Welfare State

Maryland ClubI was saddened to read about the fire that severely damaged the Maryland Club.I hope the club can fully restore the architectural detail that four generations, and I as a guest, have appreciated and enjoyed.This period of rebuilding is a fitting time for the Maryland Club to refurbish its membership parameters to include women.With the support and enthusiasm of male and female members, the Maryland Club would indeed see its eminent building and traditions continue for another 100 years.

The greatest moral imperative we face is replacing the welfare state with an opportunity society.For every day that we allow the current conditions to continue, we are condemning the poor -- and particularly poor children -- to being deprived of their basic rights as Americans.The welfare state reduces the poor from citizens to clients. It breaks up families, minimizes work incentives, blocks people from saving and acquiring property and overshadows dreams of a promised future with a present despair born of poverty, violence and hopelessness.

In a fascinating replay in miniature of the national debate over crime and welfare reform, the District of Columbia's overwhelmingly Democratic, "liberal" city council has given its blessing to two bills that could have come straight out of Newt Gingrich's "Contact with America." If that seems a contradiction, it only shows how corrupted words like "liberal" and "conservative" have become in a season when political labels are tossed around with careless contempt for meanings.The council, alarmed over rampant juvenile crime in neighborhoods where parents can't or won't control their children, passed a curfew banning young people under 17 from being on the street after 11 p.m. on weekdays or after midnight on weekends.

AFTER GROUSING about it for eternities, Republicans are finally making a sincere effort to destroy the welfare state.For the past 60 years Republicans have been saying the welfare state was destroying us, or would destroy us, and we'd better destroy it first, or else.When their chances came, though, Republicans as formidable as Dwight Eisenhower, Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan always decided it was wiser to go on living with it.Now the Newtites are at last doing their best to bring it down.

The new Republican majority in Congress is pledging to do this year what it refused to allow President Clinton to accomplish last year: End Welfare as We Know It.Monday the House will begin marking up the GOP welfare reform proposal in the Ways and Means Subcommittee on Human Resources, chaired by Rep. E. Clay Shaw, R-Fla.Mr. Shaw's bill would end individual entitlement to cash benefits from the federal government and replace it with block grants to the states, which could use the money however they saw fit. It would limit benefits to two years, ban extra benefits for women who had additional children while on welfare and deny assistance to unmarried teen-age mothers and to most immigrants.

HOUSE Speaker Newt Gingrich speaking recently to the National Governors Association:"And it seems to me it's true not because of a political ideology or a political movement but because of five large realities that you face at the governor's level, we face in the Congress, the president faces in the White House, the cities and counties face at their level. . ."The Alvin and Heidi Toffler model of a third wave of change. I mean, go back and look at government just prior to the rise of agriculture, then look at government during the agricultural era, what they called the first wave.

When Gov.-elect Parris N. Glendening named UMAB Prof. Linda Thompson to be secretary for children, youth and families, one of the busiest people in state government settled for wearing only one hat. Children, youth and families secretary since 1989, Nancy S. Grasmick added the duties of state superintendent of schools in 1991. It proved a heavy burden, but Dr. Grasmick combined those jobs with remarkable effect.One reason government-funded social programs have been less effective than they should be is the fragmentation of these services.

In the rush to overturn the welfare state, it's not at all clear that the changes ahead will be ones the states can live with easily.Exhibit A: the food and nutrition programs that have reduced hunger and malnutrition dramatically in this country. One suggestion has been to lump these programs together in block grants with welfare programs that are far less popular and effective -- not a good idea for anyone interested in sustaining the progress this country has made against hunger.Another idea is to do away altogether with the entitlements associated with the welfare state.

WASHINGTON -- Last Saturday, two days before he would realize his life's ambition and be named the speaker of the House of Representatives, Rep. Newt Gingrich spent seven hours -- with only a short pizza break -- holed up in a Capitol conference room with a psychotherapist."

There is an inevitable connection, often overlooked, between welfare and charity. Welfare is the government's often clumsy attempt to ease the pains of poverty. Charities often have the same goal, but do their work through private means. As the new Republican-controlled Congress debates welfare reform proposals in the coming months, it is important to keep in mind the similarities and differences between these two essential ways of providing aid for the poor.Welfare systems often produce large, relatively impersonal bureaucracies.