Focus 580; Welfare Reform Strategies

He's a policy analyst with the Heritage Foundation in Washington D.C. and has been a critic of the system. He has some number of ideas on welfare reform and we will talk about that in this part of focus 580 as is the case always. We're interested in your comments and your questions we think you will want to react to what the guest has to say or pose some questions for him to answer. And we welcome them here in Champaign-Urbana. The number to call is 3 3 3 9 4 5 5. And anywhere else you're listening if it would be a long distance call for you. Use our toll free line that's 800 to 2 2 9 4 5 5 3 3 3 W I L L and eight hundred two to two W I L L those are the numbers to call is director L. O. Thank you for having me. Well we appreciate you giving us your time. Let's begin by having you talk about the problems that you see with the welfare system as it is now. What's what is wrong with it. Well one thing that's not wrong with it is a lack of money a lack of

spending federal state and local government spend. In 1990 the last year for which we have data two hundred twenty six billion dollars in welfare assistance and by that I mean programs that are exclusively targeted to low income persons. And I'm not counting programs for the middle class such as student loans or. Social Security total welfare spending in constant 1990 dollars since the war on poverty began in the mid 1950s has been three point five trillion dollars adjusting for inflation that's greater than the cost of fighting World War 2. And of course in World War 2 we won. It seems rather dubious whether we can claim victory in the war on poverty. Total overall spending on welfare and in inflation adjusted terms has increased five fold since the war on poverty began so there's a tremendous amount of resources that we've been putting out

there to assist the poor. I think the real problem is that these resources have been mis directed in fact have generated more problems than they have solved. I think that to begin to talk about reforming the welfare system it is important to distinguish between two different types of poverty. The first is the simple material poverty and by material poverty. What I mean by that is what the ordinary citizen thinks about is poverty that is a person who cannot feed his family nutritious food. Or who lacks a reasonably warm and dry shelter to keep a family in or an even simpler sense of family that perhaps has an income less than the official poverty threshold which is about $14000 a year for a family of four. Although I would point out that many families can be adequately fed and housed for less fun than that. The second type of poverty is is more complicated and I think it's a much more

important issue and that is been termed by Senator Moynihan from New York behavioral poverty and by behavioral poverty. We talk about a cluster of behaviors such as out of wedlock births divorce prolong single parenthood long term welfare dependency eroded work ethic lack of educational attainment and an aspiration an inability to discipline and motivate one's children. Criminal behavior drug abuse and a lot of other social behaviors like that and what we have seen coincident with this increase tremendous increase in spending in the War on Poverty is a great increase in you know welfare dependent and in the type of behavioral poverty problems. And what we need is to recognize that most

of the problem is that the in the spending that we have put into conventional welfare programs have in fact caused an increase in behavioral poverty. If we're simply talking about been Tiriel poverty I would disagree with most liberals in the sense that I think the government has done a reasonably efficient job of giving away food and housing in cash and so forth so that if you really look believe it below the surface in the sensational political claims what you can see is that there are very very few poor people left in the United States that do not have reasonably decent housing that do not have nutritious food to eat and so forth. If I could show to your audience which unfortunately I can't charge for pay. Ared which has been done many times by the Agriculture Department comparing the average consumption of protein minerals and vitamins of very poor children and comparing that against upper middle class children. You would not really be able to tell the difference and in fact they

consume in most cases well over the recommended daily allowance of almost all nutriment poor children for example on average consume 100 percent above the recommended daily allowance of protein which is a very expensive nutriment the same thing for most other vitamins and minerals. I can't really tell the difference between local and lower income children and upper income children as a consequence of that we find a paradoxical thing that were children when they grow up to even reach age 18 today in fact grow up to be one inch taller and 10 pounds heavier than the G.I. who stormed the beaches of Normandy in World War 2 it's pretty hard to do that if you're consistently hungry and malnourished to some political figures would claim. And I think that failing to really recognize that we have pretty adequately addressed this problem of material poverty. Really distracts us from the more central problem which is this huge proliferation of growth of of behavioral poverty. When the war

on poverty began in the 1960s. One out of four black children or United States was born out of wedlock. Today the figure is two out of three. That is a real figure and there's a tremendous amount of human tragedy involved in that figure the children who grow up without father figures are much more likely to fail in school they will have more medical problems they have money more emotional problems and they're dramatically more likely to be involved in crime and other activities like that. So that and also this problem is not restricted to black children the same increase in illegitimacy is occurring among low income whites that that is a huge social problem that we must begin to address. And now my feeling is. That the problems of behavioral poverty that we are seeing are not solely but largely a result of the fact that all of this conventional welfare spending that we're doing this two hundred twenty six billion dollars a year comes in the form of programs that reward

