Relying Only on Charities to Help Needy Will Leave Some in the Cold

In case you hadn’t noticed, Alvin Toffler has been quietly dethroned as the author House Speaker Newt Gingrich is most likely to quote. Toffler’s successor is a man who looks for inspiration not to the future but the past: a slim, bearded writer in Austin, Tex., named Marvin Olasky.

Last winter, William J. Bennett, the former education secretary and reigning GOP virtues czar, urged on Gingrich Olasky’s 1992 book, “The Tragedy of American Compassion.” Gingrich read it last Christmas and hasn’t stopped talking about it since; he praised it again in his faceoff with President Clinton in New Hampshire earlier this month.

Olasky’s book traces the dense web of 19th- and early 20th-Century private charities and voluntary associations, many of them church-based, that provided aid to the needy before the advent of large-scale government social welfare programs. He argues that groups like the Erring Women’s Refuge for Reform in Chicago and New York’s Home for the Friendless were more effective than modern government programs because they demanded personal responsibility in return for their aid, infused their assistance with religious teachings and provided more “compassion” than government--in the literal sense of sharing the sufferings of the poor.

“Governmental welfare programs need to be fought,” Olasky wrote, “not because they are too expensive . . . but because they are inevitably too stingy in what is really important, treating people as people and not animals.”

It’s easy to see why that message would appeal to conservatives like Gingrich and Bennett, who simultaneously want to shrink government and shed the GOP’s reputation as hardhearted toward the poor. But until recently Olasky’s arguments were used mostly to score debating points; they were an insight in search of an application.

Suddenly that’s changing. A lengthening line of Republicans on Capitol Hill is pushing bills based on Olasky’s ideas. One set of proposals, including a plan introduced recently by Sen. Rick Santorum (R-Pa.), would provide tax credits to encourage donations to charitable organizations that work with the needy. Sen. John Ashcroft (R-Mo.) is offering a competing tax credit and a measure encouraging government to give charitable groups a greater role in delivering social services.

“There is a difference in character and a difference in spirit that comes from individuals who have a personal interest in the recipient rather than a vocational interest in the recipient,” Ashcroft says.

Private charities already play a large role in delivering government services. In Michigan, for instance, Republican Gov. John Engler has turned over management of most of the state’s homeless shelters to the Salvation Army. And when the state launched a program of intense counseling support intended to hold together “at risk” families, Engler contracted its management to Lutheran Family Services.

That’s not unique. Catholic Charities USA, a huge network of 1,400 local charities, contracts with governments to care for abused children and AIDS patients, to provide job training for inner-city residents and operate youth groups in troubled neighborhoods. More than 40% of funding for United Way agencies comes from contracts with government.

No one particularly disputes that private charities effectively deliver services. The core issue in this debate is how much more government could--or should--rely on private charities, particularly in the distribution of direct cash assistance to the roughly 5 million families receiving welfare.

Olaskyite conservatives, operating on the principle that the poor need moral uplift and a sense of community as much as they need cash, are looking for new ways to interpose private charities between welfare recipients and the government.

Kirk Fordice, Mississippi’s conservative Republican governor, has taken a first step. He’s launched a program under which the state provides churches with information on nearby welfare families (omitting the names); once churches pick the cases they’d like to take on, the state offers the families the opportunity to meet with the church. Ultimately, Fordice envisions members of church congregations providing tutoring, day care and help in finding employment to thousands of people. But it is difficult to predict how large an impact the program will have because only 250 churches have signed up so far and the process of matching them with recipients has proved tedious.

Olasky envisions much more ambitious change. In an interview earlier this year, he argued that government should gradually turn over to private “compassion circles” in churches and charities the basic responsibility of screening, monitoring and distributing aid to families on welfare. But even leaving aside the practical question of whether private charities could retain any of their lean and entrepreneurial character while fulfilling the bureaucratic demands of monitoring welfare recipients, such a wholesale transfer of responsibility would raise other troubling questions.

The House and Senate bills to reform the welfare system would eliminate all federal eligibility standards. If states then subcontract management to private charities, they could decide to deny aid “for any reason or no reason at all,” worries Mark Greenberg of the Center for Law and Social Policy. To understand what welfare recipients would face under such circumstances, he says, “people should ask themselves, ‘How would you feel if your application for a driver’s license was considered by someone who was free to reject you for insufficient moral character?’ ”

Ashcroft, a former governor now serving his first term in Washington, doubts that any state would go that far in turning over authority to private charities. But he doesn’t entirely dismiss Greenberg’s concerns: Ashcroft’s bill would prevent any charity delivering government services from denying aid based on religious affiliation or requiring participation in religious services. “We don’t want to promote anyone forcing someone into spiritual activity,” he says. “But we don’t need for social services in this country to be provided in an environment of spiritual sterility.”

Defining that balance may prove more complex than Ashcroft makes it sound, but the problem isn’t insurmountable. Within limits, the Olaskyites have a good instinct in looking to build new partnerships between government and the charitable sector.

The problem comes to the extent they suggest that charity can substitute for, rather than supplement, government action. One variant of the Olasky argument holds that the expansion of government assistance has suppressed Americans’ charitable instincts. If government pulls back, this social supply-side theory holds, volunteers and donations will pour forth to make up the difference.

Well, maybe. But the $14 billion in annual spending reductions in the House-passed welfare bill slightly exceed the total annual contributions (about $12.5 billion) to charitable organizations that work with the poor. Most charitable groups doubt that donations would rise nearly enough to make up the difference, even if Congress approves a modest new tax credit ($100 in the Santorum version; $500 in Ashcroft’s) to encourage giving.

“This is sociological speculation fueled by ideological wishfulness,” says Father Fred Kammer, president of Catholic Charities USA. “They wish that the private giving would take place so they could justify their cutting, but they have not produced a single shred of evidence that this will happen.”

That’s no reason not to invigorate charitable organizations with tax credits and an invitation for greater involvement in delivering social services. But no one should harbor the illusion that there is any painless way to cut government aid to the poor as much as Congress is now contemplating.

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Public and Private Giving

Federal expenditures and private charitable giving for social welfare programs have risen over the last 10 years at a remarkably similar rate. Yet the federal government still spends about $7 for every $1 in private donations.

FEDERAL OUTLAYS (in billions*)

CHARITABLE GIVING (in billions**)

* Federal outlays include international assistance; community and regional development; education, training and employment; social services; health; Medicare, and income assistance.

** Charitable giving includes money for health, education and human services. Except sacramental religious purposes.

Source: Aspen Institute