A Scandal Called Welfare

...And on top of that would be continuing state contributions, meaning that in high benefit states most recipients would continue to receive at least as much as they are granted now...

...The Family Assistance Plan represents that new approach to helping poor families...

...Food stamps will push its purchasing power up to $2,400...

...This could be a tremendous boost for bills such as Senator Gaylord Nelson's public employment manpower proposal to provide jobs in that sector for 300,000 needy Americans...

...There is some real justice in federalizing welfare...

...This often forces an unemployed, or underemployed, father to abandon his family so that his children may eat...

...Unfortunately, there are more than ten million jobs in this country, including many offered by state and local governments, which do not pay even that Federal minimum wage...

...These two possibilities have become entangled and we will have to resolve them together...

...Here is what they would find: First, all of our big cities are overcrowded, near bankruptcy...

...In 1970, I worked and voted for the House-passed version of President Nixon's Family Assistance Plan to reform that creaking, crumbling welfare machine that we built with a third of a century of disjointed social legislation...

...But along with many others, I am beginning to wonder whether the best way to get more Federal dollars for cities and states might not be for Uncle Sam to pick up the whole welfare check for all levels of government, including the $7.5 billion paid this year at local levels...

...Maybe we will have to come to look on welfare as a "people subsidy" given in return for family stability, healthy children, and for services and facilities the public needs...

...This is up from 7.7 million just five years ago...

...The heart of the FAP proposal is that all of this will be changed...

...Liberals ought to take a close look at the welfare system and the chaos it has bred—and at the FAP as well, before they dismiss it out of hand...

...And that includes millions of men who willingly work, but do not earn enough to feed their families...

...As our present system grew, a basic principle was fostered forbidding help to an able-bodied adult, or to children dependent on him...

...The main roadblocks to passage of FAP are these: There are some liberals who agree that the present system is a mess, but say that FAP does not go far enough, and that its support levels are ridiculously low...

...There many of them, whether they want to or not, end up on welfare...

...Here is one of those voices, with a message I like: "I believe that the American people feel that with the high production of which we are now capable, there is enough left over to prevent extreme hardship and maintain a minimum standard floor under subsistence, education, medical care, and housing, to give to all a minimum standard of decent living and to all children a fair opportunity to get a start in life...

...The Army treats its seriously hurt, but it also cares for the "walking wounded...

...I am referring, of course, to the national scandal called welfare, and I am disturbed by the fact that one of the main roadblocks to reform of our antiquated, cruel welfare system is a segment of the liberal community that may be putting partisanship ahead of the needs of the poor...

...If we federalize the system we can compel a complete overhaul/' Trapped in this welfare maze, we have lost our way...

...Third, welfare's stated goal has always been to provide temporary help until a family could get back on its feet...

...Our welfare system continues to care for these people today...

...They distribute almost thirty-seven per cent of the nation's welfare money...

...I would hate to think that liberals were standing in the way...

...As a small state faced with many of those same strains, Arizona's welfare budget has soared from $10.8 million to about $26.1 million a year in the last decade...

...That city's welfare bill will total $1.7 billion this year, a jump of 600 per cent in just one decade...

...Mothers with pre-school children would be exempt from that requirement, naturally...

...Ironically, the explosive growth of welfare rolls came during the late 1960s in a period of full employment and peak prosperity...

...But it is a place to start...

...But in practice welfare rules usually penalize those who try to work themselves off welfare...

...il Part of welfare's staggering costs arise from a fantastic administrative apparatus, with an enormous army of caseworkers required to visit homes and pry into people's lives...

...Chicago and New York did not produce these trends, yet they are being asked to pay the welfare bills that come due at the local level...

...f If present trends continue to 1975, more than sixteen million Americans will be on welfare, collecting something like $25 billion each year...

...How can anyone defend a system designed to drive families apart...

...In our concern for hungry or neg-lected children, we added a further category, aid to families with dependent children (AFDC), which now supports 9.5 million people...

...America badly needs people who will work in these jobs, yet our present welfare system says two crazy things: "We'll help the children of men who desert them, and who don't work at all . . . but rather than give 'something for nothing' we won't help the children of men who don't earn a living wage...

...If that is true, it is a terrible price they are asking the poor to pay so that we may continue to play politics as usual...

...In its place we will have a new agency to administer a new FAP...

...This program could save a total of $7.5 billion at the state and local levels this year alone, $27 million of it in a fairly small state such as Arizona...

...The taxpayers are ahead by $2,600, she is ahead, and eventually she may get off the rolls entirely...

...I have no doubts that we could get the benefit level up to a basic $4,000 or so within a couple of years— if we can get the program started now...

...and it will eliminate many other evils of the present system...

...But she hates welfare and wants to get off...

...it stops short of our real social needs...

...It does not on either count...

...I think it vital that we come up with a new approach to welfare...