self-destructive behavior. And that's the core issue in terms of reforming welfare to to put the whole thing in and in a nutshell basically we provide a mother with two unwed children that she's had out of wedlock on average in the United States a welfare paycheck from various programs worth about $14000 a year I call that the paycheck. Now there are two conditions that society insists on very firmly for that mother to be able to earn that welfare paycheck. One is if she can't work and the other is she cannot marry a fully employed male. If she does either of those two things the welfare state will either cut off almost all of her welfare payments or dramatically reduce them. And it's what I call the incentive system from hell. If you wanted to design a system that was had a greater potential for capturing people in dependency and for discouraging marriage and an encouraging single mothers

to remain on welfare and not become part of a stable married two parent family you couldn't come up with a worse system than what we've got. And I think what we begin to need to begin to do is change the incentive structure in all of these welfare programs so that we reduce the rewards that we're providing to non-working non-marriage and we increase the rewards to work in marriage. Once we begin to do that then I think we will begin not only to address the problems of material poverty but. Also to begin to address these behavioral problems poverty problems and to really improve the quality of life of low income people. Let me reintroduce our guest and then we'll take a call from somebody who is listening our guest this morning Robert Rector is a policy analyst with the Heritage Foundation in Washington D.C. We're talking about the welfare system as it exists what may be wrong with it what may be right with it how it may be changed into we welcome your comments we do have one caller here our toll free line we'll get right to and I would welcome anybody else into the program locally. Three three

three. W I L L as a number to call. We also have the toll free line and you can use it anywhere you can hear us around Illinois Indiana those other states where the signal travels and that number is 800 to 2 2 9 4 5 5. Here is our call the toll free line. Hello Bonnie. Yes I've got a comment and then a question comment has to do you you sort of talked about it in and talk about this incentive but just incentives that got me thinking was there was a girl whose mother was on welfare and the little girl was saving up money for college and she evidently made Morna thousand dollars or whatever so they want to do is it took money from her mother. Well when I first heard it I said boy I'd look at him welfare cheats and I was come at the girl and you know I got to thinking about it as she's I'm a capitalist and this and that. I said that. That's terrible. Maybe maybe it might be fair to say you know take away money from

0 radio guys have talk shows of their children make too much money that he had to give the money back to the company or whatever. But for anybody else seems ridiculous because for everybody but there have been. Son when I got to think about it how can we correct this problem and the way I'd be only way I could think of it. If you can't elect all the state representatives perhaps have a governor who will pardon every welfare cheat and that actually makes sense to me. And then that would I would flood the system and do away with welfare altogether. Well I think that what the problem you're talking about is is a symptom of a larger problem. Despite what Secretary Jack Kemp says about this young woman who was a stencil saving for her college education. That family almost certainly was cheating on welfare they were. They did have earnings that they

weren't reporting and they were putting those in the bank. And in fact that's a very common thing on welfare. The problem and that's why we have added tax on welfare so that if you're getting welfare and you're piling up money in the bank somebody suspects there's something wrong and you restrict that. But the problem that's only a small symptom of the more fundamental problem which is that the welfare system says to the mother if you don't work. Then we're going to give you $14000 a year if you work or if your daughter works or if your boyfriend is working and you marry him then we're going to cut down your welfare payments. Really almost buy it by one dollar reduction for every dollar of earnings that you have and that is what creates the very strong incentive system for these welfare mothers to go out and work or have their daughter work and but not report to anybody that you're doing that. Now

there would be no so. So the basic thing is the way that welfare works is you get a certain amount of money. If you're not married and not working and then if you get married or if you work you're going to have those welfare benefits scaled back dramatically. And there would be sort of two ways of addressing it. One would be to say oh OK you can go ahead and work or you can go ahead and get married to an employed man and we won't reduce your welfare benefits. The problem with that is that you just made almost like a. A tremendous segment of the American population immediately eligible for welfare because you're saying well we don't care what your earned income is or what your husband's income is. We're going to give you a lot of welfare benefits anyway. That would cost hundreds of billions if not trillions of dollars and it simply couldn't be afforded. The other way to begin to change this incentive structure would be to say to at least some of the mothers on welfare. OK we're giving you assistance we're giving you systems worth

