Big Stick, Small Carrot

After decades of piecemeal revision and patchwork repair, the U.S. welfare system resembles nothing so much as a vast Rube Goldberg money machine. Long under attack by conservatives because of its cost (more than $6 billion a year for all levels of Government), the welfare colossus has lately received its most telling blows from liberals, who accuse it of subverting the very people it is supposed to sustain. It seems hardly possible that the system could be made more inequitable or inefficient, but that is exactly what the U.S. House of Representatives appeared to have accomplished last week.

The welfare changes were tacked onto a bill providing a general 121% increase in Social Security benefits; they reflect the gut feeling of many Congressmen that large numbers of welfare recipients are either too lazy or too unmotivated to work. Their remedy: a big stick and a small carrot.

100% Tax. "We are rough in this bill!" shouted Arkansas' Wilbur Mills, chairman of the Ways and Means Committee, during the debate. "Make no mistake about that. We intended to be rough, but we don't want to be inhuman." No one was likely to mistake him. To make sure that the relief rolls get no bigger, the bill will, among other things, simply freeze at last January's level the percentage of children--mostly Negroes--receiving federal money under the Aid to Families with De pendent Children program. To trim the number of adult welfare recipients, states 1) would be allowed to remove from the rolls parents and high school dropouts over 16 who refuse to accept work "without good cause," and 2) would have new authority to force "deserting" fathers to support their offspring. Though Mills estimated that the provisions would take 300,000 people off relief, most experts were skeptical at best.

On its own merits, the bill's carrot content would have won wholehearted support. Job-training programs would be greatly expanded, more day-care centers would be established so that working mothers would have a place to leave their children. Not least, welfare recipients would be allowed to keep some of the money they earn. Under present rules, most welfare agencies are required to deduct every penny earned from welfare payments, in effect imposing a confiscatory 100% tax that discourages any attempt at getting a job.

Sins of the Parents. Yet the good in the bill was far outweighed by what one welfare expert, Mrs. Frances Fox Piven of Columbia University, called "the most repressive measure we've ever had." Massachusetts Governor John Volpe complained that the freeze on AFDC payments to children "makes no provision for local, statewide or even federal emergencies," while John Gardner, Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare, said that "I do not believe children should have to pay for the real or supposed sins of their parents." Ironically, no provision was made, as the Administration had requested, to force laggard Southern states to raise their welfare payments to even a subsistence level (Mills's Arkansas, for example, allows an average $19.55 a month for each person under the child-aid program v. $54.20 in New York). As a result of their plight in the South, a recent federal study showed, thousands more, mostly Negroes, are likely to migrate from farms to Northern slums in the next ten years, sharply exacerbating the very problem that bothers Mills.

Gardner and other Administration strategists hope that the Senate will preserve the House bill's better provisions, while expunging some of the proposals they consider retrogressive. At the same time, they hope to boost Social Security close to the 15% increase asked by President Johnson. (Social Security taxes would rise in any event, from a current maximum of $290 a year per employee to $334 next year under the House bill, $343 under the President's proposal.) Complete revamping of the unwieldy welfare machine must await another year and another Congress.

In an attempt to see just what it is like to live under welfare, 22 upper-echelon HEW officials last week traveled to a gritty part of Baltimore's center, where they lived in a slum environment for three days and had--literally--to eat statistics. Example: What do you get for the 330 welfare stipends allowed for lunch? A cup of soup, a cup of coffee, two packages of crackers--and a hungry afternoon.

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