MISSOURI COMMENTARY: LACK OF MONEY OR SELF-DESTRUCTION?

President Lyndon Johnson was the War-on-Poverty president. He tried to solve the problem of systemic and enduring poverty by putting more money in the hands of the poor. Johnson also created educational and training programs to provide poor people with access to the world of work. He went so far as to create local administrative units where the poor could decide how the federal monies would be spent in their neighborhoods.

Johnson was convinced that the problems of poverty related, pure and simply, to a shortage of resources. Given enough resources under the direction of the poor themselves, poverty could be substantially reduced. Cultural factors were not considered significant causes of poverty. It was all a matter of money.

The big city mayors railed hell about poor people setting up their own political organizations with federal funds. Then, as the Vietnam War took a heavier fiscal toll, the whole notion of spending war-on-poverty money faded away.

President Richard Nixon came into office. One of his advisers wrote, "The poor inhabit a different way of life than the non-poor, primarily because of a lack of money." Nixon's welfare policies, and later President Jimmy Carter's programs, guaranteed a minimum income to all poor families, requiring work form the able-bodied.

As was the case with Johnson, Nixon and Carter though the answer was money with some work thrown in, but Congress found the cost of their programs to be prohibitively expensive. Illegitimacy was not dealt with in the Johnson, Nixon or Carter programs.

All along there was another school of thought, the cultural school. This holds that the blame for poverty rests primarily with the self-destructive behavior of the poor.

Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan was the most notable early advocate of this philosophy. In 1965 as an Assistant Secretary of Labor, he wrote that the illegitimacy rate in that black community was destroying the social fabric of black America. Moynihan was severely criticized for his views, which some considered patronizing and condescending to the culture of lower class blacks. Some black philosophers went so far as to argue that while white middle class may desire two parent households, a single parent family may be sufficient for the black lower class. The Moynihan alarm was pretty well silenced as an intemperate, perhaps even racist, outburst by a rambunctious young academic.

In the 1990s, the cultural theory came into its own. No one claimed that the money theory had worked. Why not try something else?

Illegitimacy became the focus of concern. Births out of wedlock now account for about three out of every 10 children. Illegitimacy is now considered a root of our social ills and has moved to the top of the public policy agenda.

Some social scientists target the welfare system as the breeder of illegitimacy. Instead of throwing money at welfare, they argue, we should design programs that discourage illegitimacy. From this theory come the concepts of denying cash payments to young women under 18 who have illegitimate children and imposing a cap denying more aid to women who have additional illegitimate children while on welfare.

In essence, the Republican majority in the House of Representatives voted in favor of attempting to coerce, as it were, women not to have children out of wedlock. They denied any additional funding for education or job training or day care. The surest way to encourage work is to deny welfare payments, it was argued.

So we have moved perceptibly away from Johnson's Great Society and the Nixon and Carter plans. President Bill Clinton nudged us in the new direction. His speeches on welfare have focused on individual behavior and social responsibility more than they have on dollar payments.

Later this year, when a welfare reform bill comes to Clinton's desk, he may express some reservations with certain provisions in the bill, but it is a safe bet he will sign it. He will attempt to keep his pledge "to end welfare as we know it."

~Tom Eagleton is a former U.S. senator from Missouri and a columnist for the Pulitzer Publishing Co.