Time for Welfare Reform II.

YES, the welfare-reform bill of 1996 was one of the stunning conservative success stories of this generation. It has cut the welfare caseloads in most states by half, while requiring that most beneficiaries of traditional cash-assistance welfare work. And yes, liberals--from Ted Kennedy to the Children's Defense Fund--who claimed that welfare reform would have disastrous effects were dead wrong, in every dire prediction. There is even encouraging evidence that out-of-wedlock teenage births, America's number-one social pathology, have started to decline as teenage girls have gotten the message that having a child is no longer an easy way to a government check.

But the job of welfare reform is not nearly done. Congressman Ernest Istook of Oklahoma has made it his personal mission in life to fix the still-gaping holes in welfare reform that discourage work, marriage, and economic self-sufficiency and instead encourage dependency and cheating. Istook recently compiled some disheartening statistics about welfare spending at the federal level. It's way up when you consider the panoply of means-tested programs. Many members of Congress forget that welfare is not just one federal program but more than 30 separate handouts, including food stamps, Medicaid, child-care subsidies, home-heating assistance, and cash-income supplements. A few years ago, a Cato Institute study calculated the "value" of the whole package of welfare benefits and found that in some states a worker would have to find a job that paid more than $30,000 a year to match it.

Since 2000, welfare payments have skyrocketed. Part of this is a result of the recession, but part is a result of cracks in the welfare laws, which have been exploited by welfare cheats. For example, as Istook points out, although we require work for traditional cash-welfare assistance, there is no work requirement for Medicaid or food stamps in most states, and these are two of the programs with the fastest increases in caseloads since 2000.

Recent reports by the Office of Management and Budget and the General Accounting Office document widespread overpayments of welfare benefits, costing taxpayers $45 billion a year at this point, or over $400 for every American household. OMB recently found that the Medicare program made $21.7 billion in improper payments in 2004. A series of GAO studies found that food stamps are often fraudulently issued to people who are deceased or in prison. GAO estimates that more than 10 percent of food stamps are improperly issued or illegally trafficked. Where are the watchdogs?

For traditional cash-assistance programs, the 1996 welfare-reform bill accomplished three important goals: It required work for benefits; it turned these programs over to the states; and it put five-year federal time limits on financial aid. Welfare Reform Part II should involve the institution of precisely these same commonsense measures for all welfare programs, to permanently break the cycle of poverty and protect against rip-offs of the system. The Left is striving for just the opposite: to reverse the gains from the original welfare reforms and rebuild the corrupt industry of dependency erected in the 1960s and '70s.

Welfare Reform Part II, if properly implemented, will save money and restore the dignity of a purposeful life. It will also be consistent with the original intention of aid to the poor, which was to be a temporary safety net for those out of work and out of luck. In 1935, the founder of the modern welfare state warned, "Continued dependence upon relief induces a spiritual and moral disintegration fundamentally destructive to the national fiber. To dole out relief in this way is to administer a narcotic, a subtle destroyer of the human spirit." Franklin Roosevelt was right. What a shame that seven decades later Uncle Sam is still undermining the human spirit with this destructive narcotic.