KINDER'S COMMENTARY: WELFARE FACTS DEFY MEDDLING BY HILLARY

First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton's offer to make her second-term project overseeing welfare reform, issued from her perch in Australia, was rather rudely rejected stateside. First to pounce was Wisconsin Gov. Tommy Thompson, a leader who can truly lay claim to having been a pioneer in this difficult chore. "We are moving people from welfare to work," said Thompson, adding tartly, "And we don't need Mrs. Clinton to come in and mess things up."

Ouch. Then there was her husband's press secretary, Mike McCurry, who came about as close as the help ever can to saying no to this First Lady: "We're not aware that any such role is being planned" for Mrs. Clinton in a second term, McCurry said, picking his delicate way through the minefield and risking Mrs. Clinton's legendary temper.

Meanwhile, thanks to new studies from a couple of sources, we know some important new truths about welfare and the poisonous dependency culture it fosters. For years, as liberals such as Hillary Clinton have resisted real welfare reform, we have been fed a steady diet of misinformation by the left. For instance, we are often told that our current system doesn't promote long-term dependence. Would that it were so. Consider the evidence assembled by the Heritage Foundation's welfare experts, Robert Rector and Patrick Fagan:

* The 4.7 million families currently receiving Aid to Families with Dependent Children have already spent, on average, six and a half years on welfare.

* When past and estimated future recipients of AFDC are combined, the estimated average length of stay on AFDC, among those families currently receiving benefits, is 13 years.

* Among the 4.7 million families currently receiving AFDC, over 90 percent will spend over two years on the AFDC caseload. More than 75 percent will spend over five years on AFDC.

Moreover, recently reported research from the Congressional Budget Office director, June O'Neill, demonstrates devastatingly that it is welfare dependence -- not poverty -- that is most devastating to children. (As you read this, reflect that it is children in whose name we are constantly told that we must perpetuate the present system.) The CBO study found:

* Increasing the length of time a child spends on welfare may reduce the child's IQ by as much as 20 percent.

* Welfare dependency as a child has a negative effect on the earnings and employment capacity of young men. The more welfare income received by a boy's family during his childhood, the lower the boy's earnings will be as an adult, even when compared to boys in families with identical non-welfare income.

The CBO research further documents the role welfare plays in promoting the great, runaway social problem of our time: illegitimacy and resultant fatherlessness. A 50 percent increase in monthly AFDC and food stamp payments will literally cause a 43 percent increase in illegitimacy. Being born outside of marriage and raised in single-parent homes:

* Triples the level of behavioral and emotional problems among children;

* Nearly triples the level of teen sexual activity;

* Doubles the probability that a young woman will have children out of wedlock:

* Doubles the probability that a boy will become a threat to society, engage in criminal activity and wind up in jail. Recently, the criminologists have begun to describe what one calls "the rise of the superpredators": young boys, raised without any positive male role model and next to no discipline, who are utterly without conscience and will shoot, kill or maim at a sidelong glance.

All this is observable in common, everyday experience -- stuff that ordinary common sense would never have doubted. You wouldn't have doubted it, that is, unless you're Hillary Rodham Clinton or part of her left-wing chorus of allies who were furious at President Clinton's cynical, election-eve signing of the third welfare reform bill sent him by the Republican Congress.

NEXT: More on Hillary Rodham Clinton's public pronouncements on, and her approach to, welfare reform.

~Peter Kinder is assistant to the president of Rust Communications and a state senator from Cape Girardeau.