MISSOURI'S WELFARE REFORMS

As the promise of truly revolutionary welfare reform comes closer to reality in the Congress, states such as Missouri have been taking promising steps as well. While it can't be said that Missouri has gone as far as truly pathbreaking states such as Wisconsin, glimmers of hope are nonetheless on the Show Me State horizon.

Missouri's principal self-sufficiency program is the FUTURES program, which currently has 8,737 welfare recipients enrolled. One FUTURES program that has merited considerable attention involves the Tyson Foods plant in Sedalia. Tyson agrees to employ able-bodied recipients receiving AFDC payments and food stamps. Participants in the program are referred weekly to the Tyson plant, which has provided full-time jobs, paying $5.50 an hour, to some 30 welfare recipients.

To date, 50 percent of those who have been referred have kept their interview appointments and 50 percent of these have been hired. Welfare recipients who refuse to participate or who drop out will see their benefits decline.

The Department of Family Services' Sedalia experiment is the program that has received the most attention, but DFS has four other experimental programs, including those that encourage volunteer work by FUTURES recipients and others that supplement wages in certain entry-level jobs with AFDC benefits. Still another involves two-parent families receiving public assistance. Since the program's inception in October 1993, the caseload for two-parent families receiving assistance has declined from 4,013 to 1,397 -- a drop of 56 percent. In this program, 849 parents have seen benefits reduced for non-compliance.

For decades, the liberal welfare state has grown like a cancer on American society, entrapping its intended beneficiaries in a web of dependency and undermining the habits essential to self-reliant citizens and communities. It is good to see a few glimmers of hope on the horizon.