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By sending out--or devolving--welfare programs to the states, Gingrich raises the prospect of more experimentation and innovation with a system that has not proved its value to date. But by capping the amount of money Washington is willing to send to the states and by putting limits on the number of years a welfare recipient can draw payments, the G.O.P. is testing the theory that if the poor know they are not automatically getting payments, they will lift themselves out of poverty. Democrats warn that, with caps and limits, the poor will be devastated. Counters Besharov: "Do a lot of states have Governors who want mothers sleeping on grates? No." Could it be that giving the poor less is a way of giving them more? Daniel Bell, professor emeritus of sociology at Harvard, speaks for the skeptics: "These things have real cultural roots. They take generational time to solve. The notion of taking the poor off welfare as a sort of cold bath is nonsense. I'm not arguing for the current situation. No one would. But nobody knows what is going to work. Why take a plunge in the dark? The oldest piece of conservative wisdom is to do things slowly."
Gingrich, however, believes the spirit of private charity will help the neediest cases when the government reduces welfare spending. He buttresses this tenet by borrowing heavily from the work of Marvin Olasky, a professor of journalism at the University of Texas and the editor of a Christian weekly newsmagazine. Olasky's thesis is that giving aid indiscriminately to poor people actually destroys those people, all the while turning taxpayers against the welfare programs. He advocates replacing welfare with private care giving, so that only the "deserving" poor are helped. A giant welfare state can't make the distinction, Gingrich argues; only those close enough to the poor can decide who deserves help and who doesn't.
Nevertheless, the Speaker of the House has neither done much nor said much to challenge his rich core constituency to shoulder more of the burden in curing poverty. His friend and sometime guru Arianna Huffington regularly urges her Republican friends to tithe 10% of their income to the poor. She has urged Gingrich to join her, but he has not. Nor has he explained why, even as the top marginal tax rate has fallen for the past 14 years, the taxpayers who have benefited the most--those who earn $125,000 or more a year--still give only 3.3% to charity, including cultural institutions like orchestras that do not address the plight of the poor.
Skeptical that private charity, unassisted, can really replace government, even a rock-ribbed conservative like Senator Dan Coats of Indiana has offered legislation to try to pump up giving. He has proposed a $500 tax credit for donations to institutions that devote 70% of their work to helping the poor directly. Unhappily, the cost of that measure alone would be $120 billion during the next seven years.
Taking all the revolution's assaults on antipoverty programs together, the Clinton Administration claims that an additional 1.5 million children will fall into poverty. On the other hand, liberals, Clinton included, don't have any good new ideas about how to solve the problems of the culture of dependence in America's ghettos. They have only the old ones that bankrupt the treasury and enrage the taxpayers.