MISSOURI WATCH: CONFIRMING OUR WORST SUSPICIONS

As Americans we have a great affinity for any claim that we're being taken advantage of, and while this attitude may not be the most positive image of the United States, it is nevertheless rooted in considerable past experience. Let's face it, the term Uncle Sucker has some historical validity, emerging into full bloom after World War II when we began helping allies and enemies alike recover from history's most devastating conflict. Since then, we have enthusiastically embraced the concept that we Americans are the most generous people to have lived on earth and those who aren't Americans, well, they only live to con us into more foreign aid or all of our hard-earned cash.

Regardless of how deep-seated this belief may be, it needs to be said that it is not entirely true. There are others around the globe who have been as philanthropic as we, and Americans don't own the exclusive franchise of Being Generous, Inc.

In more recent years, this paranoia about being taken to the cleaners even as we remain oblivious to the fraud has manifested itself in other areas of America, particularly when it comes to public assistance, or what many like to call the welfare society. We have a criminal society and we have an elitist society and then we have the welfare society, all of them bad, all of them out to take advantage of our generous nature and our naive acceptance of underclasses filled with sinister people, lazy and indolent, and all of them out to rob us of our heritage and our hard-earned weekly paycheck.

The image of the welfare queen driving to pick up her monthly check in her brand-new Cadillac is enough to drive us good Americans up the wall. One of our presidents depicted this example of how our good nature is being exploited and we haven't exculpated his charge in more than a decade. What really drives us up the wall is the image of a young, unmarried woman sitting around her federally subsidized apartment, watching TV and sipping a beer which she got with food stamps, producing another baby every nine months to enhance her bank account. When most of us conjure up this image, we only pause for a split second to denounce the immorality of it and then move to the high cost of our state's welfare system. Few injustices in life incense us more, even if they don't fit all recipients.

No one likes to remind us of our welfare anger more than our friends in Jefferson City and Washington, where the rules and laws of public assistance are written for the rest of us. One gathers, from all the angry disclaimers, that those who angrily denounce welfare fraud have absolutely no power to correct the situation, which can only be altered if voters will turn out the political opposition. At which time, we now come to the second roadblock to meaningful reform: the mindless bureaucrats who seemingly have all the power-in our state and federal governments. Just how they got all this power, without authorization from elected public officials, is never explained.

It's impossible to count the number of times since the end of World War II that we've reformed welfare in Missouri, but suffice it to say, it's been frequently. The nation is being blessed with the latest federal attempt, for which we're all grateful, if less hopeful. But welfare has so many critics that it's not easy to keep up with all of them, and one of the reasons is because the system lacks both clear goals and the standards for determining whether the goals have been achieved.

If the goal of welfare is to keep a majority of the elderly, handicapped and poor housed and fed, then the system has been amazingly successful. But if its goal is to reduce the need for welfare, then, of course, it has been a failure.

Which leads us to the second important question about government payments: are they entitlements of citizenship or the fruits of charity? Is an unemployed single mother with five children as entitled to a monthly check as a widow who lives on Social Security or a farmer who signs up for crop payments in order to avoid bankruptcy?

Before we buy into the argument that we can only evoke morality by starving hungry children, we need to consider what such an act will produce in society. If we insist that a mother with five children hold a full-time job to feed her family, we must consider all consequences, even as it ignores the truth some recipients are immoral. The overriding consideration that must be used for any reform is whether it imperils young children who are the real victims of the sins of their parents.

~Jack Stapleton is a Kennett columnist who keeps tabs on government.