By DAVID LIEBER
Staff Writer
 

The new welfare law destroys the United States' national commitment to assisting the most impoverished citizens of this country. It is simply unconscionable that a country which generates such tremendous wealth condones the systemic abandonment of its most disadvantaged people. President Clinton made a commitment on the 1992 campaign trail to "end welfare as we know it," and if nothing else, he has certainly done that.

The Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (the new welfare law) ends the 61-year old entitlement to public assistance, establishes strict work requirements, imposes time limits on welfare receipt, accords considerable latitude to states to implement their own initiatives, and reduces welfare expenditures by $54 billion over the next 6 years.

The old welfare system was clearly indefensible because it often attacked the symptoms rather than the causes of poverty. Recipients could expect to receive a check from the government to sustain their families for another month, but rarely did the government provide the necessary tools to promote long-term self-sufficiency. But in fashioning a new law, prompted by public resentment of welfare, Congress and President Clinton have rashly created a welfare system that is likely to create more problems than it solves.

The most outrageous aspects of the new welfare law revolve around the gratuitous cuts in expenditures for food stamps, disabled children and legal immigrants. These cuts bear no relation whatsoever to the underlying purpose of welfare reform, which is to promote and reward work while undermining welfare dependence. Denying welfare recipients access to food is not going to educate them about the merits of work, and denying assistance to disabled children and legal immigrants won't teach them not to become disabled. Perhaps children will go hungry and the budget deficit will be reduced infinitesimally, but what other concrete goals do these cuts serve?

The new welfare law also arbitrarily imposes a five-year lifetime limit on receiving public assistance; no federal funds can be used to help recipients who have received welfare beyond this period of time. This particular time limit completely ignores the realities of the low-wage labor market.

Jobs within the low-wage labor market are usually episodic, producing frequent spells of unemployment. Some welfare recipients have no work experience, others lack basic skills, and most employers consequently are unwilling to hire them.

Recipients that live in rural areas and on Indian reservations have significantly fewer employment opportunities than recipients in larger cities. Many recipients who want to work in these areas do not have access to affordable public transportation systems that would enable them to commute to work.

The capacity of the low-wage labor market to absorb welfare recipients will undoubtedly be reduced during a recession. All of these factors increase the likelihood that some recipients will spend a substantial amount of time on welfare because of economic realities beyond their control.

What will happen to recipients when the five-year lifetime benefit limit hits? Few states have made a commitment to spend their own money on recipients who are ineligible for federal assistance because of time limits. And conversely, some states, including Massachusetts, have discussed using their expanded authority to lower the five-year lifetime benefit limit to two or three years.

Many states do not want to become "welfare magnets" by offering benefits that other states are eliminating. Former Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis once praised the states as "laboratories of democracy" for policy implementation, but he also feared that divergence among states would create a "race to the bottom" phenomenon, in which states would respond to increased autonomy by making their programs so unattractive that potential beneficiaries would either move or stay away from that particular state.

The United States is not in the midst of an economic recession and some states already have lowered time limits, reduced benefits, and made the application process for welfare receipt more difficult. It doesn't take a lot of imagination to predict how states will respond if the United States suffers a recession. As the amount of welfare recipients states must serve increases, the resources they possess to assist them will significantly decrease. Reduced tax revenues coupled with a $54 billion cut in welfare expendtiures mandated by the new law will force states to turn away potential recipients and curb or deny assistance to active recipients.

The doomsday scenario that many opponents of the new welfare law predicted would occur has not come to fruition.A favorable economy and the windfall of tax revenue that has come with it has allowed states to postpone the difficult decisions they must confront. But the new welfare law is one economic recession away from producing mass homelessness and substantial material hardship, and in the current political climate, these issues are likely to be ignored.