Hd– Welfare Pains

In the year since Congress finally handed over the nation’s welfare problem to the states, a lot has been accomplished and yet, with all the studies, pilot programs and legislation, two key questions remain unanswered: To what extent can welfare recipients be trained and are American businesses willing to hire them?

The training issue is critical, because many of those on welfare have little skill in even applying for a job, much less holding onto one. It’s one thing to curtail welfare as this state has done by limiting aid to just two years but it’s quite another to determine what happens after that.

The so-called welfare-to-work programs are designed to address those issues and the GAIN program, in particular, has received particularly favorable notices.

The program is unusual in that its emphasis is on getting a job rather than on job training. Los Angeles County officials say they are placing 4,300 people a month through GAIN, a 10-fold increase from four years ago. Last year, more than 40,000 people were placed into jobs.

Certainly those are impressive numbers, which helps explain why the state is happy to keep increasing the program’s annual budget.

Another positive sign: a recent report by the Council of Economic Advisors that the welfare caseload nationally has fallen by more than 40 percent.

But beneath those encouraging statistics lies a less buoyant reality: Placing people in low-paying jobs is one thing having them better their financial situation is quite another. The one inescapable obstacle in overhauling the welfare system is that it’s often more financially beneficial to stay on the welfare rolls than to take a low-wage job. With staying on welfare no longer an option, it’s obvious that there will be a migration toward the work place. Less obvious is whether those jobs represent a step up.

Also uncertain is the future of those jobs. In these best of economic times, employers are more willing to hire; when times get tougher, there’s more resistance, especially for marginal posts.

That’s why policy makers must focus their priorities on job training and business incentives two areas that remain muddled.

Take, for example, California being awarded $189 million in federal job creation funds. That money, the biggest share of any state, will be distributed in a way that makes it difficult to coordinate with the state’s other job programs.

What we’ve feared all along appears to be taking shape: one giant bureaucracy (Washington) passing along the welfare mess to another giant bureaucracy (Sacramento), with little, if any, coordination to ensure that the limited funds are spent as sensibly as possible.

Meanwhile, relatively little attention is being paid to the role of business. There have been calls for a variety of incentives ranging from outright tax breaks to the waiving of stress claims and at first glance many of these proposals would seem appropriate.

The problem is no one really knows for sure. That’s the problem with the welfare overhaul in general: There are few, if any, guideposts to follow. And just as there have been some early successes, there no doubt are going to be failures as well.

Or as put by Deputy Labor Secretary Kitty Higgins: “If this had been easy to do, it would have been done by now. This is not easy to do.”