Who Should Still Be On Welfare?

Cherlyndra Wells, 21, was just the kind of welfare recipient who sets critics of welfare programs off on a rant. A single mother of four from Dallas, she left school in the ninth grade and started having children. Rather than work or marry a man who did, she relied on welfare, food stamps and Medicaid. The tough 1996 welfare-reform law spelled out in clear terms what it wanted Wells and others like her to do in the future: get a job.

Under the new rules, Wells' life changed drastically--but not the way reformers intended. She did give up welfare last year, but not to work. Instead she lives with her mother. She takes the occasional odd job and gets help from her children's father, who kicks in support "whenever he can." Health care is tough--"I have a pile of bills this high," she says--but she found a hospital emergency room that treats her kids even when she can't pay. Wells succeeded in bucking a major national trend. She didn't join the millions of Americans who have left the welfare rolls in recent years for gainful employment.

These are euphoric times for welfare reform. The rolls have plunged nationwide--down 48% in the past six years, to a 30-year low. And two-thirds of those exiting the system have taken jobs, according to state studies. Last week's Welfare to Work conference in Chicago, which President Clinton addressed, was a three-day lovefest between advocates for welfare recipients and labor-strapped companies seeking to hire them. Among the most surreal moments: a session on "Finding Welfare Recipients for Your Training Programs," at which social workers bellyached that in these boom times there just aren't enough welfare moms to go around.

But the more welfare reform succeeds, the clearer it is that there is an entrenched group of welfare recipients who show no sign of heading anywhere near the workforce. This is true, for example, in Dallas, where despite a frothy economy and a countywide unemployment rate of just 3.6%, 17,500 of Wells' neighbors are collecting welfare benefits as if nothing had changed.

Welfare professionals have a term for these persistent welfare cases: the hard to serve. Many have backgrounds that employers shun: weak education, illiteracy, drug and alcohol abuse, mental-health problems and criminal records. Often they also have logistical obstacles, like transportation and child-care difficulties. And, some argue, many of them have the toughest barrier of all: they don't want to do work.

Today the hard to serve are the hottest topic in welfare reform--and the subject of a hard-fought ideological battle. To liberals--and the Clinton Administration--the answer is greater investment in job training, substance-abuse counseling and other programs to help them overcome their various obstacles and get to work. At the same time, liberals have begun calling on the Federal Government to reconsider a central tenet of the 1996 reforms: that virtually every welfare recipient can and should be in the workforce. "It flies in the face of common sense," says University of Michigan public policy professor Sheldon Danziger. "There's no evidence from any welfare program that everyone can work steadily."