Making Sense of a Swiftian Welfare Fix : Wilson’s proposed 25% cut can have only one possible intent-- to do away with poor people.

Since Pete Wilson is having trouble speaking for himself, it is up to me to make sense of his latest proposal to pay for a 15% cut in corporate taxes with a 25% cut in welfare and 10% less for the poor who are old, blind or disabled.

Before you bleeding hearts get carried away, keep in mind that a welfare mother with two children would still get $445 a month. That’s a lot more than they get in Mississippi. Yes, the cost of living, particularly for housing, is much lower in Mississippi, but that’s the whole point; we want the poor to move there. Anyway, if we don’t cut corporate taxes, all of California’s corporations will relocate to Mississippi, so the sooner we emulate Mississippi standards, the better.

Listen to this man Wilson because what he has pioneered in California is about to become national policy now that the Republicans control Congress. The basic message is so simple that anyone who’s not a fuzzy-headed liberal would get it: Poverty programs cause poverty, so eliminate the programs and voila!

But Wilson is no primitive reactionary who simply blames the poor for poverty. He understands that there have been structural shifts in our society and that decent-paying blue-collar jobs in the industrial sector are a thing of the past. His answer, first enshrined in the Proposition 187 campaign, is that we have to force poor people to take lousy-paying jobs in the service sector. Jobs in the car wash and house-cleaning fields that would be available were it not for illegal immigrants. There are only so many underclass jobs to go around, and if illegals grab them, there will be no work for our own people.

But just getting rid of the illegals is not enough of an incentive because no American citizen is going to reject welfare and Medicaid and leave her kids home alone for a job that pays even less money. Welfare payments must be cut back to a level miserable enough to make the lowest-paying jobs in the free market attractive. For example, the maid job that Wilson created in the private sector when he was mayor of San Diego paid $25 a day with no medical benefits. Figure it out; would you leave welfare to do Wilson’s laundry?

How did Wilson’s maid survive on $25 a day, some of you cynics might be asking. Easy, she lived in Tijuana, where the cost of living is even lower than in Mississippi. Now do you get Wilson’s drift? The answer to California’s welfare crisis is for the state’s poor people to go live in a poor country where they belong, and there is an excellent one right next door. Leave the kids in Tijuana, which saves on California school costs, and have the mother cross over daily to clean house. That way she gains valuable work experience and a sense of independence free of the crippling effects of life on the dole. Being a U.S. citizen, she wouldn’t even need a guest worker permit of the kind Wilson has always championed for the state’s imported agriculture workers.

Impractical, you say? Most of the maid jobs are too far from Tijuana? Maybe you have a point. The answer then is to create Tijuana-type communities on this side of the border. You don’t have to actually live in Tijuana to enjoy the Tijuana life-style. We used to have that life-style right here before the liberals messed things up. What we need is a return to the old-fashioned pre-social-safety-net slums. Separate and extremely unequal is the way to go. If we can’t move the poor to the Third World, then we’ll bring the Third World here. Which is why the congressional Republicans, with the support of governors like Wilson, are gutting Medicaid, public housing and Head Start. Faced with truly depressing conditions and none of the privileges now associated with U.S. citizenship, poor people will learn that a $25-a-day job is an incredible deal.

Before you bring it up, let me concede that Wilson’s other proposed cut--the one that takes 10% away from old, blind and disabled people on SSI--is a little harder to defend. But who’s to say that with some directions in Braille, blind people couldn’t have cleaned Wilson’s townhouse? And wouldn’t they have felt better about themselves if they had picked up after the mayor?

I know this can all sound terribly heartless, so much so that California voters rejected that same Draconian welfare cut when it was proposed by Wilson in a statewide referendum two years ago. But sounding heartless is very important to being a credible candidate in the Republican presidential primaries.