Welfare System

WASHINGTON -- The nation's 62-year-old welfare system, condemned last year by federal law, will formally die tomorrow, and a season of state legislative debate has brought new clarity to the decentralized system rising in its place.If the emerging programs share a unifying theme, it can be summarized in a word: work. States are demanding that recipients find it faster, keep it longer and perform it as a condition of aid. Most states regard even a low-paying, dead-end job preferable to the education and training programs they offered in the past.

FREDERICK -- The article, ''Welfare Reform: the return of indentured servitude'' (Opinion Commentary, March 28), was perhaps well-intentioned. Douglas Miles and his co-authors are correct about one thing: The poor may become the losers in the debate over welfare reform. Unfortunately, the divisive language could undermine efforts to reform a welfare system that many feel is out of control, placing the poor in gravest jeopardy.In the first place, ''indentured servitude,'' implying that welfare reform is moving us back to slavery, is plain erroneous.

WASHINGTON -- Because of the ''psychological bomb,'' welfare reform has been jump-started. It is working well, and will likely work better. It may end up as a salutary turning point in American social policy. It could even turn the direction of policy in other areas of the world.I say this after moderating a vigorous ''Think Tank'' program on PBS with a quite remarkable panel, who didn't agree on many things -- in some cases caustically. The four participants have been both scholars and activists in the great welfare wars of the last decade.

LAST AUG. 22, President Clinton made good his promise to "end welfare as we know it" by signing into law the "Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996." He heralded the new law as "the beginning of a new era in which welfare will become what it was meant to be: a second chance, not a way of life."Like many big-city mayors, I believe that changes in the welfare system were long overdue. I agree wholeheartedly with the president that it ought to be a system that is transitional and moves people to independence, not to prolonged dependence.

Poverty is the problem, not welfare systemSince the presidential campaign of 1992, the American public has heard about ''ending welfare as we know it.'' This objective assumes that the problem is the welfare system. How absurd.The real problem is poverty, and until we focus our policy making within this context, no welfare reform will be effective.The first step in making policy is to define the problem. Politicians have done the American people a disservice by framing the debate around changing or eliminating the welfare system.

HAVRE DE GRACE -- ''The last thing we need in our society,'' said Kweisi Mfume earlier this month, ''is 50 welfare systems.''The NAACP president expressed this judgment during a luncheon speech to a convention of editorial writers, who were gathered in Baltimore to party it up and exchange ideas about how to tell their readers what to think. For all I know, all of them agreed with Mr. Mfume, who is a talented and sometimes passionate speaker.At any rate, none of those present was rude enough, or perhaps awake enough, to leap up and challenge him -- to ask why, with the federal welfare system an acknowledged catastrophe, it wouldn't make much more sense to let each state devise its own approach.

Will's disservice to conservatismIt is a sign that the presidential campaign is in full swing when normally reasonable political commentators abandon logic and consistency in the pursuit of partisan advantage.A perfect example is George F. Will's column of Aug. 26. Will, perhaps the foremost proponent of American conservatism, professes to divine the innermost thoughts and beliefs not only of Bill Clinton but of the entire Democratic Congress.In Will's opinion, Clinton is cynical because he does not truly believe what he says, unlike Ronald Reagan, who was a man of principle in belief and action.

WASHINGTON -- Under election-year pressure, President Clinton and the Republican-led Congress appear to be on the verge of an agreement to end the 61-year-old federal guarantee of welfare for anyone who qualifies.Republican leaders settled yesterday on a welfare reform bill that they believe makes enough concessions to the president to assure that this third version of the measure will be signed by him. Clinton vetoed the first two."It looks like we are coming to the end of what has been a very long road," said Rep. E. Clay Shaw Jr., the Florida Republican who is among the chief architects of the legislation.

BEFORE CONGRESS recesses for the national conventions, it may actually send three major measures to President Clinton: health insurance reform, a rise in the minimum wage and the most sweeping changes in the welfare system since the New Deal. Moreover, Mr. Clinton is almost sure to sign the first two and is under intense pressure to swallow the third. He should.As Republican challenger Bob Dole surveys this scene, it can hardly be reassuring. The Senate under Trent Lott of Mississippi is, with Democratic cooperation, building up a legislative record that eluded Mr. Dole when he was majority leader.

EAST ST. LOUIS, Ill. -- In this Mississippi River city populated mostly by welfare mothers and their children, government is a lifeline, not a bad word.For a generation, East St. Louis has been a postmark of urban blight. To conservatives who live outside its borders, it serves as a shorthand for everything wrong with liberal solutions. Socially concerned liberals come here periodically to use the city as a canvas to paint stark pictures of the inequities of American life.Half the people in East St. Louis live in government housing, so federal bureaucrats are their landlords.