The Vicious Cycle

By NANCY GIBBS

One day this past winter there came a defining moment in the fight over the true cause of America's moral breakdown. It was the day police in Chicago arrived at a small apartment, opened the door and faced 19 children living in a squalor so wretched that one child pleaded to a female officer, "Will you be my mommy? I want to go home with you."

This is how a conservative like Bill Bennett responds to a crime scene like that: "Body count!" barks the former Education Secretary. "Body count, yes, body count. Kids dying, kids abused, kids cut up, kids burned with cigarettes, kids whose brains are so poorly developed they can't function in school. This isn't child neglect, it's child endangerment." The Chicago story was a classic example of how a big-hearted, deep-pocketed government ends up subsidizing disaster. In all, the six mothers who lived in filth were collecting $5,496 a month in welfare payments. The system will keep on paying such women as long as they keep having children, don't get married and don't get a job. Which leads to an inflammatory proposal, one that is seeding a revolution.

Women who have children they cannot support and are not fit to raise, Bennett and his disciples argue, use their children as hostages to win benefits. In response, the government should not hand out welfare and food stamps and counseling. It should cut off aid, take the children away and place them in foster care or orphanages. "It's not the state tearing the child away from the arms of a clutching mother," he says. "Nobody cares about the kid. I know the initial reaction would be to say this is the hard approach. But this is the compassionate approach if you use as an index two words: body count. We will have a lower body count with our proposal than they have with theirs."

Their plan, in this case, is the one that President Clinton is expected to lay out this week when he finally unveils his proposal for overhauling the welfare system. No promise in his race for the presidency proved so popular as the pledge to "end welfare as we know it." No issue in his first term has inspired such bipartisan, near universal agreement on the need to do something dramatic. And for all the attention paid in the past year to his health-care plan, no policy has such potential to reinvent whole aspects of American public and private life. Behind all the bureaucratic tinkering is a moral campaign against illegitimacy, aimed at persuading poor people to become stable, self-supporting workers before they become parents. If this crusade works, its supporters promise, it could do more to fight crime, strengthen families, and rebuild the fabric of the inner cities than any other antipoverty program on the table.

Given the failed history of welfare reform, Clinton is already proposing to do something radical. He wants to make able-bodied people work for their benefits, cutting them off after two years if they refuse. But he too has seen that putting people to work is not enough. Since teenage mothers form the hard core of the welfare population, consuming $34 billion in benefits a year, and are the least likely to climb out of poverty, he has made teen-pregnancy prevention a pillar of his program. He has invited states to cut off additional payments to women who have children while on the dole, a hotly controversial measure dubbed the "family cap."

Clinton's ideas have great popular support, but his plan will still come under fire from all sides. A group of conservatives are taking his themes and raising the stakes even further. They don't want to reform welfare; they want to abolish it. Only drastic measures, they argue, will break the cycle of dependency that has destroyed so many families. To liberals, such a policy is cruel and racist, and it punishes children for their parents' behavior. When the Philadelphia Inquirer ran an editorial suggesting that women on welfare be implanted with the contraceptive Norplant -- a sort of chemical family cap -- the newspaper was fiercely attacked, even by some of its own staffers, for advocating genocide. "Who will put the limit on the number of kids a family should have?" asks Buffy Boesen, a Denver community organizer. "In China the government does it. Is that the way we're going -- if you're poor, you can't have any more?"

Of all the domestic-policy battles of this Administration, none is more politically incendiary than taking money away from mothers with children. The President needs to define himself as a new kind of Democrat yet preserve the liberal base he will need to pass his health-care bill. For Congress the challenge is to show that it is capable of reversing a disaster of its own making. Meanwhile, more than half the states, tired of waiting for Washington, have started a revolution of their own. Virtually everything in Clinton's plan is already being tried somewhere. The basic principles of encouraging regular work and intact families are becoming so firmly established that nothing Washington does -- or fails to do -- will diminish the pressure for change.

What could be easier than scrapping a program that is widely derided as morally poisonous, politically stupid and a fiscal swamp? Welfare is a relatively tiny budget item, only 1% of annual government spending. But the stories of fraud and abuse are so common and the evidence of disastrous unintended consequences so compelling that a large majority -- 81% of those surveyed in a TIME/CNN poll -- thinks it is time for "fundamental reform." Clinton's plan, like the three major bills already proposed in Congress, has as its core a requirement that people work for their benefits, if not in the private sector, then in a government job. The bureaucracy's role would change from check writing to job training and placement.

