California Good editorial piece in today’s Union Tribune.
In recent weeks and months we have seen story after story about fraud and overpayments in our state welfare programs. The following editorial touches on Cal Works and In Home Supportive Services. Both programs need to be restructured, reduced, and reformed. Read it here or below.
UNION-TRIBUNE EDITORIAL
Fantastic fix
Governor right to demand welfare reform
2:00 a.m. July 15, 2009
The state budget debacle just might end up giving Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger one of his greatest policy triumphs: the overdue arrival of welfare reform in California.
The 1996 federal law putting a time limit on cash assistance to welfare recipients and pushing them to get jobs was decried as a mean-spirited assault on poor families. Thirteen years later, welfare reform on the national level stands as one of the great public policy success stories of recent times.
The number of families on welfare nationwide quickly plunged by more than half. Child poverty declined. Virtually every newspaper in the nation carried success stories about people who had prospered when finally forced off the government dole.
Except in California, where both the spirit and the letter of the federal law have often been ignored. Officials running the CalWORKS welfare program don’t rigorously enforce time limits on benefits, which are unusually generous. As Schwarzenegger says, this means state policies “are actually encouraging people to stay on welfare.”
The result: While California has 12 percent of the nation’s population, it has 30 percent of U.S. welfare recipients. No wonder the governor has sought for years to fix CalWORKS.
Now, at last, he has the upper hand. Reports out of budget talks suggest that Assembly Speaker Karen Bass, D-Los Angeles, and Senate President Darrell Steinberg, D-Sacramento, have accepted proposed changes in CalWORKS rules that would save $753 million this fiscal year and $1.5 billion annually in the future.
Given that welfare reform doesn’t just save the state lots of money, but it also has a track record of improving the lives of millions of people, this is a triumph of common sense.
The Western Center on Law and Poverty doesn’t agree. Nor do other advocates of social services for the needy. Nor does Assembly Budget Committee Chairwoman Noreen Evans, D-Santa Rosa, who melodramatically calls the governor’s plan a “family killer.”
But these same sorts of folks were dead wrong about welfare reform when they fought its adoption by Congress in 1996. They’re still wrong. On welfare, tough love beats being an enabler.
Schwarzenegger is facing more opposition in his push for reforms to another big state program: the fraud-ridden In-Home Supportive Services. Unlike welfare recipients, the caregivers, as part of the Service Employees International Union, have great clout with Bass and Steinberg.
But these are different times in Sacramento, and the Democratic leaders just might accept sweeping changes to the in-home nursing program.
Is this another sign of common sense? Not really. We’re in the dog-eat-dog phase of the budget fight. The biggest dog of all – the California Teachers Association – knows that every dollar cut out of other programs is a dollar that won’t be taken from education, which has by far the biggest share of the state budget. We suspect that the CTA has, um, communicated this viewpoint to Bass and Steinberg.
In the Union-Tribune on Page B6