KEEPING PROMISES : What we owe the working poor.

It's fashionable to talk about poor Americans left out of the economic boom. It's not fashionable to do much about their problems. In Congress and on the campaign trail, a favorite pastime for members of both parties is to brag about the welfare reform bill passed in 1996. The bragging is over the sharp drop in the welfare rolls brought about by a prosperity that has created so many new jobs, and also by the bill's tough welfare-to-work provisions. George W. Bush regularly boasts about the decline in Texas's welfare rolls, while Al Gore trumpets his premier role in pushing welfare reform against the wishes of some of the leading voices in his own party. It's hard to oppose the core principle behind the welfare bill: public assistance should be temporary and the system should help the poor find jobs and pursue independence.

But supporters of the bill insisted they weren't just being punitive. They said they wanted benefits--Medicaid, food stamps, child care, transportation assistance, and children's health insurance--to follow poor people off the rolls and help support them as they found their footing in the workplace. These benefits are especially important to the children of the poor, and no member of Congress likes to look mean to kids.

The problem, according to a new study released earlier this month, is that many states are denying the working poor benefits to which they are legally entitled. That undermines the incentives that Congress pledged to put in place on behalf of the working poor. "Even if you're a proponent of welfare reform, you'd be shocked at what's happening," says Lissa Bell, policy director of the Seattle-based Northwest Federation of Community Organizations. If the purpose of welfare reform is "self-sufficiency," that idea is "not being adequately reflected" in actual administration of the programs, she says.

What Bell and her co-author, Carson Strege-Flora, found were many cases of states and localities violating federal rules by imposing waiting periods for programs that are supposed to have none; creating cumbersome application rules to make it hard for eligible people to get benefits; and misinforming the working poor about what help was available to them. Now if there is good news in any of this, it is that community groups around the nation are organizing to put the cause of the working poor at the center of the national debate. Paradoxically, those who were most critical of the welfare bill when it passed may end up saving welfare reform by insisting that those willing to labor hard for low wages be lifted out of poverty. "The people who are being denied access to these programs are people who work," says Deepak Bhargava, director of the National Campaign for Jobs and Income Support, which was launched this month at a meeting in Chicago and sponsored the study. The Campaign is a coalition of about a thousand community groups, including faith-based and neighborhood organizations. "Its goal is to put poverty back on the national agenda," he says.

The devolution of power to the states, an idea associated with conservatives,

is unleashing a wave of activism by the poor and their supporters. "The interesting thing about the devolution phenomenon," Bhargava says, "is that it's really put the ball in the court of the community organizations." They are demonstrating "a new level of sophistication about public policy politics." But in the end, he says, these groups will also look to Washington to make sure states run programs for the working poor by the rules. And Washington will necessarily play a large role in any serious expansion of benefits for those who work but are still trapped in poverty. Universal health care would be a nice place to start.

"Poverty is the great invisible problem in the national discourse," Bhargava says. "It's not being talked about because there hasn't been much political pressure from the people affected. And the problem is usually defined by the success of welfare reform in getting people off the rolls, as opposed to the failure to make much of a dent in the poverty rate."

This ought to be the most promising of times for programs to alleviate poverty. Public coffers at all levels are bulging, thanks to good economic times. The old welfare system is dead and most government assistance is now flowing to those who work--meaning that the vast majority of voters approve of the values now embedded in the programs. If we're not willing to do more to help the working poor, what does that say about our much advertised commitment to the value of work? And how devoted are we to that sentiment now roaringly popular on the campaign trail, compassion?

[C] 2000, Washington Post Writers Group