$14000 a year how we believe that we need to assist you and we need to help you support your family. However welfare we should not be a one way handout. What it should be is that we will assist you and we will expect you to do something back in return we'll expect you either to get a private sector job or if you can't find one. We will ask you to perform community service in exchange for the assistance that we're giving you. Now all of a sudden you've dramatically changed that mother's incentive system because she no longer is getting a free income from the government. She now has to perform some service in exchange for getting that income and that has two very positive side effects. One is it makes it much more attractive for her to get a real private sector job if she has to now work in exchange for the $14000 a year we're giving her in welfare benefits. Now it makes it much more attractive for her to say well if I'm going to have to work for this welfare maybe I should go get a private sector job where I'll have greater personal

dignity maybe a likely higher income and so forth so it makes real work in the private sector more attractive to her. It also makes it more attractive for her to get married because if she marries an employed male she will still lose eligibility for those welfare benefits. But she's losing eligibility for something and she has to now earn and if she can get a job that pays roughly the same amount then the marriage no longer serves to reduce her overall income. And if you have if you believe in. Oh yeah the goodness of government or the government has it. And a reason to be in that area then you might believe that that will work if you believe government works and you would believe that program might work well. I believe I believe that this sort of transcends government and the deuce is in fact what we're talking about here are the basic rules of human charity. But the apostle Paul got his dinner is that what you're saying. Of course from the government for charity.

No I'm saying that in fact even if this church if we go if God if the charity were totally totally private sector or say totally within a church we would still want to follow the same roof. The rules tram fand whether or not it's a government or a non-government it's giving out the aid. Think of the new tests as theirs. They're the best suited to do it. They've got the most money set. No I'm saying that that we know certain laws of how to assist people and how not to assist people. And we know that whoever is giving out the money that if it is given out is a one way handout. It is neither good for the giver nor for the recipient. The apostle Paul says in the New Testament he who shall not work shall not eat. And I think it's very important when thinking about welfare to air and that was in fact the foundation of Judeo Christian charity through most of the history of this country. In fact religious charities in the 19th and early 20th century all used that maxim.

And the question to ask is Why did they do that was it because they had a fiscal crunch and they didn't have enough money to spend. Or was it because they were secretly supporters of Ronald Reagan and supply side economics. I think not. I think that what it what the Christian charities the Jewish charities recognized was that if you give aid unconditionally without requiring anything from the recipient in return that you create a sort of unlimited demand for assistance which is what we've seen in the United States for the last 20 years. Secondly if. Give unconditionally without expecting anything in return. You undermine the selve capacity of the recipient. You make them accustomed to being dependent. You make them accustomed to living without marriage. You make them a custom and go home for Turbo. We've been basically a drag on everyone else and that in the one term is either very harmful thing to do to the recipient. Instead of that what we need is

an aid system based on mutual responsibility. We will assist but we expect positive and responsible behavior from the recipient back in return for what we give and even eventually give it to me and you know just about all of that. But now I want to and if you question some That's kind of different it seems were you in a feminist tend to agree. And you can correct me if I'm wrong on this but it seems like Dan Quayle and the feminists want some sort of federal system to capture deadbeat parents or their money or something like that the way I'm reading them and to me that well that's plainly unconstitutional it see it and less in letter and have federal laws that will mandate marriage divorce alimony child support property arrangements you know type of deal and the federal government trying to do that and it would be OK to start forcing those but if estates do Annette say New Jersey allows all kinds of homosexual marriage isn't it an asset.

And one of them comes to New Jersey on the other one. $10000 a month. Why should Illinois I agree to have this guy pay $10000 a month to his boyfriend in New Jersey. That isn't really the case that we're dealing with what we're dealing with here are some 4 million single mothers on AFDC many of whom have boyfriends who have jobs and could pay something to contribute to the support of that child but are not. I mean I've got money today but I'm well and in fact you are contributing you're contributing as a taxpayer. Where's the real biological parent of a child who is not contributing so that the general principle on which I think there's a large amount of agreement follows that in the future we should reform the welfare system so that a mother who has a child out of wedlock. It is a condition of receiving

