COLUMN LEFT / CASEY S. McKEEVER : Wilson Cuts Don’t Equal Clinton Reform : The governor’s revived welfare proposal bears little resemblance to the President’s program.

Gov. Wilson, badly in need of a boost, thinks he has found an ally in President Clinton. Wilson apparently believes that Clinton’s Feb. 2 speech on welfare reform at the Governors’ Conference “might help disarm critics” of his welfare program, decisively trounced by voters in November but reintroduced in Wilson’s ‘93-’94 budget.

But Clinton’s program hardly resembles Wilson’s. The President proposes to spend $6 billion to give families receiving Aid to Families with Dependent Children, typically headed by a 30-year-old mother of two children, more help in becoming employable. He also would assist working-poor families with health care, child care and added income support. Clinton would require that after completing a training program, an AFDC parent work, but guarantees a job would be offered.

In contrast, Wilson proposes to slash aid to these families by $1 billion and calls this a “work incentive.” If despite her best efforts a parent can’t find a job, or finds one that barely covers her child-care expenses, too bad.

Wilson argues that the main reason poor families rely on aid is that AFDC is too generous. Yet cuts made over the past three years have reduced the value of AFDC by 20%, leaving the typical family with $624 per month that, combined with food stamps, is 19% below the poverty line.

At the Governor’s Conference, Clinton discounted the notion that welfare itself is the problem: “(M)any people stay on welfare not because of the checks . . . They do it because they do not want to put their children at risk of losing health care, or because they do not have the money to pay for child care out of the meager wages they can earn coming from a low-education base.”

The centerpiece of Wilson’s program is another 19% cut in benefits for poor families. It applies to those who can’t find work even if they complete or are in the midst of job-training programs, and to many who supplement part-time, low-wage work with AFDC. Wilson hardly rewards those who, in Clinton’s words, “work hard and play by the rules.”

The President promises to give AFDC recipients “the education, training and child care they need.” Wilson proposes to “re-focus on employment-related services to help clients find jobs quickly . . . .” Instead of preparing them for jobs that would support a family, Wilson would rather that single mothers look for unstable part-time jobs that will guarantee their continued reliance on aid.

Clinton’s total reform package also includes measures that would help the working poor: universal health care, a larger earned income tax credit, better child-support enforcement and more affordable child care.

Wilson offers a few “work-support features” and added child-support enforcement. But he mostly proposes to implement existing laws. The added child-care money he touts would still leave low-income parents facing long waiting lists for affordable care.

Wilson assumes that Clinton’s encouragement of state experimentation means that his proposals would meet with automatic federal approval, even though they violate current laws.

But Wilson’s “experiment” is a thinly veiled budget cut hurting large numbers of families on whom the impact won’t even be studied. It does not serve the purpose for which “demonstration projects” were designed, and may not fit Clinton’s demand that such experiments be “honestly measured.”

Comparing Clinton’s strategy favorably with Wilson’s, however, does not mean that the President’s approach confronts all the problems of low-income families.

Giving families with full-time workers the chance to escape poverty doesn’t solve the strains on single mothers for whom parenting duties prevent full-time work from being a realistic option. As Harvard poverty expert David Ellwood said, policies must address the “dual role (of single parents) as both nurturer and provider.” This could include a government-guaranteed child-support payment that does not decline with earnings, helping many women avoid poverty if they work part-time.

A set time limit on aid proposed by Clinton fails to account for the variety of situations and needs of poor families. It is also crucial that the public-service jobs offered after training are real and not dead-end make-work assignments.

Despite these questions, it should be clear that the President’s reform strategy is fundamentally different from, and superior to, Wilson’s. The governor should not be able to resuscitate discredited policies by hanging on the coattails of Bill Clinton.