BILL CLINTON’s promise in the 1992 presidential campaign to “end welfare as we know it” is turning out to be all too true. As the next election approaches, he has bowed to a Republican Congress, signing a Bill that abolishes the federal safety net set up after the Depression to protect those most at risk.
Now the burden shifts from Washington to the state governments, some of whom will seize the chance to cut their own welfare programmes further. Bizarrely, the president agrees that the Bill contains “serious flaws”. He claims to have huddled for two-and-a-half hours last week with members of his Cabinet in an agony of indecision before deciding to sign. He describes this meeting as being “a very moving thing”. The people most likely to be moved, by rage or despair, are those who will suffer as a result.
The original thrust of Clinton’s campaign proposal four years ago was to provide new jobs for many of those out of work, and funds to enable them to be trained, so that the huge federal budget could be cut as “welfare checks were replaced with pay checks”. But the Bill that has now been passed cuts the welfare without guaranteeing the workfare.
A progressive state such as Wisconsin may continue with its own innovative scheme while others choose not to do so. A few states may compensate for reduced federal welfare funding. Others such as California are already welcoming the chance to reduce their own budgets. There is no mandatory provision for poor families whose entitlement expires.
The big urban centres will become even more burdened than before. These fundamental omissions in the new system are compounded by the punitive cuts that it contains. The food stamp programme has been ripped apart, and disabled children and poor immigrants will suffer serious losses of entitlement. Clinton has said he will work for the reversal of some of these cuts after he has signed the Bill: his chances of success with a victorious Congress will be even lower than before.
Clinton has argued that the Bill is at least less bad than before: it is no longer linked to cuts in Medicare and represents a “real step forward”. What it really represents, as The Washington Post has put it, is “political expediency and opportunism”, with the president seeking to neutralise Bob Dole’s anti- welfare pitch to the electors.