WASHINGTON (BP)–Various facets of the Welfare Reform Act began to take effect with the new year, leaving the poor less and less certain of where they will get help and heightening the call for states to put their new welfare plans in place.
When President Clinton signed the welfare reform bill last August — pleasing most Republicans and angering many of his own party — he cleared the social services chess board and sent state governments, social agencies, faith?based organizations and the poor scrambling to see who will give what to whom, and when.
The welfare system has been relatively unchanged for 30 years, but it will be replaced by “50 experiments,” according to Marvin Olasky, an evangelical who has written extensively on welfare’s effectiveness in empowering the poor.
Upon signing the Congress’ welfare reform, Clinton said he wanted to make “welfare what it was meant to be: a second chance, not a way of life.”
Abolished was Aid to Families With Dependent Children, the welfare system workhorse that pays out cash benefits to almost 13 million people monthly, more than half of whom are children.
The welfare law took effect Oct. 1, but its major provisions will be implemented in increments, with many not in effect until July. July 1 is the deadline for states to submit to the federal government their plans for welfare. At a conference of state welfare officials in mid-December, it was determined that at least 38 states have submitted
their plans.
The old system will be replaced by a system of block grants and new authority for the states. Meanwhile, the poor wait to see how the systems will work, and churches and other faith-based organizations wait to see what role they may play.
Advocates of social reform say the old system put America in a give-and-grab cycle that took the “in” out of independent. Said Clinton, “A long time ago I concluded that the current welfare system undermines the basic values of work, responsibility and family, trapping generation after generation in dependency and hurting the very people it was designed to help.”
Stanley Carlton-Thies of the Center for Public Justice agreed.
“The way general help was given to everyone actually encouraged some people to make bad choices,” he said. For instance, a single mother might choose not to marry but to live with a man because she got more benefits while single.
“A lot of people did get on (the welfare system) and get off,” Carlton-Thies said. “If there was a well?prepared, motivated, educated person who was abandoned by their husband, many times they found their way off. But if they needed motivation, job preparation and if they overall weren’t prepared, the system was of very little help. It held out the idea that, ‘OK, here’s some money.’
“What welfare reform can do now, in the best sense, is turn that around. What welfare should do is help a person get to the point of not needing it. The system has to be more relational, more personal, and there ought to be an explicitly moral aspect to the help.”
The new systems will, theoretically, personalize welfare, empowering local entities such as churches and para-church organizations to offer a more practical helping hand to, as Clinton put it, “give people on welfare a chance to draw a paycheck, not a welfare check.” A key element of the reform is that private agencies and religious groups can contract with government to provide services.
It is an effort to have less of a “big brother” mentality and more of a “helping hand” approach to welfare. Said Sen. Dan Coats of Indiana: “This legislation is a step in the right direction and I strongly support it. But it is not the final word on welfare reform. Many of the problems of welfare reform are problems of the heart and home. The government cannot solve these problems and it should not be in the position — as it has been for 30 years and $5 trillion — of exacerbating them.”
Coats has been behind a move to “shift resources and effort out of Washington and back to local communities where those resources and efforts should be rooted.”
Will that help- That is hotly debated in some quarters. Representatives of charities cried foul on behalf of the poor when Clinton signed the bill. A statement from Bread for the World, the self-proclaimed nation’s largest Christian anti-hunger organization, said, “While some members of Congress say churches and charities can make up for cuts to welfare programs, leaders of these organizations say that isn’t realistic. To cover the $53 billion in proposed cuts over six years, each of the 350,000 churches in America would have to add more than $150,000 to their budgets.”
A statement from another food assistance charity, Second Harvest, said, “These welfare proposals will devastate hungry and poor Americans. Proposed cuts to the Food Stamp Program alone — $28.4 million — would equal five times the food assistance distributed through all of Second Harvest. Are you ready to contribute five times more time and money than you did last year?”
Many reform-minded people think the charities are voicing alarm too soon. Said Olasky, “There’s been hysteria from folks who built their careers on the government welfare state who are fearing that the flow will be cut, but this is a very moderate bill. It really is backing in (to reform) in every area. States with federal funds can make a lot of exemptions. It’s not a two?year?and?out measure. States have a lot of running room here.”
Olasky said the bill provides the opportunity for a lot of good experiments, but he warned states must not just make radical cuts without encouraging relationships between charities and churches that help build up recipients and make then productive in society.
“In other words, this bill takes very small steps toward potentially eliminating some of the negatives; the question is, ‘Will the positives be eliminated?'” Olasky said.
Carlton-Thies also sees pros and cons to the states’ involvement in welfare reform.
“It’s not the case that states are just all rearing to do the right thing,” he said. “On the other hand, it’s really clear that states and local governments are starting to recognize that they are being looked at to redesign it. That has really unleashed a great creativity.
“But one dilemma is that every state is looking around to make sure it isn’t more generous than the states around them.”
Private groups, including churches and faith?based organizations, will unquestionably be asked to shoulder much of the welfare burden, Carlton-Thies stated.
“My guess is that every single state will be turning to the
non-government community, and in many cases explicitly the faith community,” he said. “This is partly a monster of the conservative religious community’s making; we’ve had the sense that government welfare is all bad, and now they say, ‘We give it up,’ and the churches have to do it.”
Churches won’t have to do it all, and they won’t have to do it alone, said Gerald Hutchinson, director of the Southern Baptist Home Mission Board’s church and community ministries department. He urged churches not to be intimidated.
“I do see this as an opportunity, and the churches must take some initiative,” he said. “I’d encourage churches not to be scared, not to be overwhelmed. I think they’ll find government welcomes the partnership. They (government) may not always know what we can do, but I think with dialogue we can find partnership. There’s an opportunity for a win-win for everybody. Be open. Don’t be scared. Share information.”
To the Protestant community, he added, “I guarantee you that the Catholics are going to take advantage of this.”
Carlton-Thies said he is struck by the biblical story of the sending out of the 70. “The fields are white for harvest,” he said. “There’s a lot of opening here for new kinds of ministry.” Yet he admitted being “kind of skeptical” as to whether the Christian community has what it takes to respond. “I think we’re not real ready,” he said. “I think some hearts are in the right place, but we
also have some other agendas.”
A critical question for Christians to ask as they consider what part they may take in welfare reform is whether this model of reform is closer to biblical guidelines than the old one.
Said Olasky, “A lot of us as church members become used to being taxpayers. Professionals take care of the problems; we don’t have to do anything. That’s not a good position for citizens in general, and it’s not a good position for a church member. The emphasis now is on being a citizen and on being a good Christian.
“I suggest every person ask this question: ‘Have I been involved personally in the life of one poor person over the past year?’ If so, great, maybe they can do even more.”
If not, perhaps they should be.
“This opens up more opportunities for biblical approaches,” Olasky said. “The approach we had was profoundly anti-biblical in that the effective Christian programs I’ve seen have these ingredients: challenging, personal, spiritual. The old welfare state emphasized entitlement, bureaucracy and the attempt to banish God.”
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Lee is a freelance writer in Wake Forest, N.C.