welfare benefits must positively cooperate in establishing who the father is. There are biological tests now that we have using DNA structure and so forth that can very reliably indicate who the father is. Once you've established who the father is the father must be expected to contribute something to the maintenance of that child. As long as the child is a minor and if the father I mean my mind if the father says Well I don't have a job I can't pay I can't do this. Then you would say OK TO THE FATHER. You say that you can't find work. Well then we're going to bring you down here and you're going to perform community service to help pay off this obligation that you have to support this child rather than expecting the general taxpayer to support this child when it has been tried by Tommy Thompson in Wisconsin and other some other states. You suddenly this absent father finds a job and is able to pay his child support payments. So this is really a question

of expecting absent fathers to make a contribution to defer welfare costs. And I think that not giving the father a free ride by saying you're not going to be able to go around and have four or five or six children out of wedlock and boast to everyone in the community of doubt about your. Your powers as a male but have no responsibility for those children. From here on in you're going to have responsible financial responsibility for these children. I think that that would have a dramatic effect in terms of changing behavior. Now whether or not you would do this if the federal government level or simply encourage states to undertake this type of reform you know I think. Another issue and really rather technical one there because it is a federal program Aid to Families with Dependent Children that we're talking about here. And one of the problems also that it does require a federal role

is that many of these fathers do jump from one state to another in order to avoid the child support payments that they owe back in their original state. And that absolutely does require some federal role of enforcement and trying to prevent fathers from basically skipping skipping the state in order to evade their responsibilities. Our guest in this hour focus is Robert Rector he is a policy analyst with the Heritage Foundation in Washington D.C. We're talking about the welfare system and welfare reform and would be happy to have your questions. 3 3 3 W I L L eight hundred two to two W while o those with an M. Because we have some of the callers standing by here so let's go on and we'll talk with someone on line one. Hello. Oh good morning David so they called in the first all be really brief but this is it is two parters I really like I really enjoy it. Mr. Rector I just want to tell you oh wonderful good I agree with just about everything you say and it's great to hear it. I actually called for a couple points of view. You might be able to help me. I've argued for a long

time but I'm not sure that I'm on good footing historical footing I've never bothered to look it up and I thought you might be the person to answer it. And David have one very quick follow up question after this. I don't mean this this insanity that you mentioned about the woman can't be married that can't be income etc. etc. to that do I have. I've argued with my friends and they said look when will these welfare things were invented 50 60 some years ago whatever it was back I think in the 30s but I could be wrong about that. I think most people had I think the rationale probably was this. Everybody wants to work on the government dole is really a stigma. No one's going to want to stay on it so we don't have to you know we don't have to enforce this because no one's going to want to stay on it. And I correct about that that that was the original thinking. No not quite. The Aid to Families with Dependent Children was created in 1934 in the middle of the Great Recession the Great Depression right up it most of the welfare that was given out. At that time wife

in fact workfare it was programs like the Civilian Conservation Corps the works project administration in fact in the around 32 33 there was a brief flirtation with welfare as we now have it in the sense that the government gave a lot of money simply gave money to people and that was extremely unpopular was unpopular both with the recipient and with the general public. So FDR very quickly changed that and moved to work only assistance you had to work in order to get assistance. And we certainly have gotten away from that or not and then answer me this well wait why was he allowed out Aid to Families with Dependent Children however was different. It was a program oriented toward widows who were not expected to work to support their children. And accidentally this program included in it a provision that he did to sort of enable unwed mothers also to get assistance although that was never

intended. And Frances Perkins who was secretary of labor at that time said later that she never even understood that it made on white mothers eligible if it if it had been clear at that time most people would have said this is a disaster you do not want to subsidize this. And so the program for widows It did not expect people to work. It was a very small amount of money that was given and it was only in the late mid to late 1950s where this program gradually began to be transformed from a program for widows. There are very few widows in it now into a program that was basically rewarding unwed mothers or women who were divorced and rewarding them for not working and not marrying. And so it largely is a sort of huge historical accident that the program grew the way it did and it is in fact a very unpopular program. The benefits under the program have have not kept up with inflation

so wise 20 years that has nothing to do with Ronald Reagan in the mean cruel Republicans. That is in fact the benefit levels are set by state legislators in every state and most of these legislatures are controlled by Democrats. They have not increased the spending in this program because they perceive it as having precisely the sort of counterproductive social effects that I've been talking about earlier. Well listen I'll give it my follow up question but thanks because I had always wondered. Again I've never really gone to the library look it up but I couldn't figure out how such an insane program could have gotten started but that explains it might might. I think it is just very hypothetical and it's simply your own personal view and I'm just simply curious because I'm not I'm not suggesting this is a practical alternative but what what do you think would happen if we just announced you know January 1903 that all welfare is going to be a public sector welfare. Phased out over five years cutting to 20 percent a year and that after five years it's done over in you know any charity will be happily handled by the private sector.