...I am going to work in the same general direction this year, and hope that all liberals will, as a first step toward a total reform of the welfare system of the United States...

...And if she had gone to Newark, New Jersey, she would have received $4,164...

...Deep within me I have a hidden fear that perhaps some of the liberal opponents of the President's plan are spurred in part because it was Richard Nixon who proposed it...

...That did not rest well with some of my liberal colleagues in the House and Senate, but I think I was right...

...Beneficiaries of the FAP would be expected to meet one requirement—to register and be available for work...

...But the fact of political life is that FAP is the only immediate move we can take, and the only alternative to taking that step this year or next is a continuation of our existing system, marked by three decades of failure...

...health service workers, $3,156...

...Yet in the Family Assistance Plan his Administration has offered more in the way of fundamental change for the good in the country's well-intentioned, but basically bad, welfare system than we were able to achieve in a decade of New Frontiers and Great Societies...

...This set of attitudes has formed the bedrock of our welfare system since the 1930s...

...New York City's welfare population includes one-seventh of the city population—1.1 million people...

...We will help both kinds of poor families, and there will be job training and incentives for people to work their way out of welfare...

...These benefits will be provided regardless of the health or presence of a father...

...Instead of hopeless, idle people on the dole, we can provide desperately needed helpers in public service: teacher's aides, day care workers for parents who want to take jobs, hospital aides, people to beautify our parks, and other services badly needed today...

...In that time the cost has skyrocketed from $5.3 billion to $14 billion...

...There is a big push by the country's mayors and governors for a massive revenue sharing plan...

...The best way to help states and localities, as well as the poor, is to act now on the President's Family Assistance Plan, put it into operation immediately, and then federalize the system so that all of the costs are paid on the national level...

...f California and New York together have a total welfare load of three million people...

...Yet the welfare system, like a huge magnet, draws millions of poorly trained, poorly educated people off the farms and out of the rural areas of our country and into the already crowded cities...

...They are linked in a strange alliance with some conservatives who think that FAP is "something for nothing" and amounts to a guaranteed annual income for people who do not deserve it...

...And it is pretty easy for liberals to point to the bogeymen of Ronald Reagan and Richard Nixon to justify just about any position they want to take...

...The senseless result: she may become a permanent rider of the welfare rolls...

...restaurant employes, $2,147...

...Each year a parade of officials and individuals comes through my office seeking "Federal grants"—grants to cities for building sewers, grants to students to pursue an education, grants to farmers to stabilize production and improve the land...

...These are people who want to work, and who work hard, but who remain desperately poor and so their children suffer...

...The lesson we have to remember is that, in the history of Congress, once a Federal social program of this sort is started, benefits do rise if pressure continues to be applied...

...This attitude may have made some sense in a rural society or in simpler times, but the FAP challenges the idea that it makes good sense in the 1970s...

...In Los Angeles, one of eight residents draws a welfare check, and in the face of a faltering economy and heavy layoffs in the aerospace industry, welfare rolls climb by as much as 15,000 new cases every month...

...It is not just an enlarged welfare system...

...But one thing is clear: unless something drastic, fundamental, and far-reaching is done we can be sure that next year, and every year, costs and taxes will go up and up in a deadly drain of the nation's resources...

...It is important to understand why that change is necessary...

...Compounding the disaster, we have not one welfare system, but fifty—a different set of rules for each state...

...We have to face facts and admit that our welfare system has continually contributed to that process, no matter what our intentions when we started it...

...for laundry workers, $2,729...

...That would save state and local governments $9.7 billion next year alone...

...In addition, it will junk the existing Aid to Families with Dependent Children program as a means of helping children of the poor...

...The median earnings of domestic workers in 1969 was $1,061...

...Thus in many states, AFDC will not help a family with children if there is an able-bodied working man in the house capable of contributing to his family's support...

...This would particularly help our working poor, totally unaided now...

...it will be administered by fewer people...

...There are not many readers of The Progressive who are on welfare...

...it is founded on some principles fundamentally different from "welfare" as we now know it...

...A direct result of a federalization of the welfare system would be a national set of welfare standards that would end the inequities which are the hallmark of the patchwork system we have built...

...But we cannot be content with simply accept-ing what President Nixon has proposed...

...But I think it is time that we at least start listening to some conservative voices, even if we think they are wrong, and in listening, perhaps help put poverty and welfare above partisanship...

...A poor child in Arkansas deserves the same level of nutrition and clothing as one in Arizona or Ohio...

...Second, as welfare developed it incorporated a basic evil principle—the proviso that denies relief to a family with "a man in the house...

...That is not to say that the liberal opponents of the President's plan were and are wrong in their beliefs that FAP does not go far enough, and that it will not provide the poor with gate passes to the promised land as the President implies...

...It will be a system designed, as President Nixon said, to "place a floor under the income of every family with children in America—and without those demeaning, soul-stifling affronts to human dignity that so blight the lives of welfare children today...

