Tinkering Won’t Work on Welfare : Absent a commitment to end poverty and discrimination, reform is an elusive goal.

Welfare reform is once again high on the political agenda. The aim of enacting changes that would put the issue to rest is praiseworthy but unrealistic.

Over the past 35 years, a wide array of welfare initiatives and fads--enterprise zones, the Office of Economic Opportunity, food stamps, vouchers, Medicaid--have come and gone. The plain truth is that until and unless our leaders and citizenry seriously commit to uprooting poverty and narrowing the wide and racially entwined economic disparities that divide us, welfare reform never will be anything but an exercise in frustration and cynicism.

We have to discard policies controlled by vested interests that further endow the wealthy by manipulating unemployment rates and keeping wages low. A serious commitment to welfare reform would mean fundamental change--say, rewriting the rules of the game. And there is no better way to frame these issues than to view our national life as a game.

In the American game of life, money is the medium for playing and winning. Everyone is expected to obtain money chips to play with, either earning them through physical or mental work or by manipulating the money markets. But there are people who cannot play according to the rules because of physical or mental defects, lack of jobs or because prejudice or discrimination close off their access to money.

For the closed-off, most options are grim--crime, homelessness, death. Welfare is a way to keep some of them in the context of the game.

Welfare is the system maintained by those in charge of the game (the president, Congress, big business) to provide some support--in the smallest amount possible and in the most disagreeable way--for those who cannot or will not play the game by the book. Welfare provides marginal players with just enough to keep their hardship from being so great that they would try to break up the game or lead other players to question the established rules. At the same time, its meagerness maintains the legitimacy of the rules for those who are playing the game normally and who would rebel against too large a change or join the ranks of welfare recipients.

The unpleasantness of welfare also has another function, one related to unemployment. Although full employment is possible, it heats up the economy and brings on inflation. So when full employment nears, the Federal Reserve routinely raises interest rates, which increases unemployment and the welfare rolls. Yet by making welfare as meager and disagreeable as possible, the game pressures people to drop out of the program and join the ranks of cheap labor. Thus the game creates a pool of jobless players who can then be hired dirt-cheap to work for the big winners in business and industry.

Welfare reform helps to preserve the basic form of the game, with all its uneven economic divisions. It tinkers a little with the rules, but does not materially redistribute resources in a way that goes against established societal rules. The tinkering process is continual, as different groups of players act on the welfare system to adjust the game. But absent a firm resolve to confront poverty and discrimination, the process will remain tinkering, not reform.

And work, which almost all players regard as preferable to relief payments, isn’t truly honored in welfare reform policies, since the game requires a supply of low-wage labor. Workfare programs, which involve education, training, child care and job development to create “good jobs,” may be a staple of modern welfare reform, but they are never funded or carried out in a substantial way. Not only are they invariably more expensive than simply providing welfare payments; they also run counter to the game’s aim of creating cheap labor.

While modern politics inevitably involves calls from both sides of the aisle for welfare reform, a debate that keeps us focused on symptoms rather than on basic causes seems to be what the game truly wants. In this set piece, we always find ourselves with a frustrating and demeaning set of programs with skimpy funding, poorly paid and low-level staff, rundown facilities and a hodgepodge of erratic policies that constantly seek to find a point of equilibrium that will keep the game going while maintaining an unequal socioeconomic structure.

Samuel Johnson once observed that, “A decent provision for the poor is the true test of civilization.” By that yardstick, we need to come up with a better game plan.