What do you think I mean again this is just hypothetical I don't have any dreams that this would have a practical reality but you know any thoughts of something like that and what effect that might have surely. Thanks a lot to really appreciate it. OK I think that that would create a very huge transition problems and I think that before you attempted to do that you would have to earn undo a lot of the intellectual conditioning that has been done for the past 40 years starting in the 1930s in the nineteen 40s in the early 50s. We underwent a very conscious process in which we said that we no longer wanted churches and private institutions to provide charity because quote that was demeaning to the poor. I think that's a very pernicious and stupid idea. But basically we indoctrinated churches and other institutions that they should no longer be the principal mode of providing charity in the United States and that the government would step in. Instead I think the government has been a

flop. Although I would also say that a lot of private sector charities and to provide the same sort of unconditional assistance as the government does isn't much better these days. But if we were to try to go back to a private sector charity system which I think was in fact a very effective system given the general low level of economic means that were available say around 900 or 1920 it gave very good assistance and it gave assistance in a way that I don't think crippled the poor in the sense of the modern welfare state does. But if we would have to go through a very prolonged public discussion about why we wanted private sector charity why we would expect that the private sector should in fact really soon resume this role and so forth. I don't think it could be done in five years in fact out. I think that this you know this type of discussion is even started yet. That's why I concentrate my efforts not on demeaning private sector charity because I think it was better than what the government gives

now. But even simply trying to make sure that the present huge government system we have does the least amount of damage possible trying to reform that system so that it no longer harms poor people. What you taking with the with the caller's suggestion. I think some people would say what you've got to do is you've got to acknowledge that the government is involved in all sorts of activities that one person or another might consider welfare. And that certainly when people think about welfare generally their minds go to AFDC. But after all people who are married get a deduction for their children and that's a form of a subsidy. Farmers get subsidies. We're bailing out the Essen else we bailed out Chrysler I mean I think some people might say if if you declared an end to welfare the entire country would grind to a halt. If you were fair and acknowledged you know. For all the spade I mean acknowledge what was welfare.

And I would make a distinction between allowing someone to keep their own money through a tax deduction and giving someone else's money to someone I believe that in fact we do have a tremendous amount of middle class welfare through farm subsidies and other programs and I think that that should be eliminated but I think we are getting kind of off from the real issue which is before us which is to begin to recognize that the welfare system as we're currently have it has actually harmed poor people in some respects. And what can we do to begin to transform that system so that harm no longer occurs. I think then in addition to that we have to talk about some other things that are needed to begin to improve the capacity of poor people to stand on their own two feet and become participants in mainstream society. I think that one of those things is crime reduction is a taking a very firm stand on crime mode. People don't realize that the predominant victims of

criminals in our society are not rich people they're poor people they're poor people that live in the same neighborhoods with the criminals and they're the ones that are getting mugged and killed. They're the ones that are getting their meager position possessions stolen out of their apartments and so forth. So I think that be much firmer on crime and taking repeat criminals off the street will have a disproportionately positive effect on helping poor people. The second thing is educational reform. I'm not a big fan of government monopolies and what we have to recognize it is at least in a grade school system in the United States we do have government monopolies and the government monopoly is are never very good but usually the people who get the worst service from a government monopoly. Are those that are at the bottom of the income scale. I think that a very very positive thing that we can do to help poor people to help themselves is to provide them with educational vouchers through choice. There are millions of poor parents and in inner cities all across the United States who would like to have the same option that Jesse

Jackson is a rich man has which is that Jesse Jackson sends his kids to a private school. There are millions and millions of poor parents who would like to have a voucher like they have the option of taking their child out of a public school that can't even protect them from physical assault in the halls and put that child in a much better quality private sector school or in another public school. And that would have a very positive effect on poor children. One of the things that we do know about poor people today is that in fact the strongest social variable in to determining whether or not for example a young black man will rise up out of poverty and welfare dependency is in fact is his religious belief and religious practices. Young man in the inner city who have strong religious beliefs are 50 percent less likely to drop out of high school 50 percent less likely to get involved in crime and drug abuse and I always challenge the Congress the United States to show me any.