...Here comes the rub: transportation, uniforms, and day care for her children come to $1,200 a year...

...Common sense would suggest that we encourage her to take the $4,800 job and let her keep perhaps $1,500 of the welfare check...

...Here are just a few exhibits from today's chamber of welfare horrors: ? Thirteen million Americans now receive some kind of public assistance...

...No one expects those three million people—mainly hard core unemploy-ables—to work...

...We have a chance to make some fundamental changes...

...The frightening rise in welfare budgets is forcing many states to cut back on schools and other desperately needed services...

...It is a sad commentary on the snail's pace of progress, and the divisions in the liberal world, that the conservative "Mr...

...This "people subsidy" can become a reality if liberals back FAP...

...But if she can get to Tucson, Arizona, with her children, she will receive $2,004...

...The change in many states, particularly in the South, would be dramatic...

...But we do have a chance to provide a true alternative that will accept the best parts of the FAP and provide local relief from spiraling tax pressures as well...

...And the FAP will protect the rights and needs of the overwhelming majority of those now receiving public assistance—the ninety-five per cent who, according to Department of Health, Education and Welfare statistics, cannot work because of handicaps, or because they are mothers who have nowhere to leave their children in order to take a job —if one exists...

...It is a sad commentary on the divisions in the liberal community that a man with Richard Nixon's checkered past could be offered up as the author of welfare reform in the 1970s...

...Thus from the start the system offered aid only to certain categories of needy adults—the blind, the aged, the crippled, those physically unable to work...

...Thus, a deserted mother of three living in Mississippi, where farm jobs have been mechanized, will receive $840 a year if she tries to keep her family together at home among her relatives and friends...

...Every poor family of four will be guaranteed a money income of at least $1,600...

...A good first step would be to enact FAP, followed by a federalization of the entire welfare system...

...Republican" could say that two decades ago and be regarded as marching in the ranks of liberal thinking today...

...A parent, if covered by the registration requirement, would lose his or her $500 in benefits upon refusal to register, but the children would not be penalized (as now), and payments for them would continue...

...Today the United States has the largest number of people drawing public aid since the 1930s...

...It seems certain that "revenue sharing" is not going to pass this year or next—and I do not think it should...

...This work requirement might well be coupled with a program of Federally subsidized public service employment...

...Thus, if she takes the job she may become ineligible for any welfare, though she is worse off by $500...

...Suppose she finds a $4,800-a-year job as a waitress...

...It is a monster which affects the lives of 13.5 million Americans, costs more than $14 billion a year, and gets bigger and costlier every day...

...And, economically speaking, there are 10.5 million Americans today who are "walking wounded...

...That was Senator Robert A. Taft —in 1949...

...Consider these statistics: If the head of a family of four worked forty hours a week for fifty-two weeks a year at the Federal minimum wage of $1.60 an hour, he would earn $3,328—the current Federal poverty level for a city family is $3,967...

...Two basic American beliefs are that work is good for an individual, and that people physically able to work should do so...

...In recent years this concept has begun to change, and it will be altered even more under FAP...

...No one is going to argue that the $2,400 is adequate as a living level...

...If we federalize the system we can compel a complete overhaul...

...I think I was right in working for House passage of the FAP...

...The whole monster is controlled by a jungle of laws and regulations which could and does baffle Philadelphia lawyers...

...At the heart of today's problem is this AFDC program, for until recently we carried forward into AFDC that basic notion of refusing help, in theory at least, to all able-bodied men and their dependents...

...We could take one of our most pressing social problems and devote concentrated attention to it with the urgency of a "space race," a race aimed at providing a decent life for the poor...

...In each of these cases, we grant Federal money because society supposedly gets something valuable in return: agricultural stability, an educated nation, clear water...

...It isn't...

...On top of that, under a sliding scale, would be wages the poor would be allowed to keep from jobs encouraged under the FAP...

...As a direct result, those funds could be put to local uses...

...Briefly put, the FAP will combine and streamline assistance programs for the blind, aged, and disabled...

...This plan will reduce snooping...

...jobs for the unskilled are scarce...

...But common sense is not so common in the welfare jungle...

...Much has been written about the polarization of our society—and the growth of the divisions splitting us...

...MORRIS K. UDALL, Arizona Democrat, has served in the House of Representatives since 1961...

...These are all subsidies given for the "welfare" of particular people...

...This would quickly relieve states of a huge and growing drain on their budgets and free a lot of local tax dollars for education, health, crime control, and all the other urgent needs...

...The broad trends which have drawn some twenty million people off farms and out of the small towns into the big cities are a direct product of a national, highly centralized, mechanized, computerized society...

...Suppose the Mississippi mother goes to Newark and gets $4,160 a year in welfare...

...Coupled to those beliefs is the attitude that an able-bodied person willing to work can find work and therefore needs no public aid or charity...