Welfare Reform

IN 1987, Riverside County took a bold step toward reforming its welfare program. The county's human services agency, which I ran from 1996 to 2004, was a leader in changing welfare from a monthly check with no strings attached to a program that focused on self-sufficiency through employment. The "work first" philosophy we pioneered was highly successful, and our approach became a model for sweeping national welfare reform in 1996.

WHERE'S the fun? That's the feeling you get watching the Democrats in Washington this summer. Gone is the happy plan for a frenzy of lawmaking, the "Hundred Hours" of action Speaker Nancy Pelosi promised when the Democrats took the House. The speaker's artful allusion to Franklin D. Roosevelt's "Hundred Days" quickly became an ironic echo.

Even as the state spends millions of dollars on emergency prescription drug coverage for more than 200,000 elderly, poor and disabled Californians, many of their claims are still being denied, healthcare groups said Tuesday.

Only months ago, congressional Republicans thought the new Medicare prescription drug benefit would help them make political inroads among traditionally Democratic senior citizens. Instead, they are facing a potentially damaging backlash among members of that crucial voting bloc, their families and even conservative activists dismayed over the program's bungled launch. Georgia Rep.

The wide-ranging spending-cut bill scheduled for a final House vote on Wednesday includes provisions toughening welfare regulations, including work requirements on two-parent welfare families that experts say is almost impossible to meet. The Republican-backed bill would hold adults in two-parent families to a higher work standard than those in single-parent families.

Robert B. Carleson, who helped initiate major changes in the California welfare system in the early 1970s and implemented them as part of then-Gov. Ronald Reagan's administration, has died. He was 75. Carleson, of Alexandria, Va., who continued to focus on welfare reform initiatives as a special assistant to Reagan when he became president, died Friday in a Washington, D.C., hospital after a brief illness, said his wife, Susan.

THE SWEEPING welfare reforms of the 1990s had two faces. Unfortunately, only one of them is on display during this week's celebrations of the 10th anniversary of these reforms. As policymakers and pundits praise the reforms' successes, they are focusing on one simple idea: work requirements -- the mandate that welfare recipients go to work or lose benefits. They're crediting it alone with successfully reforming the system.

THIS FALL marks the 10th anniversary of Clinton-era welfare reform, which imposed strict work requirements and time limits for receiving some forms of federal relief. Have the rules been a success? If the goal is employment, reform has unquestionably triumphed. Many single mothers -- the prime recipients under the old Aid to Families with Dependent Children program -- have dropped off the rolls entirely.

Rachel Amshalom was living on the edge even before she lost her job as a teacher's assistant last summer. Amshalom, the single mother of an 8-year-old daughter, said her monthly income subsidy from the Israeli government shrank from $300 to $75 in 2003 in the wake of sweeping welfare cutbacks. Amshalom said she also lost a small slice of her already minuscule child allowance, a benefit paid to all Israeli parents that has been scaled back.

In his column, "Of, by and for Big Business" (Commentary, Feb. 22), most of what Robert Scheer says about this administration is accurate, but don't blame the Republicans. The Republicans are just serving their constituency. It would be nice if the Democrats served their constituency as well. None of these bills could become law if the Democrats were actually an opposition party. They have enough votes in the Senate to prevent any bill from becoming law -- but they usually don't. People seem to forget it was a Democratic Senate that confirmed Clarence Thomas for the Supreme Court, and it was a Democratic president who brought us the North American Free Trade Agreement, the World Trade Organization and welfare reform.