A Challenge for Democrats: Innovative Social Programs That Work

As the nation seeks more effective answers to complex social problems, the Democratic Party has often been criticized for failing the responsibility to offer new ideas and put forth a vision of the future. We have learned to our regret in recent national elections that ideas matter. Whether we agreed with President Reagan or not--and I didn’t much of the time--he was a successful candidate and an effective leader primarily because he stood for a set of ideas and wrote many of them into the national consciousness. Ronald Reagan was a great communicator, not simply because of his personality, but because he had something to communicate.

One of the principal challenges for Democrats is to transcend the artificial choice between throwing money at problems and throwing up our hands. Not all initiatives have to depend on appropriating money; the federal budget is not the solution to every problem. What Democrats must do is redefine the role of government in meeting social problems and make our responses more effective. We cannot settle any longer for programs with good intentions. We must also make them work. The objection today in the public mind--and the public is right--is that too often the tax dollars go out, whether the results come in or not.

This approach would be absurd if applied in the private sector. No customers in their right mind would guarantee the local 7-Eleven that they will pay for coffee, whether they like the product or not. It should come as no surprise that the public is telling the Democratic Party that they want their coffee hot; they don’t want their tax dollars spent for more cold cups of bad federal brew.

Tying programs to results is essential in earning support for social initiatives. I call this concept “public enterprise”--applying basic principles of free enterprise to government endeavors. It is time for government to start solving problems, instead of merely spending money on them.

Public enterprise can become the cornerstone of the rejuvenation of the Democratic Party in the 1990s. Commitment to social programs involving progress and opportunity for all citizens is what makes us Democrats. Republicans have been misusing the lack of results as an excuse for their scorched earth policy of slashing and killing the programs. But Democrats can prevail if we are honest enough to admit the lack of results and revise the programs to make them work.

The present flawed test of job-training programs, for example, is how many people are “trained,” when an honest test would measure how many actually start work and stay at work.

Two initiatives, one at the state level and one at the federal level, illustrate the point. In recent years, in its Education and Training (E.T.) program, Massachusetts discovered that job training is more effective when coupled with support for child care, health care and transportation.

Building on E.T.’s success, Democrats in Congress launched an effort to measure federal training programs by the number of trainees permanently placed in jobs. The innovative feature of the legislation, enacted in 1988, is the opportunity for states to share the resulting savings in federal welfare costs. Under this application of the public enterprise principle, the most successful state programs will bring the most savings to the state. The idea will not only pay for itself; it will actually make money for both state and federal treasuries, since the costs of effective training are less than the long-term costs of chronic welfare dependency.

Similar cost-effective approaches can be used to close the skills gap in education. Only 10% of current math and science teachers are fully qualified. It could cost as much as $10 billion to bring them up to speed and to recruit the new teachers we will need by 1993--but we don’t have $10 billion to spend. In an imaginative response, Democrats last year offered--and Congress passed--a measure called “Star Schools” to link classrooms in various regions of the country by satellite. The program makes available to all students the best math and science teachers in a region, at a small fraction of the cost of traditional programs.

Where new spending is required, we need to direct it toward programs with the largest payoff. One promising initiative is to provide preschool education for every 4-year-old in America. The price tag in the federal budget is $1 billion a year, if matching funds are provided by the state and the private sector. The long-run savings will be $5 dollars for every $1 invested. Early childhood education has such a profound impact on later development that it can cut future unemployment, welfare and other social costs by a third, according to the Committee for Economic Development.

Ideas such as these are the beginning of new directions in Democratic social programs for the 1990s. The concept of fashioning public policy to produce results is applicable to a wide variety of current federal spending. As a principle, public enterprise is limited only by the bureaucratic inertia of the status quo and by our imagination in devising constructive ways to insist on the results we want.