Voice of the people. (letter)

Welfare's Failings

December 12, 1995|By Howard N. Sims.

COLUMBUS, Ohio — R. Shankar Nair (Op-Ed, Nov. 24) seems to think we must acknowledge "that the welfare state, as we know it, has worked." He is dead wrong.

Welfare has miserably failed to reach its original goal, which was to decrease dependency on handouts. In 1962 President John F. Kennedy, introducing his welfare-reform proposal, asserted that the whole point was "to strengthen and broaden the rehabilitative and preventive services" offered to "persons who are dependent or who would otherwise become dependent." In 1964, after passage of the Welfare Bill, President Lyndon Johnson exulted, "The days of the dole are numbered."

A subsidiary aim of the "war on poverty" was to reduce crime and violence. If, as Mr. Nair asserts, 29,000,000 people have been lifted above poverty in 1993, something is wrong. What is wrong is that welfare apologists have shifted their sights from what was originally intended to be a program to end need to a self-perpetuating system of handout, from encouraging independence to subsidizing poverty.

But success by redefinition can only put off the day of reckoning. Our job now is to refocus on President Kennedy's goal, to reduce "not only the long-range cost in budgetary terms but in human terms as well."