Kaus: Why throw that away? My plan--and Clinton's welfare plan--has big, simple, obvious ideas. I would say, "You're not going to get a check from the government if you don't work. If you do work, we may give you a variety of benefits."
Murray: Then you have a vast edifice that you have to erect to administer that.
Kaus: It's simple.
Murray: No, it's not simple.
Kaus: I just think you undermine your entire contribution to the debate and you've thrown Losing Ground in the trash can. I am more optimistic than you. First, I agree with Chuck that the American people have always been for work and against giving people cash. And Bill Clinton has realized that that's what the American people think. Clinton's proposal is a substantial proposal if he enacts it the way he talked about in the campaign. If it's really a two-years-and-out system [in which after two years a welfare recipient must take a job], that would have a big effect on the culture of the ghetto.
Murray: OK, let me be optimistic for a moment and try to retrieve Losing Ground from the trash can. There's much more room for change than I thought there was a few months ago. I think there is a good chance that the states are going to get a lot more waiver authority, and there's a good chance that states who want to eradicate the welfare system are going to establish a whole lot of restrictions which achieve some of what both you and I would like. In this regard, the initial results out of New Jersey, which I've just seen in The Washington Post, are striking.
Postrel: What happened there?
Murray: New Jersey passed a law saying you would not get any more money for the second child or subsequent children born on welfare. And a lot of people, including me, said, "Big deal. Most welfare women don't have a second child and that's only $64. How much difference is this really going to make?" Well, these are early days yet, but in New Jersey they are reporting a very large drop in second children being born. If those numbers hold up, people are going to say, "This is what you get in return for not giving 64 bucks? Gee, what would happen if you took away the whole grant?" By the way, isn't it interesting, just politically, the way that Bill Clinton is in danger of locking himself out on this issue?
Postrel: What do you mean by locking himself out?
Murray: First by his appointments. He put in place over at HHS three people--Donna Shalala, David Ellwood, and Mary Jo Bane--who are temperamentally and philosophically not on board. And Clinton himself has shown a curious reluctance to capitalize on the obvious political popularity of welfare reform. I would like to know what Mickey sees going on inside the Clinton White House and how this is going to play out.
Kaus: My impression is there are people in HHS who still cling to guaranteed annual income--and Charles, maybe you should get together with them.
Murray: They don't want a guaranteed income as a replacement for everything else.
Kaus: They're writing all sorts of proposals for a fall-back benefit even if recipients don't get a job. And there are the public-employee unions, who are terrified that if you really do have a system where people go into public jobs at the end of two years, they will be doing all sorts of jobs that union people could be doing. And then you have the legislative bottleneck, where Clinton doesn't think he can get both welfare reform and health-care reform through Congress at the same time. And his wife is more interested in health- care reform. Those three factors are conspiring, I agree, to have him lose control of this issue and lose the political advantage.
Murray: Chuck, what do you think?
Hobbs: I guess I really don't care what--as long as he holds to two things which he has already said. One is to promise the governors he'll give them maximum flexi-bility to try different approaches. I also think he has to maintain the two-years-and-out promise. The way he does that is not nearly as important to me as how the states react to flexibility in designing those two-years-and-out programs. It seems like everybody is looking for what they call the other door. At the end of two years if there's no job, what do we do with these people? The Full Employment Program, or Mickey's program, is an answer to that. It says that the other door is that you don't wait two years. You start working right now.
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Apart from state-by-state differences, total school spending in the United States is routinely underestimated because of other measurement problems. As Lieberman and other analysts have pointed out, official school spending statistics leave out an awful lot. A partial list of expenditures excluded from federal data includes business and foundation donations, donated time, pension contributions, the cost of negotiating contracts, the cost of training teachers, remedial education in colleges, judicial costs, out-of-pocket parental expenses, and federal educational programs in departments other than Education (such as Head Start). Since real per-pupil spending even as currently measured shot up 62 percent from 1973 to 1993 (according to the ALEC study), an accurate analysis of total spending would no doubt find an even bigger jump.
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