I write these suggestions as a concerned citizen and as someone who as a teacher and resident has spent some of his early adult life living and teaching in and near Harlem, New York.
The ghetto is a place where disrespect is a way of life. Chaos rules. Structure, when encountered, is ignored or if necessary, destroyed. The feel of the ghetto is frightfully hard and cold; the sound—that of a siren. Nothing is dealt with until it is an overpowering emergency. Reality is very harsh, as destruction most often rules the day. Inhabitants are left to choose between escape, revenge and numbness. Each one is a killer.
I once watched as two cats began clawing at each other and screeching. The children nearby did not wince at the pain, but instead bet on which cat would win. The situation has reached the point where many of the poor, especially the young, no longer care: about life, about each other, about themselves. “Trying” has become an empty platitude. It is this bad. Even hope is retreating.
However, there are measures that can be taken that would, in time, reverse this horrible situation. Welfare must be stopped. It teaches people that it is O.K. to be unproductive, and even more destructively, this it is O.K. for children to grow up imitating their parents’ counterproductive ways. Instead, we should institute a type of workfare that neither we nor any other society has of today attempted.
All present welfare recipients should be guaranteed not jobs, but job opportunities. People deserve the right to be able to work, to bring home enough money to support their family and to feel the sense of accomplishment that work and activity bring. On the other hand, all Americans rightfully expect that their fellow citizens fully support themselves if given the chance. Each of us has the obligation to pull our own weight and work to help ourselves and those who are helping us.
Communist countries make the disastrous economic mistake of guaranteeing work for all. America, acting from our own traditions and beliefs, should amend this error and guarantee our fellow citizens not work but the right to work and the opportunity to build a foundation from which they can prosper.
A massive job opportunities program should be enacted. The government, in conjunction with private industry or alone, would create job opportunities for each welfare recipient. The system would be tiered, set up with three different levels of jobs, each emphasizing different levels of responsibility, status and pay. All employees would start off in the highest stratum, their performance would either move them up or down, within or between the spectrum of job offerings.
For example, the federal government and local governments would together identify problems that need improvements or a renewed commitment. Low cost housing is one of our nation’s most pressing needs. Another need is trained workers who can build the housing. In large inner cities this is particularly true. Shells of buildings exist desperately needing rehabilitation. Ghetto and middle class residents need places to live and welfare recipients and members of the underclass generally need to learn both job skills and the value of a sense of personal accomplishment. Workers could be given apprenticeship training and lower than unionized, but decent salaries. Workers would learn the necessity and dignity of work and have money in their pockets with which to help themselves and the economy. With proper planning, participants would be able to rebuild nearby units for their own future occupancy.
If people worked hard, they would be rewarded with apprenticeship programs, managerial positions and access to more sophisticated technological training. If people did not work hard, they would be dropped from the choice first tier job. These jobs would be less career-oriented and there would be less chance for advancement. The types of tasks these groups might pursue could be rebuilding park benches and helping to create parks and gardens where vacant lots now exist.
If employees failed in second tier jobs, they would fall to the third and final tier. These jobs would concentrate on some of the less sought after jobs, but they offer an honest day’s pay for an honest day’s work. If employees are fired from a tier three job, they can ask friends and relatives for money. The government is then finished providing all welfare benefits. If someone’s benefits are cut off, they could wait a mandated period, perhaps six months, and then reenter the system at tier three, working their way up if deserving.
Concerns that those without benefits would turn to crime or exist among extreme hardship are generally unfounded. The overwhelming majority will turn to their friends and relatives for support. For proof of this, look at the average allocation presently offered by welfare; no one could live on its benefits exclusively. People need their own resources for help even now. With the adoption of this program there would now be more money in poor areas, and it would spread more evenly. People would have more money to help each other. Decisions as to who should be helped and why would then be decentralized and made by private citizens, not by the government’s bureaucracy. The system would be more efficient and more flexible. The providers would also be more forceful in putting pressure on the recipients to be productive.
An informed critic might say that this work program sounds good but does not address the real problem: most welfare recipients are mothers with children. Who will care for her kids while the mother is working? The answer is day care. Day care is an expensive program to administer. Surveys have shown that it is less expensive for the taxpayer to support the welfare mother than pay to properly care for and educate her children. However, a properly managed day care program will eventually benefit America both economically and spiritually. Day care should be provided for the children of welfare recipients starting from age one. Mothers would then be able and required to work.
The need for an extensive Day care program is based upon the belief that early childhood education is the most important education. Presently virtually no money is spent on the education of children between the ages of one and five, (except for proportionally few Head Start and day care dollars.) In urban ghettos, money earmarked for trying to remedy the problems of the ghetto is mostly spent on children in their late teens or early twenties. A complete reversal of funding priorities should be instituted.
In a further cost-containment measure, day care should only be provided for one’s first two children from a date. The program would start at a certain date in the future so people will know its limits. Middle class taxpayers should not be expected to support more of someone else’s children then they bestow upon themselves. Most American families stop at two children because they do not believe they have the resources, money and otherwise, to properly raise more than two kids.
This proposal in no way states that the poor cannot have as many children as they would like. What it does suggest is that just as middle class families limit their family’s size due to financial constraints, so should it be a consideration of the poor, (or at present, government planners shaping public policy for the poor.) If poor mothers or families would like to take that same allocation and stretch it further to provide for more children, so be it.
These programs should reinvigorate a spirit of responsibility and achievement among the urban poor in America. Greater financial rewards must be available to those people who are trying to improve their situation, while greater obstacles should be placed in front of those who refuse to take primary responsibility for improving their own lives.
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