Ehrlich on Washington column, March 26, 1995

EHRLICH ON WASHINGTON By Congressman Robert L. Ehrlich, Jr. WEEK OF MARCH 26, 1995 ENDING WELFARE AS WE KNOW IT In 1964 President Lyndon Johnson unveiled his ambitious Great Society agenda. Through bold new social programs, increased social spending, and heightened federal control, the President promised to end poverty, homelessness, and want. By utilizing the sweeping powers and resources of the national government, the President believed that it was possible to spare future generations from the misery and despair experienced by his own. It is now thirty years and $5 trillion later, and despair is still alive and well in America. The poverty rate has actually increased from 14.7 percent in the mid-1960s to 15.1 percent today. In the years before the advent of the Great Society, poverty had been increasing steadily. Clearly the welfare state envisioned by Lyndon Johnson has failed in a most extraordinary and expensive way. It is hard to image a welfare system that encourages greater hopelessness, or is crueler to children, than the one which now exists. Illegitimacy, the root cause of institutional poverty in the United States, has exploded during the Great Society era— from 7 percent in 1965 to 32 percent in 1990. By 1993 6.3 million children were living with a single parent who had never married— a 25-fold increase over 1960. The one-parent family is six times more likely to be poor than the two-parent family. Children born out of wedlock are three times more likely to depend on welfare when they become adults. The current system also encourages babies to have babies. The percentage of teen mothers who are unmarried has increased dramatically-from 30 percent in 1970 to 71 percent in 1992. About half of unwed teenage mothers go on welfare within a year after the birth of a first