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Jewish World Review Sept. 20, 2005 / 16 Elul, 5765 Bold, persistent experimentation By Rich Lowry
http://www.JewishWorldReview.com |
It is the other flood: The outpouring of concern for the poor of
New Orleans. According to nearly every journalist in America, our
consciousness has been raised about the invisible scourge of poverty
in this country, and nothing is too much to ask when addressing the
plight of the disadvantaged evacuees of New Orleans. They should get
every form of aid possible — except, that is, assistance that might
help give them more control over their lives.
The most controversial parts of the Bush aid package for New
Orleans are the ones that attempt to free the poor from the
tentacles of government bureaucracy. He wants to give the unemployed
personal accounts to assist in their job search and create a $500
million program to fund school vouchers for displaced children to
attended private schools. The current political climate is premised
on the notion that no one should say "no" to any Katrina-related
program, but Democrats will attempt to veto these proposals.
One argument that has always been advanced to block aid to poor
families who want to send their children to private schools is that,
in effect, the government can't afford it; it will starve public
schools of funding. But no one in Washington has any credibility to
say the federal government can't afford anything, since there is
very little that this Congress and administration isn't funding
fulsomely. Will $500 million for vouchers bleed public education
spending? That's hard to see when President Bush increased federal
education spending 65 percent during his first term.
The objection to these Bush proposals isn't fiscal, but
philosophical. They serve to undermine the principle of government
dependency that underpins the contemporary welfare state, and to
which liberals are utterly devoted. In a reversal of the old
parable, liberals don't want to teach people how to fish if they can
just give them federally funded seafood dishes instead.
The unemployed now get 26 weeks of federal unemployment
benefits, which are often extended and also supplemented by various
state programs. This is a social safety net that can become a trap.
The longer and more generous benefits are, the less incentive
someone has to find work (see Germany in particular and Western
Europe generally for examples of the phenomenon at work). The Bush
program would establish accounts that unemployed people could use as
they see fit for education, training programs and child care to
support their job search. If they find a job within 13 weeks they
can keep up to $1,000 of the $5,000 account.
This would reverse the traditional incentive of unemployment
benefits; it would do an end run around work-force investment
boards, the state-level bureaucracies that now eat up federal
dollars; it would allow each person to tailor federal aid to his own
needs and strengths. It would be at least a step toward preserving
individual initiative from the enervating clutch of bureaucracy.
The education vouchers, meanwhile, make private school available
to kids who had suffered in the atrocious New Orleans public system
and help preserve the choice many families had already made. Out of
187,000 students in the broader New Orleans area, 61,000 went to
private schools. Opponents of the voucher proposals want to say to
bereft families of those private-school students, "Congratulations,
you lost everything, and we hope your children now get trapped in
public schools on top of it."
New Orleans was partly a catastrophe of the welfare state, which
has subsidized inner cities with countless billions of dollars
throughout the past 30 years, with little to show for it except more
social breakdown. The past few weeks should be the impetus for
"bold, persistent experimentation," as Franklin D. Roosevelt put it,
in the country's social programs. Instead, we are likely to get more
spending on more of the same, and eventually everyone's attention
will shift once again from the shame of New Orleans and the
persistent failure of the welfare state.
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© 2005 King Features Syndicate |
Arnold Ahlert | |||||||||||
