Welfare Babies Bother You? Drown ‘em : A modest proposal to keep our corporate plazas clear of children begging for food.

They’re not so tough, these Republican welfare bashers like Gov. Pete Wilson and the Newtonians in Congress. What good is all this talk about kicking mothers and their children off welfare? You just end up with 9.2 million raggedy kids begging all over the place.

If the conservatives had the guts to be consistent with their ideology, they would just drown the newborn issue of any welfare mother. That way you get a twofer: The fetus is kept alive to birth, but the kid doesn’t cost you anything to raise. It’s both pro-life and fiscally conservative.

Instead, they pussyfoot around with cutting welfare payments to just above starvation levels, which misses the point. Isn’t the basic idea to get rid of these kids because conservative think tanks have proved that they’ll never amount to anything? With their schools and neighborhoods, how many are going to make it in the information economy? Lately, people with IQs high on the bell curve have come to understand that nothing will help kids in poverty anyway, so why not just throw the baby out with the bathwater? I know it sounds a little “master racy,” but we are competing with Germany and Japan.

What’s the alternative? Wilson and his rivals on the new right say we should end federal welfare programs and let the states pick up the pieces. It won’t work. The more local the decision-making, the more squeamish people will get. Tough love works best from a safe distance.

At first it will seem like a great idea. What California corporation isn’t going to be thrilled when the governor gives it a 15% tax cut paid for by welfare cuts? But it’s a bummer when the new homeless--mostly women with kids--camp out around your ornamental fountains.

I know, Wilson plans to cut welfare payments so low that this underclass will be forced to leave the state. But how dumb does he think the other governors are? Freed of federal restraints, they will all have poverty-program fire sales.

Cutting payments just continues a pattern of coddling generations of welfare families into dependency. Over the past 25 years, we have cut welfare payments as measured in real dollars by 45%, and the rolls have almost doubled. Evidently the lower the payments, the greater the dependency; you have to spend so much time figuring out how to survive that you can’t look for work. It’s reverse Darwinism.

Anyway, the dependency thing is not what it’s cracked up to be, since four out of five kids raised on welfare grow up to lead lives off the dole. Even those teen-age mothers we hear so much about are a distraction since there aren’t enough of them. Less than half of 1% of mothers receiving Aid to Families with Dependent Children in California are under 18. Cut them off without a cent and you won’t notice it in budget savings.

Welfare’s pretty cheap, less than 3% of the federal budget. Total AFDC expenditures are the same now as in 1975. It’s not about money, it’s about kids: 70% of the people on AFDC are children, and we just don’t like them.

Why be ashamed? It’s not a racial thing. True, the media make it seem like all welfare kids are black inner-city carjackers, but the largest group is white and non-urban. We want to cut their payments all the same, irrespective of color; that’s what makes this country great.

Pain also makes this country great. That’s why I respect the Republican members of Congress--they can step up to pain and stare it down. As Florida’s E. Clay Shaw Jr., on the welfare subcommittee, put it, “There are going to be people who are going to be hurt. We know that.” Is that a leader or what? He acknowledges the pain, but he can take it. No pain, no gain. Shaw admits that cutting out the food-stamp program and school lunches will hurt some people, but how else are we going to end these entitlements? If kids are raised to think they are entitled to food just because they are hungry, what kind of message does that send?

The most important thing we can teach young people is to take responsibility for their lives, and that includes picking parents who can find and hold good jobs. If parents can’t find jobs, then we have to give those young people the option of checking into orphanages. Not some nasty government-run ones; no, use vouchers so those children can pick private-sector orphanages of their choice. So what if it costs 10 times more than welfare. We’re teaching free enterprise here.

This is no time for the Republican revolutionaries to chicken out. They were elected because they said they were vicious and mean. If they’re not up to the task, we’ve got 1,000 talk-show hosts eager to step in and get the dirty job done.