• U.S.

Welfare Overhaul Senators pass a landmark bill

2 minute read
TIME

What began in 1935 as a temporary pension program for widows, then ballooned into an income-maintenance program for millions of unemployed women with children, may now become a job program that would enable people to get off the dole altogether. By a vote of 93 to 3, the Senate agreed last week to revamp the nation’s welfare laws in the hope of breaking the cycle of dependency on government support. “It’s the first major change since the 1930s,” said New York’s Democratic Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the architect of the bill, “and it redefines the notion of welfare.”

The idea behind the landmark measure is to get people off relief by getting them into jobs. The bill requires that states provide job training, education and work for able-bodied welfare recipients, except those with children under the age of three. (States have the option of lowering that limit to age one.) To ensure the transition from handouts to breadwinning, states would have to provide child care for nine months and Medicaid for up to a year after the parent gets a job.

The bill remedies one much criticized aspect of the present federal program: that two-parent families cannot receive benefits. The new measure extends benefits to families in which both parents are unemployed; no longer will there be an incentive for a father to leave the home. In fact, the incentives will go the other way: the bill will get delinquent fathers to pay their fair share of child support by requiring employers to deduct support payments from their wages.

The Senate bill is a companion to a House bill passed last December. The $7 billion House measure is more expensive and less stringent, and it provides greater benefits. Differences between the two must now be resolved by a House- Senate conference committee. The White House prefers the sterner Senate version. To avoid a potential presidential veto, a last-minute amendment was added to the Senate bill that requires one adult in two-parent welfare families to devote at least 16 hours a week to “workfare,” or unpaid community work projects. The Senate and the Administration have already struck a compromise whereby 22% of those receiving benefits must have jobs or be enrolled in education or training programs by 1994. Says Moynihan: “If it works by the turn of the century, we will have a different social landscape.”

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