Big bad welfare.

• Author: Conniff, Ruth
• Position: Welfare reform politics and children - Cover Story

Over a free lunch, a group of experts gathered at a right-wing think tank this spring to talk about cutting off aid to the poor. The mood in the gracious, twelfth-floor conference center at the American Enterprise Institute on 17th Street NW, a few blocks from the White House, was positively festive. Participants--Republicans and Democrats alike who want to cancel Aid to Families with Dependent Children--agreed that their moment has come.

Doing away with welfare is the issue of the hour. President Clinton's new welfare-reform plan, various competing proposals in Congress, and a plethora of workfare experiments in the states all aim to end "welfare as we know it." According to the polls, a majority of Americans think the welfare system ought to be scrapped.

How to do this will be the subject of debate for at least the next year. But the American Enterprise Institute luncheon was a pep rally for the winning team. Whatever their quibbles with one another, the participants were on the same side, united against a common enemy. Who that enemy is became clear by the end of the afternoon.

"The act of getting pregnant if you are not prepared to care for a child is not morally neutral, it is a very destructive act," sociologist Charles Murray told the group. "And much as we may sympathize with a young woman who finds herself in that situation ... part of arranging society so that happens as seldom as possible is to impose terrible penalties on that act."

The terrible penalties, he explained, include "severe social stigma" and poverty.

In the United States, according to Murray, the social order has been disrupted by welfare: "The only way we have lifted the terrible penalties--economic penalties--of having a child out of wedlock is by intervening using the power of the state." In order to set things right, Murray said, we must restore the sanctions on single motherhood. "That means ending welfare in all its forms (even though I, for various reasons, say okay, we'll keep Medicaid).... And I have used the O-word, 'orphanage,' as a symbol for the kind of thing we must think about as an alternative."

The other participants concurred. "Thanks to Charles Murray, I think those of us in the political world are now a little less bashful in talking about some of the pernicious effects of illegitimacy," said William Weld, the Republican governor of Massachusetts. Weld kicked off his keynote address with some snide remarks about a family in his state that had four generations on welfare, "including fourteen children of the matriarch, who came to Massachusetts in 1968.... Several sons among these fourteen children were on disability for anxiety, so the idea of work made them anxious."

He went on to outline his proposal for welfare reform in Massachusetts, which, he says, would save the taxpayers money and drastically reduce unemployment simply by prodding people on welfare to get out of the house and do community service jobs and other "routine tasks." ("We avoid the W-word, 'work,' which seems to inflame passions," Weld said.) Under Weld's plan, after sixty days, able-bodied welfare recipients would be pushed into the labor force. The state would convert their cash grants into day care and health care.

The rest of the panelists--Mickey Kaus, a neoliberal Democrat and an editor of The New Republic; Amitai Etzioni, a professor of sociology and the editor of the communitarian magazine The Responsive Community; Robert Lerman, chairman of the economics department at American University, and Murray--all praised Weld's proposal. There was some back and forth about the details of the plan, but in principle and in tone, everyone agreed. ("I think Governor Weld is on the side of the angels," Murray said. "Charles, let me say that I think you're on the side of the angels, too" Weld replied.)

Talk about welfare reform these days revolves around a few common themes. Money is the first: It is now the conventional wisdom that AFDC is a massive, wasteful program, and taxpayers are fed up with paying for it. Work is the second: Most Americans don't like the idea of idleness, and there is broad agreement that people on welfare ought to go to work. Illegitimacy is the third: Charles Murray and others promote the claim that the "culture of poverty" is transmitted through single mothers to their children, making welfare dependency a way of life. Poverty, in this view, is a problem of morality, not economics. If single mothers and their children tend to be poor, society must not encourage them by alleviating their suffering.

Murray first advanced this theory in his 1984 book Losing Ground, which earned him a place on the lunatic fringe of the welfare debate. But times have changed. These days, popular attitudes toward the poor have shifted to the Right. Murray's scarlet-letter approach is currently being tested in states that cut aid to women on AFDC when they have more than one child. Under President Clinton's new welfare plan, states would get an automatic green light to conduct more such experiments.

Rather than ending poverty as we know it, current welfare reform plans, including the President's, simply focus on ending welfare.

Under the President's proposal, women on welfare would be forced to go to work after...