The House approved a Republican welfare reform bill Thursday that would require more single mothers to work and provide hundreds of millions of dollars to promote marriage, according to the Associated Press.
Passing by a 230-192 vote, largely along party lines, the bill puts strict limits on the amount of time welfare recipients can spend in education and training programs, requires states to put more of their welfare recipients to work and requires that each person work more hours.
The bill would allocate $300 million per year to experiments promoting marriage, while another $50 million would go to promoting abstinence from sex until marriage.
Welfare-to-work is by no means a perfect solution. Consider a worst-case scenario:
In his 2002 documentary "Bowling for Columbine," filmmaker Michael Moore cited welfare-to-work plans as partly responsible for the growing number of unsupervised and latchkey children.
The film cited one single mother in Flint, Mich., who rode a bus 90 miles to work, where she worked 12 hours between two jobs in a mall food court. She then took the same bus 90 miles home.
Because she could not afford child care on the combined incomes of the two minimum-wage jobs she found through the welfare-to-work program, she was unable to leave her son in good hands.
One day, her son found a gun in his babysitter's home and shot a 6-year-old girl to death.
Sure, it's a worst-case scenario, and sure, one Michigan woman doesn't undermine the whole bill. But it's easy to see how the faults of this bill can surface. While welfare-to-work programs have good intentions, they are just as problematic as doling out monthly checks.
Still, Republicans say the key to success is putting people to work.
"A check in the mail every month won't teach responsibility. It won't build confidence," said Rep. Deborah Pryce, R-Ohio.
That's a given, but the alternative -- forcing single mothers to work and find child care on their own -- won't build healthy families.
Democrats argue that getting someone off welfare includes education, training and access to child care as part of helping people earn a decent living. Studies show that people who have left welfare are working but still live below the poverty level.
Encouraging marriage and abstinence is not without merit -- it's actually the most feasible part of the bill.
However, single mothers should have a choice as to whether they want to stay at home with their children or find jobs that allow them to balance quality child care with a career -- and a mall food court is not much of a career.
If the government is willing to put single mothers to work, it should be ready to accommodate their children through assisted child care. Otherwise, this solution is no more practical than monthly checks.
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