How to Nip Poverty in the Bud : What’s next? Can we expect a 1990s version of ‘off with their heads’?

Now that Bob Dole and Bill Clinton are both desperate to claim credit for killing the 60-year-old Aid to Families With Dependent Children program, all sorts of bold innovations are possible. Gosh, last week Clinton even outdid the Republicans in swiftly endorsing the Wisconsin plan, which goes further than Newt Gingrich in holding the poor responsible for poverty.

But this is no time for overconfidence. The bleeding hearts are still out there and they will keep harping on the fact that the poor are mostly children. When the voters are reminded that cutting welfare means that kids will go hungry, they tend to lose their appetite for reform. Remember the ridicule that Gingrich had to put up with just for trying to eliminate school lunches for needy kids? But while the fainthearted in both political camps will view this kids angle as a problem, true tough-love pros will welcome it as a bold political opportunity.

To begin with, it’s an excellent means for sidestepping the abortion controversy that haunts both campaigns. When Clinton is pro-choice, he loses the blue-collar Catholics, and Dole’s support of a constitutional amendment banning abortion jeopardizes the support of moderate Republicans. A historic compromise is in the offing: Since 70% of welfare recipients are kids, then the way to end welfare is to get rid of poor fetuses before they become poor kids.

Mandatory abortions for the poor and choice for everyone else. It’s a solution that once worked efficiently in Germany, and in this heyday of bioengineering can easily be fine-tuned for a democracy.

Conservative thinkers never were all that happy with poor fetuses. They plotted bell curves showing that those fetuses hardly had a chance competing with the offspring of the better born. And as long as mandatory abortion applied only to poor women, moderates could come to accept it as a rigorous form of family planning.

Sounds harsh, I know. But really, what’s the difference between killing the fetus and starving the newborn? I mean, right now most of the welfare reformers are eager to deny extra money to a child born to a woman on welfare. They hope this will end what Dole calls “a plague of illegitimacy.”

But if the child is by definition and through no fault of its own to be branded “illegitimate,” then the fetus must also be judged “illegitimate.” So what’s the big deal in aborting a fetus destined to commit a crime through the very act of being born?

Religion, you say: The fetus must come to term, it’s written in sacred scripture. OK, I can buy that as a political constraint. So we go to Plan B. Let the poor kids be born, but don’t waste resources on raising them.

As the Republicans have warned us, all those poverty programs do is turn kids into criminals. Even something as innocent-sounding as midnight basketball. Like Dole said last week, the liberal Great Society programs produced an “epidemic of violence.” Welfare is even worse than Hollywood. (Yes, I know about those statistics showing that most kids raised on welfare grow up to be law-abiding taxpayers, but the statistics must lie.)

AFDC is also a cheap program costing the feds about the same as seven purposeless B-2 bombers. But if welfare does any good for kids, how can you explain that not a single major politician will ever go before the voters and defend it the way they do the B-2?

What those politicians know is that poor kids are only kids for a very few years. Five, to be exact, which is the cap that both Clinton and Dole would place on welfare eligibility. After five years, the mother and kids are on their own. Why go through the motions of pretending that their adolescence offers some hope when it doesn’t?

The answer is to eliminate adolescence for poor kids by lowering the eligibility age for prison. By sending poor kids straight to prison we avoid the need for child care and free the mother for work even if there are no jobs. Clearly, welfare mothers are not expected to mother. That was revealed in the Wisconsin welfare reform plan, which both Dole and Clinton endorsed, that requires welfare mothers to take jobs after their youngest child is 12 weeks old. The gap in child care between infancy and prison can best be filled by one of Gingrich’s orphanages.

The door is wide open for innovation. But I hope they don’t go too far. As someone who started life supported by welfare and who was born out of wedlock, I would consider it most unfortunate if they also tried to eliminate us adults who were born “wrong.”