Meg Whitman vs. the Welfare State
LOS ANGELES — Will former eBay CEO Meg Whitman be the Tommy Thompson-style welfare reformer of the coming decade?
Ms. Whitman, a Republican gubernatorial candidate in California, is fashioning herself as the latest crusader promising to crack down on abuses of the welfare state, which is nowhere more corrupt and costly than in the Golden State. Last week her campaign launched a series of radio ads now running across the state that educate Californians on the abuses of public assistance in this near-bankrupt state.
"Welfare can’t be a way of life," is the headline of the ads, and Ms. Whitman’s campaign is betting the farm that this message will resonate with California voters. The system is "completely broken," she says and the ads punctuate that theme with jaw-dropping statistics. For example: California has twice the population of New York but five times as many welfare cases. One reason, her campaign says, is that California offers "among the highest cash welfare checks of any state. But only 22% of our recipients work for their benefits."
These are the kinds of statistics that were commonplace in other states in the 1980s and 1990s, after then-Wisconsin Gov. Tommy Thompson inaugurated a wave of state and federal welfare reforms that cut caseloads by more than half. But as Donna Arduin, California’s former budget director and now an adviser to Ms. Whitman, points out: "California never adopted many of the reforms that were adopted in the 1990s in other states — and that worked to lower costs."
One of the reforms Ms. Whitman touts is to "put able-bodied welfare recipients to work" or require them to be "looking for employment, performing community service, or working toward a GED." She also wants to cut the welfare benefit from five years to two years. California is one of the only states that does not already require these two common sense protections against fraud and abuse.
Whitman aides tell me that balancing the budget in California — the deficit is headed back up to $20 billion this year — is nearly impossible without getting welfare costs under control. California is twenty years behind the curve on welfare reform, and Ms. Whitman may be the first candidate in a generation with a concrete plan to replace lifetime welfare with work and dignity. It may just be a message that California voters are hungering for.
— Stephen Moore
January 28th, 2010 at 12:00 am
In light of the whole Arnold fiasco, I could care less what any of these dilettantes has to say, but rather what they will do. These rich folks will spend their own money in a narcissistic pursuit of power for themselves, either because they are deluded enough to believe that they are what is needed to fix what so many before them could not, or they just think it would be a cool addition to the CV/Resume. You don’t see them supporting worthy causes like the part-time legislature which might do some actual immediate good.
January 28th, 2010 at 12:00 am
Welfare benefits are in a direct sense child support paid by the taxpayer. The State of California and the federal government has spent billions of dollars on the CA Department of Child Support Services (DCSS), and the best they can do is collect 52.3% of current child support due, and 48.8% of arrears due. The children of California are owed $19 BILLION in child support arrearages. The key to welfare reform is stricter accountability on non-custodial parents to pay their child support.
January 31st, 2010 at 12:00 am
It is pure fantasy to believe that one can control welfare expenditure by stricter controls of child support collection from non-custodial parents. I know what I speak of as I worked in this defunct system for 16 years. More often than not, non-custodial parents are not the gainfully employed individual who refuses to pay support. If anything they mirror the custodial parent who is on welfare: almost illiterate, uneducated, skill-less, jobless, unmotivated or illegal whose income is untraceable. What both have in common is the ability to breed which brings them income in the form of “welfare” at the taxpayers expense. Welfare is out of control, because we as a society decided a long time ago that it was okay for people to breed without any social responsibility and they would be rewarded for it.
May 3rd, 2010 at 12:00 am
Non-custodial parents who are not gainfully employed individual who refuse to pay support could be rounded up or made to work in the jobs that folks are saying we need illegal immigrants for. We could kill two birds with one stone. Instead of just releasing convicts into a society that has high unemployment, they too could be placed in these types of jobs, and we could kill three birds with one stone.