Welfare State

If the great budget debate of 1995 were just a fight over money, Democrats and Republicans could resolve it the time-honored way - by splitting their differences. But the stalemate between President Clinton and the Republican Congress is not just about money, even though it is cast in terms of balancing the budget. This dispute is rooted in deep philosophical differences over fundamental values. These differences are as old as the republic. They have never been easy to compromise.

Recently a young pregnant woman was horribly murdered, then her fetus was cut out of her and taken by three depraved brutes. The woman's two oldest children were murdered. As the nation recoiled from this abomination, House Speaker Newt Gingrich decided to weigh in. Using phrases like "welfare state" and "drug-addicted underclass," Newt's opinion amounted to little more than a crass (and formulaic) attempt to foment further racial discord while netting political capital.

In October 1994, when Susan Smith, a desperately disturbed woman, drowned her two small children and tried to blame it on a fictitious black stranger, Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich - who is not an expert in crime, psychology or social pathology but who is a politician without scruples - was ready with an explanation. "I think the mother killing her two children in South Carolina vividly reminds every American how sick society is getting and how much we have to have change . . . People want to change, and the only way you get change is to vote Republican.

If you find incomprehensible - as the rest of us do - the murder of a pregnant Chicago woman and two of her children and the abduction of the baby ripped from her womb, Newt Gingrich has made it comprehensible. It's politics. Thus spake the speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives. That's right: The horrifying incident is a byproduct of the welfare state and politicians' reluctance to address moral issues. And so, in one historic statement, Newt has explained psychopathology - it's the fault of the "Left," whatever that is. These unspeakable, depraved killers would be upright, productive and noble citizens if not for the "moral decay the world of the Left is defending," said the Newtster.

The word "federalism" is enjoying a new vogue these days, as Republicans promise to give power "back to the states. " But the way the power is given "back" has little to do with what the founding fathers meant by "federalism. " In the current welfare reform bill, for example, the states are given power to regulate welfare programs, but with strings attached. The power is considered to come from the federal government, which supposedly "grants" it to the states. This is a reversal of what our ancestors meant by federalism - namely, that the states were the source of the federal government's powers.

Sen. Bill Bradley faced the prospect of his future irrelevance last week and did the manly thing. He quit the Senate, explaining that Congress no longer was good enough for him. "We live in a time when, on a basic level, politics is broken," he told an audience in Newark, N.J. "In growing numbers, people have lost faith in the political process and don't see how it can help their threatened economic circumstances . . . Neither political party...

It cost almost $1,200 to put my son back together. He needed stitches in both his upper and lower lips. He was X-rayed twice. He was checked for broken bones, for eye damage and for a concussion. He was given penicillin and a painkiller and when it was over, about 2 a.m., and we were in the car leaving the hospital, he said he had no choice but to go back to where he had been mugged. He had been teaching inner-city kids how to use computers. That awful night is now some months distant and my son, thank you, is fine.

Hans Jacques paid his dues, and now he wants something back. He suffered under the Nazi occupation. But, living on his wits, he survived. He worked hard to rebuild his country. He paid the high taxes that financed Europe's most bountiful welfare state. And now, like other Dutch seventysomethings, he thinks a grateful nation owes him a decent retirement. Instead, the value of his government pension has declined, and new trims seem inevitable. He and his wife, Gonda, can't afford to eat out anymore.

The Democratic Party held its winter meeting last week. While it wasn't exactly a wake, some of the participants seemed to be whistling past the cemetery. President Clinton, trying to buck up troops dispirited by the massacre in the November election, said, "The reports of our demise are premature. " Actually, those reports are up-to-the-minute. A U.S. News & World Report poll discovered that the President's popularity (a dubious label, given his unpopularity) has declined to 40 percent.

GOVERNMENT GIVEAWAYS DON'T HELP THE UNDERCLASS I am having a difficult time comprehending why Acel Moore is defending the plethora of social programs enacted in the War on Poverty. Mr. Moore says "evidence" shows that those programs work and have given hope and provided opportunity to thousands who had previously been excluded. That statement could not be further from the truth. If you define "hope" and "inclusion" as the expansion of the welfare state and the continued creation of a political underclass, then some obvious facts have been ignored.