But even as this consensus about putting welfare mothers to work was building, the debate was shifting again. The problem is not that too few single mothers are working, the conservatives are saying. The problem is that there are too many single mothers in the first place. To critics like Bennett, author Charles Murray, former Housing Secretary Jack Kemp and their allies in Congress, illegitimacy is the underlying cause of poverty, crime and social meltdown in the inner cities. Far better to discourage people from having children before they are ready, the conservatives argue, than to burden society with weaving the safety net of jobs, child care, Head Start, health care and a collapsing foster-care network for those who cannot cope.

It is hard to argue with the evidence they cite. Nearly a third of American children are born out of wedlock, and those children are four times as likely as the others to be poor. Unwed mothers average nearly 8 years on welfare, in ^ contrast to 4.8 years overall. "From the President on down, there has been an amazing shift in attitude," says Douglas Besharov, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. "Today everyone recognizes that dealing with births out of wedlock is the central issue of welfare reform, so much so that the President's draft plan makes dealing with illegitimacy the No. 1 priority."

There is a long-term price of illegitimacy as well, one that resonates at a time when the fear of crime, particularly the crimes committed by a generation of young, pitiless men and boys, has become a national obsession. When people ask where all these 16-year-old predators are coming from, one answer is chilling: from 14-year-old mothers. More than half the juvenile offenders serving prison time were raised by only one parent. If present birthrates continue over the next 10 to 15 years, the number of young people trapped in poverty and tempted by the streets will increase dramatically. Says John DiIulio, professor of politics and public affairs at Princeton University: "You have a ticking crime bomb."

The second point of consensus is that historically the welfare system has rewarded everything it ought to prevent and punished everything it ought to promote. "The Federal Government has created a monster," says Ann Clark, a welfare case manager in Colorado Springs, Colorado. "I'm dealing with third- generation recipients. Welfare has become their way of life. It scares them to death to try to get off it." The idea is not that the government get into the business of deciding who should have children; rather it is to get the government out of such decisions, by removing all the perverse rewards and punishments embedded in the system.

Across the country, welfare case workers argue that most recipients want to work. "The problem is not work ethics," argues law professor Julie Nice of the University of Denver. "It is the lack of jobs." But those who do manage to find work can instantly lose their health coverage, food stamps, public housing and child care. Marriage too comes with a penalty. Mary Ann Mendez, a mother of three in Harlingen, Texas, received only Medicaid benefits when she was living with her common-law husband, who worked periodically. When he left her, however, her broken home was showered with benefits: Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC), more food stamps, gas money to get to and from school, and free day care. "It doesn't seem like they want families to stay | together," she says.

But when it comes to correcting all the other damaging incentives of the welfare system, the arguments break out. The hottest topic at the moment is the family cap. Already in New Jersey, Arkansas and Georgia, families receive no increase for children born while on the dole, and Clinton's plan would allow other states to follow suit. Since the average increase of about $67 is much less than the cost of raising another child, welfare mothers didn't really have much economic incentive to have more kids. But this above all is a symbolic issue, a chance for the government to send a message about how it plans to treat parents who have children they cannot afford.

The co-chairs of Clinton's welfare-reform task force, policy adviser Bruce Reed and welfare experts Mary Jo Bane and David Ellwood, warned the President last month that child-welfare groups hated the family cap and would fight it. So would the Catholic Church and some right-to-life groups, out of a fear that it might encourage abortion. So, ironically, would certain liberal groups, on the grounds that being pro-choice includes defending a woman's right to choose to have children -- even if she can't afford them without taxpayer help.

Clinton has always stressed the need to bring the welfare system in line with real-world values. Why should women on welfare be rewarded for making a decision that reduces their chances of getting off welfare? Working women do not get a raise in return for giving birth; they have to bear the responsibility and financial burdens themselves. "We're sending a clear message that we will pay for your first kid for a short time while you get ready for the work force," says Donna Shalala, Clinton's Health and Human Services Secretary, "but we will not pay for the second kid."

The record so far in New Jersey, where the cutoff started last August, suggests that the family cap may have some deterrent effect. By last November, evaluators claim, births to welfare mothers were down 16% from the same month a year earlier. But its critics still argue that in the long run it will do more harm than good. "The premise that women have children for economic reasons is a joke," argues Betsy Smith, a sociologist at Florida International University who has extensively studied women and welfare. "It's a complicated internal process. Women have children to fulfill an emotional need: to have someone that loves them unconditionally, or simply to have the experience of raising a child."

