New York's welfare struggle - Column

In New York State the popularity of Governor George Pataki is down (33 per cent approval). The bumper-sticker explanation is that he is reducing welfare payments in order to reduce taxes on the rich. In New York City there was a most enormous fuss when Mayor Rudolph Giuliani was said to have remarked, after proposing a $700-million reduction in welfare payments, that the measure might cause some of the welfare recipients to leave town and that that would be "a good thing." A few thunderclaps later, the mayor's office denied he had used the words, "good thing."

The attack on Giuliani was especially virulent in the New York Observer, a highly literate weekly which when it touches ideology becomes a hate-screed. Its headline: "A Modestly Priced Poor Proposal:/Hey, Rudy! Send 'Em to Stockholm!/Welfare Crack Flap; Green Says Mayor's Heart/'Couldn't Get Through Airport Metal Detector."' The story's labored funny-line was that Giuliani should consider buying airline tickets for New York's welfare recipients to travel to Sweden, where the poor are guaranteed free lodging, food, medical care, and abortions. When the author was finally done with the Swedish roll, he reached back and quoted Roger Starr twenty years ago as having opined that the time had come to ask serious questions about urban welfare. Starr had said that the city "should not encourage people to stay where their job possibilities are daily becoming more remote . . . Our urban system is based on the theory of taking the peasant and turning him into an industrial worker. Now there are no industrial jobs. Why not keep him a peasant?" The author informs us that Mr. Starr's remark had "contributed to his departure as Mayor Beame's commissioner of the Housing and Development Administration." This is in fact false.

The handling of Roger Starr in that way perfectly captures the know-nothingism of the assault on Giuliani. Roger Starr is among the best-schooled urbanologists in the country, a deeply rooted liberal who spent many years studying the housing problem and, until retiring, served on the editorial board of the New York Times. His point -- that cities should not encourage immigration when they have nothing of professional or economic advantage to confer -- has the bite of acid reality. New York State and New York City are damaging themselves by profligate welfare policies. Under Governor Cuomo, New York confirmed itself as the wastrel state. As it now stands, New York's per capita welfare load is 11 per cent higher than that of runner-up Massachusetts. New Yorkers pay $3,532 per capita in state and local taxes, 70 per cent more than the average of the other states.

Now this responsibility is not entirely that of Democratic governors. Thirty years ago Governor Nelson Rockefeller ignored a recommendation by a special state committee that would have imposed a one-year residency requirement on welfare applicants. The idea was to try to diminish the number of those who elected to come to New York, not because there was economic opportunity here but because welfare was given out in prodigious relative amounts. Governor Rockefeller prevailed, and the mess festered.

The basic question surely begins with what it is that the genuinely indigent most need, to which the answer is: food and shelter. The need for shelter is an aspect of the harshness of the climate. If one is poor and homeless one cannot endure a winter in New York City without suffering pains not inflicted on those who live in the South.

New York is listed as the second most expensive city in the United States to live in, a mere one point under San Francisco. Rudimentary common sense argues against attracting chronic welfare mothers and children to a city in which life is tough, crime high, dope especially tempting, as it is for those who seek escapism. It is surely Mayor Giuliani's point a) that welfare can't be unlimited, and b) that no compassionate purposes are served in attracting the indigent to a city where unemployment is higher than the national average and the cost of living as unattractive as the winter weather.

Whatever the vicissitudes of public life, Messrs. Pataki and Giuliani are taking measures that should bring strategic reward.

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