New Promise in Welfare

The welfare reform package presented in the Senate by Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the New York Democrat, is a useful contribution in the attempt to answer many of the objections to the existing system. It is worth doing as long as everyone understands that reform is neither cheap nor quick and, if done wrong, could do more harm than good.

Basically, Moynihan urges an elaborate system of education, counseling and child care to move those on welfare into jobs and self-sufficiency. Each state would be left to design and implement its own program along lines similar to what California enacted last year with its Greater Avenues for Independence (GAIN) program.

The concepts are laudable. Those without high school diplomas would get them. Fathers who no longer are part of the family unit would be traced and their payroll checks tapped for child support. Unskilled persons would be trained for the job market. Health insurance under Medicaid (Medi-Cal in California), now largely limited to families on welfare, would be extended to protect those moving into the job market for a nine-month transition period. And a child-care program would be made available to facilitate the training and the return to the workplace.

California’s experience demonstrates the importance of providing adequate resources and moving without undue haste. As California has begun to offer special education, job training, child care and other supports to help people move off the welfare rolls and into permanent jobs, it has made three startling discoveries that are instructive to those designing a federal program:

--The educational status of those in the program has required far more remedial education than anticipated before job training itself could begin. At least 57% of those entering the California program do not meet minimum requirements for job training and are being given remedial education, with the expectation now that some will require at least a year of fundamentals in reading, writing and computation before they can start training for jobs. This has strained remedial-education facilities in several parts of the state.

--Child care at any price is in short supply, and child care at rates affordable to lower-income families is in critically short supply. At least there is the statewide California Child Care Resourceand Reference Network able to inform working parents of available child-care services, but this essential service exists in only four other states.

--Costs are exceeding all of the earlier estimates for GAIN. The state has agreed to compensate persons in the program for child care at the median market rate for the region in which they live. For infant care, this varies from $40 a week in Merced County to $120 a week in San Francisco. Experts estimate that the minimum for a federal program, if regional differences could not be respected, would be $225 a month--far more than the $160 proposed by Moynihan. The annual cost of GAIN is now running at $1,400 a year per person--more than was anticipated. Gov. George Deukmejian and the Legislature nevertheless remain fully committed to the program, anticipating both the compassionate benefits to those completing the program and the tax saving against the cost of welfare--which, for a mother with two children,is more than $8,000 a year. But the California program will not be fully operational until 1990, when the present enrollment of about 15,000 will reach 200,000. At that point, costs could bump into the budget limits imposed by the Gann initiative, Proposition 4.

In the words of the California Assembly GAIN Oversight Committee staff, “There is no quick fix for welfare reform, and it is not cheap.” Congress needs to keep that in mind as it moves ahead with Moynihan’s bill and similar legislation in the House. If it heeds the California example, however, the reform holds great promise.