But far more effective than limiting the number of children born to welfare parents, experts agree, is discouraging girls from becoming parents in the first place -- hence the heavy emphasis on preventing teen pregnancy. Clinton's plan would provide $400 million over five years, with most of the money earmarked for schools and school districts in poor neighborhoods to start teen-education programs that combine sex education with encouragement of abstinence. Teens who do have children must stay in school to be eligible for benefits; high school graduates must be in job-training programs.

Like so many aspects of the illegitimacy debate, pregnancy prevention puts the conservative critics in a bind. Besides not wanting to be seen as pushing abortion, these reformers tend to oppose extensive sex education or making contraception more easily available to young people, on the ground that this fosters sexual activity. So the focus tends to be on abstinence campaigns, which are spreading through school districts across the country, and on increasing the deterrents and penalties for girls who get pregnant before marriage.

In some cases, the most powerful impetus for change may come from the welfare mothers themselves, who know too well the price of parenthood. Delores St. Onge, 37, a welfare mother in Riverside, California, looks at her daughter and sees how much they are alike -- and it breaks her heart. Delores got pregnant at 19, left school and has been on welfare most of the years since. Her daughter Hope dropped out when she got pregnant, intentionally, at 17. "She saw other girls with babies," Delores sighs, "and thought they were cute." She and Hope share a house and their welfare checks, but Delores is relentless about breaking the cycle. "I don't say, 'If you finish school . . .' It's always, 'You will finish school, and then you will go to college." Delores is a supporter of the family cap. "If you get pregnant and have another child, it's like you're getting paid to have kids," she says.

Elke Baca, 28, a former welfare mother in Denver who now works as a telephone installer, doubts the cap would make much difference. "They're not having babies for the money in the first place," she says. She has more faith in the work requirements: "Give them a limit, then cut them off. That's what I'd do. That ought to be enough motivation."

Though young mothers are the ones who cash the welfare checks, the reformers are targeting men as well in an attempt to break the pattern of irresponsible behavior on both sides. Clinton proposes that each welfare mother be required to give the name and location of her child's father before she can collect welfare. Men who fail to make payments will have their driver's licenses revoked. Massachusetts has made willful nonpayment a felony punishable by as much as a five-year term in prison. Maine's new welfare law, which threatens to take away the professional and driver's licenses of parents who fall behind on child-support payments, is persuading deadbeat dads to fork over roughly $1 million a month.

Penalties, however, are never enough. Social critics point to the need to change the patterns and assumptions that guide the behavior of young people growing up in desperate neighborhoods. Elijah Anderson, a sociology professor at the University of Pennsylvania, argues that young black males have such trouble finding family-sustaining jobs -- the traditional mark of adulthood -- that they end up building their self-esteem through games that emphasize sexual prowess. Their babies become evidence of their manhood. "I ask why they don't marry the girl," Anderson says, "and they say, 'Because I can't play house.' That means they don't have a job that allows them to support a family."

The welfare system often creates strange distortions in social relationships that soon become traditions of their own. It is not uncommon, says Anderson, for a young man to persuade a young woman living at home with her parents to have a baby so she can get on welfare. "She lives home with Mom and Dad, and the $158 she gets every two weeks amounts to an allowance," Anderson says. "And she gives a lot of it to the boy." The welfare check binds a boy and girl together, just as a baby can. "There's no ring involved, but the boy comes to expect his share of the check. Sometimes he'll demand his share from the girl and fight about it, saying, 'If it weren't for me, you wouldn't be getting this check.' "

Such patterns can provide ammunition for reformers at the extreme end of the debate who argue for abolishing the welfare system altogether. "How does a poor young mother survive without government support?" asks author Charles Murray. "The same way she has since time immemorial. If she wants to keep a child, she must enlist support from her parents, boyfriend, siblings, neighbors, church or philanthropies. She must get support from somewhere, anywhere, other than the government." In Murray's view, state-run orphanages become the caregivers of last resort.

But that proposal may be hard to stomach, even for "family values" conservatives, who traditionally want to keep the government as far as possible from the business of raising children. "One thing we know about poor families is that parents love their children," says Judith Gueron, president of the Manpower Demonstration Research Corporation, a leading welfare and poverty think tank. "Why should we be confident that an institutional environment is going to provide any benefit to these children?"

Conservative activists are unmoved by images of Dickensian poorhouses, given the breakdown in families and the caseloads drowning the foster-care system. "Nothing could be worse than the current system," argues Robert Rector, a senior policy analyst with the Heritage Foundation. "The current system has already pulled the family apart. The system treats having a child out of wedlock as a favored life-style that's deliberately subsidized by the government. Nothing could be more harmful than that." True enough, but Clinton's point man Reed disagrees with the orphanage solution. "It's the kind of goofy social engineering that these same conservatives have made fun of for most of their lives," he says. "The whole point of welfare reform ought to be to reinforce families and a sense of parental responsibility -- not to take people's children away."

