The Perils of Welfare Reform

There is a wonderfully telling moment in Bradley Whitman's piece "Welfare's Lost Children." (Opinion, Sept. 30) One can almost see the hand-wave when he says that "such a policy would force many unwed mothers to give up their children to the state, but in the long run, the benefits to society would outweigh the costs." Even leaving aside all of the other laughable defects of this assertion, like the reality that raising a child in an orphanage is orders of magnitude more expensive than raising that same child in its family, there is something idiotically perverse going on here.

Apparently, Whitman believes that the second parent's role is of such paramount importance that we may as well give up on the family if there's only one parent around. Given his statement that children from single-parent households are more likely to end up single parents themselves, I'm surprised he didn't bother to extend this line of thinking to the no-parent household.

I have yet to see a cogent call for welfare reform that doesn't contain at least one serious ellipsis in its logic Usually, however--and unlike Whitman--their authors at least try to conceal such leaps of faith. --James Grimmelmann '99