the federal government to fund and manage basketball programs, or to explain why such programs can't be funded and managed more efficiently at the local, rather than national, level.
Dan Drees
Hays Graduate Student
By Greg Hardin