The debate leaves open the question of how to pay for whatever reform is enacted, a problem that has dogged both Clinton and the reform sponsors in Congress. The cheapest possible welfare program is one that just hands out checks -- like the system now in place. Anything that adds job training or child care or orphanages involves new bureaucracies and new costs. "The real question is how you overcome the belief that welfare reform should save money," admits a senior White House official.

"We're entering a counterintuitive era when closing bases costs money, the GATT trade agreement costs money, and reforming welfare costs money. And the public is already kind of sticker-shocked."

Clinton's delay in introducing his bill, and his retreat from his radical rhetoric, presented moderate Democrats and Republicans with the chance to define the issue for themselves. Of the competing bills in Congress, two are almost identical to Clinton's in philosophy, differing only in financing and thus the pace at which people would be pushed into the work force. The Mainstream Forum Plan, proposed by moderate House Democrats led by Dave McCurdy of Oklahoma, would put a three-year limit on how long a welfare recipient can stay in a publicly funded job. A G.O.P. bill submitted last November, which is sponsored by 160 out of 176 Republicans in the House, would speed up the work requirement so that half of all welfare recipients would have to be holding jobs within five years of the bill's passage.

Both plans actually cost more than Clinton's scaled-down version: $12 billion over five years, vs. $9.3 billion. Yet House Republicans promise a saving of $31 billion over the same five years. Where will all the extra money come from? From a proposal, in the words of the sponsors, to "simply end welfare to most noncitizens." To fund either approach, the sponsors propose cutting off millions of legal immigrants from school breakfast and lunch programs, foster care, emergency food and shelter and child care, as well as AFDC. Though Clinton's plan also includes cuts in programs for noncitizens, they are far more modest. "It's a matter of priorities," says McCurdy. "We believe American citizens are the priority."

The most extreme proposal, with very little chance of passage, is the Talent-Faircloth bill, introduced by Representative James Talent and Senator Lauch Faircloth. Their plan would deny benefits to unwed mothers under 21, without promising them a job or any other means of support. The savings would go to the states for setting up orphanages and group homes. To those who have called these requirements harsh, Talent replies: "What the existing system does is tell young people they can raise a child without waiting until they're old enough to handle the responsibility. It's a cruel lie to people."

The President must know how useful -- or how dangerous -- welfare reform can be politically. All during his campaign, when his pollsters monitored the responses to commercials promising a drastic revolution, the response was off the charts. One White House aide and campaign veteran estimates that 40% of Clinton's paid advertising mentioned ending welfare. It formed the basis for Clinton's claim to be a New Democrat. Middle-class voters, argues Al From of the centrist Democratic Leadership Council, "just never expected to hear a Democrat say, 'You can stay on welfare for two years, but then you have to get a job.' "

. There is another motivation: the cost of continued delay. Some activists are warning of the risks of social explosion if something is not done to break the desperate cycles of life in America's poorest precincts. "The conditions are desolate now," Housing Secretary Henry Cisneros warned Clinton, after Cisneros visited housing projects in Chicago. "With meager public resources coming in, what people would do in desperation, I don't know. But what I do know is that some intellectual arguments made around a conference table in Washington are far removed from the concerns of real people."

For years it was easy to argue that welfare needed reform in order to save money. But the current crusade proves that the most powerful motives lie elsewhere. Tightfisted Republicans are prepared to spend more; large majorities of voters are willing to spend more, so long as the money is going to support the values and programs that strengthen families and community life. As enraging as the stories of fraud and waste may be, what has saddened most people is the evidence that a program designed with the best of intentions -- to help those most in need -- could end up doing them so much harm. Spending more money, on the right things, becomes a way of making amends.

CHART: NOT AVAILABLE

CREDIT: From a telephone poll of 600 adult Americans taken for TIME/CNN on May 18-19 by Yankelovich Partners Inc. Sampling error is plus or minus 4% Not Sures omitted

CAPTION: IS THE WELFARE SYSTEM IN NEED OF FUNDAMENTAL REFORM?

DOES THE CURRENT WELFARE SYSTEM ENCOURAGE POOR PEOPLE TO FIND WORK?

DO YOU AGREE WITH THESE WELFARE-REFORM PROPOSALS?

With reporting by Ann Blackman and James Carney/Washington, Richard N. Ostling/New York and Richard Woodbury/Colorado Springs