Welfare Reform

German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder's proposals for tax cuts and long-contemplated welfare reforms -- known as Agenda 2010 -- were scaled back Friday by political parties unwilling to enact more sweeping legislation in an attempt to enliven Europe's largest economy. What Parliament approved the day before Christmas recess could be termed Agenda 2010 Lite. The $19 billion in income-tax cuts Schroeder proposed for 2004 were reduced to about $10 billion.

About 100,000 people marched in Berlin to protest Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder's plans to trim Germany's generous welfare state, the biggest show of opposition so far to the proposal aimed at reviving Europe's largest economy. Answering the call of labor unions and left-wing groups, protesters chanted slogans and carried signs saying "Poverty for all" and "Why take from the rich while we've still got the poor?"

Locked in low-wage, dead-end jobs and socially segregated by limited English skills, working-class Vietnamese Americans in the state's welfare-to-work program are burning through their benefits much faster than other recipients, according to policy analysts, social workers and activists.

Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder claimed a symbolic victory Friday when German lawmakers approved tax cuts worth about $21 billion and agreed to begin overhauling an entrenched welfare state that many say has weakened the world's third-largest economy. The votes by the lower house of Parliament were a boost to Schroeder's politically dangerous plan to scale back Europe's most generous welfare system.

The lives of families relying on cash welfare benefits changed forever in 1996, when Congress set time limits on benefits and required many adult recipients to work. Soon, the conditions for receiving the government's support will probably get even tougher. The House passed a bill in February that would require a larger percentage of a state's recipients to take jobs and to work longer hours.

Despite all the efforts of welfare-to-work reforms, 78% of current and former welfare recipients who enter the labor force in Los Angeles County still earn incomes below the poverty threshold and many may never become self-sufficient because of disabilities and social dysfunctions, a new study concludes.

The statues are majestic, the buildings ornate. It feels as if the campus breathes money. But Humboldt University, with its 193 years of history and 29 Nobel Prize winners, is threatening not to enroll a freshman class next semester because a bankrupt Berlin is again cutting funding for higher education. This city of "poets and thinkers" makes an economist shudder.

Felipa Ayon sells parts off the Oldsmobile marooned in her frontyard -- the radio, window handles, anything for a few dollars. Even before asthma pushed her from Tulare County's grape fields three years ago, she needed a welfare check to make it through the dead of winter. Though Ayon still gets a government check for four of her children, the nation's reconstructed welfare policy has dried up her own $110 monthly payment for good.

Eleven months ago, when the local unemployment rate was steadily rising, Shantrese Burkes was defying the trend. A welfare mom with three kids, she landed a $9-an-hour job as a cashier at a cafe attached to a gas station. She didn't stop there. Two promotions later, Burkes, 28, is earning $27,000 a year as the cafe's manager and is eyeing her next step up the ladder.

Just when I think the Bush administration cannot go any further in its assaults on the least-advantaged Americans, I read "House Passes Bill to Step Up Welfare Work Requirements" (Feb. 14). Of course, these "compassionate conservatives" added little or nothing for child care or job training to help these people find work in a depressed economy. And then the Republicans reveal their true right-wing agenda, including in the bill $300 million annually for programs to encourage marriage and continuing a $50-million grant for states to promote abstinence from sex until marriage.