The Public Policy/Building Blocks
Frum, David
Building Blocks by David Frum F ix it in Washington or in the states? All at once or bit by bit? That's the choice Republicans are facing as they prepare to reform welfare. And the longer you think...
...But at the very moment that this pledge was helping Republicans to win power, many conservatives were rethinking it...
...William Kristol of the Project for the Republican Future, while hesitantly favoring block grants, recalls the dismal experience of President Nixon's rev46 The American Spectator May 1995 enue-sharing in the 1970s, and warns against repeating those errors now...
...Farm-state Republicans mutinied against this plan, ostensibly because they worried that a state-run food-stamp program would be even more vulnerable to fraud than the leaky federal one...
...States might abuse their new freedom by stubbornly refusing to reform, but that would be their taxpayers' problem...
...In practice, this would mean replacing the existing patchwork of federal, state, and federally funded, state-administered programs with big "block grants"—chunks of money the states could use to fight poverty as seemed best to them, subject to only the most general directions from the capital...
...When the debt-plagued federal government decides to scale back, as it periodically does, all it need do is cut along the dotted line—one reason that the Canadian federal budget unveiled on February 27 could deliver actual dollar decreases in spending on programs: C$119 billion was spent inthe 1994-95 fiscal year...
...Inability to choose between them caused the Republican leadership in the House of Representatives to execute an embarrassing double flip-flop over the food-stamp program in late February...
...These grants will come attached to substantial new responsibilities for the states...
...Rightly horrified by the rapid increase in food-stamp costs over the past five years—in post-recession 1994, 27.5 million people received food stamps, up from 20 million in pre-recession 1990—the Republicans at first opted for the decentralizing solution: lump all federal nutrition programs together and load them onto the states...
...Medicaid is perhaps the single most shocking example—up from $20 billion a decade ago to nearly $100 billion this year—but other programs, like Supplemental Security Income, are mushrooming nearly as fast...
...Welfare programs are now designed for limitless growth...
...It will be that same amount next year, or quite possibly less, but it will be a number set as the result of democratic choice, and not by some out-of-control budget mechanism...
...In the end, thanks to Gingrich, the House voted to deliver full responsibility for nutritional programs to the states after all, subject to conditions designed to restrain fraud...
...Now just imagine what the far more conventional Senate will do...
...T he food-stamp imbroglio foreshadows the bigger choices Republicans and conservatives will face in the welfare reform debate...
...On the other hand, Pat Roberts's Four Days in February should remind us that even a Republican-dominated Congress will almost certainly fail to write an adequate welfare reform bill...
...The arrival of billions of federal dollars is more likely to relieve the states of fiscal pressure to reform welfare and Medicaid than to spur dramatic action, especially since, as liberal welfare critic Mickey Kaus has written, the prevailing image of governors as reform crusaders is utterly mistaken...
...What would that mean in practice...
...and to impose on recipients a twoyears-and-out time limit...
...Roberts went even further still: Not only would Washington administer the program, but food stamps would remain an entitlement, with benefits paid to anyone meeting the eligibility criteria—with no total limit on costs...
...Washington or decentralize—is more than of merely theoretical interest...
...Virtually all of Canada's social programs are administered by the provinces...
...With the status quo costing more and more, and Washington contributing (as it surely will) less and less, even the most troglodyte states will eventually succumb to reform...
...By the time Congress finishes with its compromises and concessions, the reform that emerges will not amount to very much...
...With welfare," Murray said, "the only way to get major reform is if one state demonstrates a very large effect and also demonstrates that you won't have kids starving in the streets"—by, for example, eliminating all its existing welfare programs and devoting the money instead to adoption services...
...Ottawa traditionally absorbed roughly half the costs...
...And the longer you think about it, the tougher the choice looks...
...C$112 billion is budgeted for 1995-96...
...It should be clear by now that Murray got it right about the possibilities for real reform in the House...
...And so in a sense they are, for they offer protection to over-leveraged Kansas wheat farmers as well as to the destitute of Chicago and Los Angeles...
...It jumps upright and sprints at top speed across the lawn—until the chain snaps it backward...
...Columnist Charles Krauthammer has written, for example, that Republicans won control of the Congress by promising to reform welfare, and are therefore honor-bound to fulfill that commitment themselves...
...So who is right?ing the programs—a complicated, politically fraught, and time-consuming business for a Republican majority with much else on its agenda...
...D espite the effective arguments of the block grant critics, the nod has to go to the decentralizers...
...to cut total welfare spending...
...The House Republicans' Contract With America pledged to adopt new federal rules to prohibit cash welfare for mothers under age 18...
...As for the infirmities of state governments, remember that block grants, unlike Nixon-era revenue sharing, are not exactly free money...
...States spend money sent them from Washington with far less care than the money they raise from their own taxpayers...
...Not until the 28th did two reform-minded Republican governors, John Engler of Michigan and William Weld of Massachusetts, cajole Speaker Gingrich into taking the matter up...
...Or, if you want numbers, look northward at the Canadian experience...
...Pat Roberts of Kansas, chairman of the House Agriculture Committee and an unblushing defender of the farm subsidy system, told the New York Times that he regarded food stamps as "the ultimate social safety net...
...Thanks to Roberts and his allies, food stamps managed to scramble back aboard the federal wagon from February 24 to February 28...
...The national contribution to the relief of poverty is"—pick a number—"and not a dime more...
...With 7 percent of the nation's population and 9 percent of its Medicaid patients, New York accounted for 20 percent of all federal Medicaid spending in Cuomo's last year in office...
...Devolution offers Republicans the chance to say, "That's it...
...Mario Cuomo's New York spent twice as much per patient on Medicaid as California, largely because the governor convinced a large chunk of his voters that the bill was being paid by Washington—as indeed nearly half of it was...
...The present division of welfare responsibilities between Washington and the states tempts local governments into reckless choices...
...to stop the practice of raising payments for each additional child...
...Fobbing the task off on the states would amount to a dereliction of duty...
...In fact, the farm-state Republicans revolted because food stamps help maintain demand for their constituents' products...
...There are only two ways out of this fix: either Washington must assert dramatically more authority over local decision-making, which few Republicans would favor, or else it must assert much less...
...Washington would enact these rules, and the states—which administer much of the welfare system, including Medicaid and Aid to Families with Dependent Children—would have to comply...
...And they will quickly prove far more fiscally constricting than most observers yet appreciate...
...Charles Murray published a powerful essay in the December Commentary urging welfare reformers to write off Washington and worry instead about freeing the states to experiment, in the hope that one or more might go so far as to abolish welfare altogether...
...The difference between these two approaches—fix it from David Frum, our Public Policy columnist, is the author of Dead Right, now available in paperback from New Republic/BasicBooks...
...Interviewed in March, Charles Murray said he remained certain that the only route to substantial reform lay through the state capitals...
...Picture a dog on a long chain that spots a cat across the road...
...For Washington to control these costs, it would have to rewrite the rules governThe American Spectator May 1995 47...
Vol. 28 • May 1995 • No. 5
