Murray: To what extent, Mickey, are there a whole bunch of public-service jobs of the 1930s WPA type that could be created?
Kaus: It's a very good question. But just looking around us, we can see there are playgrounds that are overgrown by weeds. There are basketball hoops without nets. There is visible filth on urban streets. There are streets with potholes. There are bridges that need painting. There are schools that need painting. The big problem is not that there isn't enough to do. The big problem is when you try to do them, AFSCME and the other public employees go berserk.
Postrel: The idea is increasingly popular that there are some people who are just unable to work even if you offer them a job--that they don't have the necessary personal organization and work habits.
Kaus: There's been a tremendous shift in elite opinion about this. The liberal opinion used to be that work requirements were gratuitous. People wanted to work. All they needed was a job. That argument has now flipped 180 degrees. When you suggest to a paradigmatic liberal, "Why not replace welfare with work?," they will say in effect, "Don't you realize these people are so screwed up they can't hold down a job even if you offer it?" That may be true, and undoubtedly is true for a certain percentage of the population. But that just shows how entrenched the culture of poverty is. If you have a group of people who can't hold down a job even when it's offered to them, you have a culture of poverty. And that shows how disastrous the current system is and why it needs to be replaced. The second point is, we need to find out what that percentage is. I've talked with people who work in the ghetto, and they say a third of the people just can't hack it. That seems high to me. But one of the reasons we need state-by-state efforts is it's important whether that number is 1 percent or 50 percent. We need to find that out before we impose a nationwide solution.
Postrel: What is, "just can't hack it"?
Murray: It goes back to some of the things Mickey was saying earlier. If you grow up in a house where time just flows by, the odds that you can get to work on time every day are pretty low. And if you've grown up in a situation where if anybody says anything critical to you, he's "dissing" you, and that is perhaps grounds for shooting him, then it is real hard for you to deal with a supervisor who says, "Hey, get your butt in here." You get in his face or you quit. A lot of people literally do not know how to work. But we don't know what the number is.
Hobbs: I think you have to look at a larger population than the AFDC population on this issue. There are a lot of people who are classified as totally and permanently disabled who can and want to work. I know that from personal experience. There are also a whole bunch of people who are not categorized as people who are eligible for work--over 50 percent, by the way, of the AFDC population is federally excluded from work programs. They have a kid under the age of 3, or they are taking care of an older sister or brother or someone who is disabled. But even when you include all of those other categories of people, the proportion of people who can't work is less--much less--than 50 percent, and probably not much more than 5 percent. People can all do something, particularly if they want to do something, and if the society around them--and I don't mean the federal government, I mean the neighborhood--says, "We really need your help." That's why the example of resident management groups around the country is so dramatic. They have totally obliterated this argument that the flight of the black leadership from the public housing developments has left a vacuum, because they have created the leadership among those people who are part of that vacuum. If they have the right incentive structure there, and if they have the opportunity presented, they are going to provide not only that leadership, they are also going to provide the bulk of those jobs and the work ethic to go with them.
Kaus: I'm worried that, at the moment, Clinton is holding up the process. Everybody is waiting for the Clinton welfare reform. In the meantime, the states aren't doing the things that they could be doing if they just were given carte blanche. Clinton knows welfare reform is popular, and he doesn't want a bunch of Republican governors, or even Democratic governors, radically reforming their welfare systems and getting the popularity that comes with that. So he is saying, "I have a program, but you're just not going to see it for a year and a half." And that's a problem.
Hobbs: I have to disagree. First of all, the states don't seem to be waiting. In the past three months, we've gone from two states to 10. Therese Murray, a liberal Democratic feminist state senator in Massachusetts, took the bill through the Senate, with [president of the Senate] Billy Bulger, who makes things run in Massachusetts, guaranteeing it will get through the House, and the Weld administration saying they'll put it into effect. We have interest in Virginia, in New Jersey, in Pennsylvania, in the state of Washington, in Arizona even while we are waiting around for what Clinton is going to do. Then we have Missouri, Colorado, Minnesota, Iowa. I think that there are now something like 18 waiver packages in front of HHS from the states, all of them headed toward work. They aren't really waiting around for Clinton, even though he might hope they are.
Postrel: Suppose you were starting from scratch, what should the goal of welfare programs be? Should there be welfare programs?
Murray: The historical era that I think needs to be studied much more closely than it has been is the late l9th, early 20th century, in both Britain and the United States. I'll state it as a hypothesis that the network that developed in the private sector then, translated into late 20th-century economic terms, is the best way to deal with this problem. That you don't need government for this. That, in fact, in a free society, you get lots of voluntary associations which deal with the problems of poverty. And they do it a hell of a lot better than the government knows how.
Kaus: I tend to think that voluntary associations are not strong enough to deal with downturns in the business cycle. The place I would want to end up, if I started from scratch, is the place I want to end up after we reform welfare, which is there are no benefits to people who don't work--you've 85-percent public approval for that--but the government offers work to anybody who really can't find a job--and you've got 75- percent approval for that, or maybe 65. That means big government. That's, I think, the best we can do until we eliminate the business cycle.
Murray: I am a wishy-washy libertarian in this regard. The business cycle is something that the individual can't do a whole lot to compensate for. So I am not philosophically averse to having the government do something about that. And the principle of unemployment insurance seems, to me, to be appropriate.
Postrel: Let me raise a question that bothers me if the government guarantees you a job. The jobs would be available throughout the business cycle?
Kaus: Right. They just don't pay very much. So in good times nobody would show up to claim them.
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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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