Welfare Cutting the Costs

By DAVID ELLIS

Pete Wilson is delivering a stark message this Christmas season to 2.2 million welfare recipients in California: It's becoming too expensive to support you. Facing a $3.6 billion deficit (over and above last year's $14 billion), the Republican Governor has called for an amendment to the state constitution granting him power to delete $600 million worth of social service programs from the state budget.

Wilson's proposal is a combination of fiscal conservatism and enforced behavioral modification for those who receive Aid to Families with Dependent Children, a program that costs the state $6 billion each year. If approved by a majority of voters next November, the measure would automatically reduce AFDC payments 10%, lowering the monthly payment to a single mother with two children from $663 to $597. Furthermore, mothers who have additional children would not receive more financial aid, and yearly cost-of-living adjustments for AFDC would be eliminated. Newcomers from elsewhere in the U.S. would be limited during their first year in California to what they would have received in the states they had left.

Democrats in the legislature condemned the measure as a demagogic attack on AFDC. In addition, some advocates of welfare rights question the constitutionality of denying benefits to newborn children. But state officials note that public-assistance expenditures are growing at a 12% annual rate, and they claim people are migrating to California to take advantage of the state's higher welfare payments. In an interview with TIME last month, Wilson talked about the tough choices ahead: "What we are going to have to do, I think, is make an internal decision to be less generous . . . There is a limit to what we can absorb." Despite Wilson's fears, statistics indicate that only 6% of California AFDC families have lived in the state less than 12 months.

California's initiative follows the lead set by Michigan last October, when Republican Governor John Engler threw 90,000 "able-bodied" adults off the welfare rolls in an effort to close a projected $1 billion budget gap. But Engler's "solution" has produced more chaos than cure. Michigan's unemployment rate is greater than 9%, and even highly qualified workers are finding it hard to get a job. In the wake of Engler's edict, thousands of welfare recipients have lost their apartments; seven people who were disqualified from receiving welfare have died from exposure this winter.

Although Michigan's tough approach has few defenders, a majority of voters strongly endorse the notion that states should compel those on public relief to meet certain requirements in exchange for being supported. A proposal under consideration in Maryland is typical: welfare mothers could lose 30% of their benefits if they do not pay rent, make sure their children are immunized against diseases and keep them in school. The budgetary crises facing the states will accelerate the trend.

With reporting by William McWhirter/Detroit and Edwin M. Reingold/Los Angeles