Show THE VOICE OF BUSINESS Lets Let's Reform Nations M w Welfare Reform Bill Bell w OJ JT e By ARCH N. N BOOTH executive vice J president of the Chamber of Commerce of of the United States In recent years the welfare problem has lias become more and more like a tough piece of steak the longer you chew it the bigger It seems to get THE SITUATION is now so close to being completely out of hand that even 1 one of the men most closely identified 1 with federal social welfare programs Sen Abraham of Connecticut moved speak out has been to The Senator who is a former Secretary Secre Secre- Secretary tary of the Department of Health Education Edu Edit cation and Welfare dropped a real bombshell in Washington when he be publicly pub withdrew his support of HR 1 I the the welfare reform bill incorporating plan which would provide a guaranteed guaranteed guaran guaran- teed annual income Senator p reasons are worth wo th repeating I 1 THINK the time has come that r we must evaluate social programs in this country and analyze them to see how they will work before we force them t w on the American people at fantastic cost and then we have ave the great disappointment disappoint disappoint- ment and the disillusionment of the poor Right now we have programs at atti J ti a cost of 31 billion to alleviate poverty And weve we've got more poverty in this H. H country than we did last year And the irony is if we took 11 billion out of that programs and spread it itT T around among the people in V everybody in this country would be out of poverty I w PUT SIMPLY the Senator has bas discovered discovered ered that the government Is not very efficient when it comes to getting re- re suits with out tax dollars This is not a anew anew new discovery but for some reason it seems to need rediscovering every year or so T Just about everyone by now that social engineering is a lot lotmore lotmore more complicated than the Die plain old w technological kind And yet no responsible responsible sible engineer would think or of spending millions even billions on a new gadget without a lot of preliminary research re re- search to make sure it will perform the way its it's supposed to to So the senator wants small-scale small field testing of new welfare programs before the commits billions of dol dot o. o lars to them on a 1 miss hit basis Amen AND HE also warns against letting T the test be bo evaluated by the same bureaucrats bur bur- who want to spend the money because they are going to come up with an evaluation to show that it works and it is good If it is a II bad evaluation they bury it it Amen again The National Chamber favors a welfare wel fare program that places the emphasis on preparing welfare recipients for good jobs and then removing any obstacles to their taking those jobs such as providing providing pro pro- viding day care for the children of working women But we would certainly certain ly join with Senator in advocating advocating that our proposal and all other proposals receive a proper field test and evaluation before a scale full program program pro pro- gram is funded Surely this is only common common com mon sense What effect has the senators senator's suggestion suggest suggest- ion had bad on the Administration A curious curious cur cur- ious lous one The Administration now wants Congress to authorize both the scale full-scale welfare program and a project pilot test of it it IT IS not hard to guess the reason for such an odd procedure Anyone who stays around Washington for any length of time quickly learns that it is much harder hard hard- er for Congress to a law than it itis itis itis is to pass it The remaining supporters of HR 1 evidently lack confidence in inthe inthe inthe the outcome of the test so they are in a hurry to get the program nailed down before the taxpayers taxpayer have a chance to see what they are buying Senator f said I think the Senate boggles at the thought of taking 14 million people now on welfare and adding another 11 million people on welfare welfare wel wel- fare without knowing how it is going to work Well its it's time somebody boggled |