The nation’s old welfare system was "an enemy of individual effort and responsibility, with dependence passed from one generation to the next," the president said Feb. 26.

A Feb. 27 New York Times article described Bush’s remarks partly as “vintage compassionate conservatism.” Is this a little like the recent compassion of the president and Congress towards corporate America, including the $15 billion bailout to big airlines?

By 2007 Bush wants to more than double the number of welfare recipients mandated to work. The unexamined assumption is that earning wages helps people to escape poverty.

Reality is somewhere else. Consider what the Economic Policy Institute found in a 2001 study, Hardships in America: The Real Story of Working Families.

EPI researchers discovered that the basic family budget levels of 29 percent of U.S. families failed to cover their basic needs as set in their communities. The basic needs were the costs of food, medical care and shelter, etc., with no money budgeted for dining out, entertaining, savings or vacationing (www.epi.org).

There's more. “The study showed that the number of poor people in this country is actually two and-a-half-times as many as the official government poverty line identifies,” noted economist John Rowntree. Recall that America, the most militarily powerful nation now and in history, led the developed world in rates of child poverty before welfare reform.

What’s the bottom line? The president’s free market solutions to poverty are the problem because there are not jobs for all people that pay a livable wage.

The free market is like no other. How, you ask?

People are free to enter into contracts to sell their labor-power to buyers. The same sellers have also been freed from the ability to provide for themselves.

Labor-buyers are free to keep the value they gain from purchasing labor-power. The more people selling their labor-power the better for those who purchase it, since the sellers have no choice if they want to continue their existence.

The starvation factor is a weapon against workers. People don’t willingly starve themselves.

Forcing more welfare recipients into the market for labor-power increases the number of people competing for jobs. This is supposed to promote personal responsibility but actually boosts profitability for buyers of labor-power who hold the upper hand when two people are competing for one job.

Freedom is illusory when people’s labor-power is a commodity. This commodity is central to capitalism.

A long-term goal is abolishing labor-power as a commodity. This could place people in control of work instead of work controlling them, the current practice.

In the short-term, however, we must support progressive changes to welfare reform, most of which ends this year and is set to be reauthorized and rewritten. The first Congress of the U.S. Basic Income Grant, to be held in New York, March 8-9, may be a step in that direction (www.widerquist.com/usbig/announcement.html).

Seth Sandronsky is an editor with Because People Matter, Sacramento’s progressive newspaper ssandron@hotmail.com

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