Government program that has one millionth of that effectiveness in terms of helping the poor to help themselves. So I think another very very positive thing that we could do in the inner city to change the moral climate in the inner city would be to strengthen the role of churches and in particular to allow those parents who have strong religious beliefs and to put their children into educational institutions that would reinforce those beliefs. We could give those parents vouchers and if the parents chose they wouldn't be forced to. But the parents chose they should be able to put their child into a religious school that would reinforce the child's and the parent's own religious conviction and I think that if we did that we would see within a decade a an absolutely dramatic change in the moral climate in South Los Angeles and in other communities all across the United States. We have about 10 minutes left. Our guest is Robert Rector He's a policy analyst with the Heritage Foundation we're talking about welfare reform. And we have a couple of people who are waiting here with comments so let's go

on and go to the toll free line. Hello. Yes hello. Yes. I just have a little bit maybe you got a couple answers. One thing that enters into this poverty picture that that I think is a big concern and that's where how many people a year or a month or something come into the United States as like Mexicans and Puerto Ricans and so forth that are low income and an unskilled and undereducated worker that comes in that comes on to our poverty rolls which counts as a form of poverty in that I read the figures and I can't find a back as to what that figure is but it's an enormous amount of folks that came in and gets out or did welcome here but then they end up as our low income people it makes it sound like the poverty people are increasing but a lot of them are trying to happy with the income that we have here on poverty Epping. You know you put your finger on I think an emerging question in terms of social science. Everyone is now recognizing that a lot

of the political radioing that we hear about how the poor got poorer and the rich got richer which isn't even necessarily true but. A substantial amount of that is due to the fact that we unlike almost any other country in the world today have a huge number of incoming low skilled immigrants who are quite happy to take low wage jobs in our economy. But that creates an impression of increasing inequality and also in some cases increasing poverty. These these individuals even if their illegal immigrants are in fact showing up in the census poverty count and in the census count of income equality and that's a very very important factor. Other people also feel that one of the things that's going on is that many of these immigrants are displacing Americans particularly American black workers from some of these low wage jobs that are that the black workers need to have. That's a

little bit more debatable but it is certainly a problem that needs to be thought about and discussed. All right. Thank you for the go. Let is go on we'll go to someone on line number one. Hello. Hi I just had a couple questions for you. Childcare is a major reason why single moms really need welfare. Is there a program that would that will be in place for the women who are required to do community service while they're getting welfare. That's question number one and number two is which major major political party is close to this philosophy of welfare reform. I hang up on the. Thank you. All right thanks for the call. In my the specifics of my proposal I would start by taking the half of the welfare mothers who currently do not have preschool children and asking them to perform community service first. That would be a dramatic change in the welfare

system it would take several years to implement that. And then after we've seen what happened there then we could talk about perhaps requiring the same thing from others that have preschool children you would also put another requirement on that if the mother. I stayed on welfare for say over four years she couldn't just continue to have one child after another into for her work obligations. But by and large I think we could do a whole lot to transform the welfare system without talking about the mothers that have preschool kids. Let's focus on the easy part of the population to begin with. One thing that the general public doesn't understand because there is a lot of rhetoric about we're going to make welfare recipients work we're going to make them do this. That basically that is that is misleading rhetoric. But in Illinois or in the average state today as we're talking here this afternoon on the radio almost certainly no more than about 6 percent of all the mothers that are on welfare are

actively participating in a job search program. And probably no more than 1 percent are actively participating in this type of community service that I'm talking about. So there's a tremendous opportunity out there to dramatically expand the amount of required work under in every single state without in fact touching of mothers that have preschool kids. And my policy that I've advocated in Washington is to start with those mothers that have older children first that they have left. First of all they're not going to need all the daycare assistance. Except perhaps in the summer when the child isn't in school and they have less justification for being at home with the child so that's where I would begin I've been in this field for 15 years and basically I've not seen many if I very very seldom think any welfare mothers are required to do anything. So I would be very happy if we could just say to all the welfare mothers that don't have preschool children we're going to

require them to work first and then most will talk about those that have the younger kids. Where will the money come from to pay these people for their work are you expecting states are going to do that or will I know what what I'm saying is that the average mother on welfare is getting about $14000 a year nationwide in some states it's lower and the payment varies within the state. But basically they're getting enough so that you could say to the mother All right we're already giving you ten to fourteen thousand dollars a year in welfare benefits in exchange for what we're already giving you. We will expect you to perform some form of community service or to get a private sector job if you get a private sector job you going to be off the welfare rolls. But if you can't find a private sector job then we're going. Why do you expect you to work in a hospital to do neighborhood cleanup to do clerical work in nonprofit organizations around the community. If you're going to

perform that community service in effect your rate of pay will be the welfare benefits that were already giving you. So not a system that would cost any additional money and in fact because I believe that if you did this even just restricting it to the mothers that do not have preschool children that it would cause as many as a million mothers to in fact get off of welfare and either get a job or get married but it would in fact have a dramatic effect of saving money. But that isn't my principal objective. OK we're coming down to but our last five minutes and have a couple callers I want to join include at least one of them. Let's go again to our toll free line. Hello good morning. Yes. Well I think your guess as a man reading the latest statistics from the U.S. government. We have two million more people that of going into their calculations of falling below the poverty level. So the situation is actually getting worse. The gap is widening between a rich. In

quotation marks an important quotation marks both in the richer industrialized countries and in the rest of the world the third world and I don't think that we can really solve the problem until we get at the root of the system the market economy that we have. Am I would think that the people who are in the higher circles of finance and kept. Lawyer and the government also all would I would want to solve this problem because it de-stabilize it's capitalism as we have it at the present time it's a destabilizing factor. It was OUR it was a very important factor in the recent big riots in spring and Los Angeles. It was mainly poor people rioting out there as you're aware and going back to walk and so forth you know on the sexy. So it's a very serious problem and now nobody wants to dress up they want their misery to continue on our nine percent unemployment.

I'm not saying that there are not problems in our economy and clearly the fact that we're in a prolonged recession is throwing a lot of people out of work and it's made more poor people. It's reduced average family income. But what you have to be aware of is that those statistics. Which lists the number of poor people in United States have what in my mind are two rather large for them. One is that in defining a poor person they don't count any assets so that in fact 40 percent of all poor people is listed by the Census Bureau in fact own their own homes. The second more important flaw in them if it out of the two hundred twenty six billion dollars that is being spent to assist poor people. The Census Bureau counts only about 30 billion dollars of that is income. So they would have to find a poor person. Do you have an income below your family for do you have an income below $14000 a year when it goes to count the family's income. It automatically excludes food stamps. It

automatically excludes public housing assistance. It automatically excludes a tremendous amount of cash assistance and in fact the entire increase. In the welfare state which is occurred since 1964 you're not counted by the Census Bureau it's as if we spent all this money but he didn't have any effect on people's standard of living when in fact it really did keep poor people's standard of living is in fact much higher than it was in 1965 and that is why I say that I think that when you really look below the surface of those figures at the actual housing conditions and food consumption and so forth of low income Americans you find that it's much better than you would imagine and that I think that a sort of false an exaggerated picture of material poverty is in fact actually harmful because it distracts our attention from these more important problems of behavioral poverty and how to reform the welfare system to address those behavioral poverty problems.

Some people I'd say though might counter that your your discussion about the material well-being of people in this country people who are classified as poor and in a sense is misleading. One has to ask what really is the value of the assets that you're talking about. And. And what really does that mean for example of some someone does own a house you have to ask what's the value of the house and though you wouldn't really expect o you the house on average is about two thirds of the value the average house in United States the average house owned by a poor person is a three bedroom house with a garage and a porch or patio. These people are not affluent by any stretch of the imagination but they're also not really poor in the sense that the ordinary people have a picture of poverty in the United States. And I think that by exaggerating the extent of material poverty by claiming that there are in fact millions of malnourished children when in fact the government surveys by the Centers for Disease Control and Department of Agriculture and HHS have shown for over 20 years that that is not the case that these kids in fact are not malnourished. They're

super nourished by most historic standards. Only get in the way of the discussion of these much more important problems such as family breakup. When you deprive the poor children today are not malnourished they are living in infant in homes without fathers and kids who are raised in homes without fathers have just tremendous multiple problems. A young black man who's raised without a father when compared to a black man in exactly the same neighborhood exactly the same income level everything else held constant. That young black man that is deprived of a father figure well he's growing up is twice as likely to get caught up in criminal activity and end up in jail. That's a real human tragedy that's a real problem it's facing us today. And by creating bogus claims that there's widespread malnutrition that we need to spend more on conventional welfare programs were only really harming the poor by distracting the discussion from the real problems that are facing.