The Orlando Sentinel from Orlando, Florida • Page 13

The Orlando Sentinel, Friday, January 24, 1997 A-1 3 OTHER VIEWS Welfare vs. jackpot of hypocrisy Dunagin's people LBASK get them from welfare to work will take expensive job-training and child-care programs that voters don't want to pay for. Under the new federal welfare "reform" bill, poverty will only increase. What's especially ironic about Rodriguez-Chomat's proposal is that the Florida Lottery has already But the truth is that the Florida Lottery cynically preys on the poor with a seductive promise of wealth beyond their wildest dreams. It takes advantage of vulnerable people by taking away dollars that are needed, sometimes desperately, for basic necessities.

Offering the false hope of a way out of poverty with glitzy television commercials, the state comes along and says you don't have to go to school, work hard or get a job. Instead, just buy a Lotto ticket and get rich. Only now, if Rodriguez-Chomat has his way, don't count on getting your entire P0K exploited our poorest SPECIAL TO THE SENTINEL 4m citizens by saturating low- Florida state Rep. Jorge Rodriguez-Cho-mat, R-Miami, has introduced a bill in the Legislature that would deduct past welfare payments from people who win more than $600 on any Florida lottery game. "If you're receiving financial assistance from the state of Florida, you should not be gambling," Rodriguez-Chomat said.

If the principle behind the proposal is that those citizens receiving state financial assistance should not be gambling, I wonder why he singled out welfare recipients. After all, the state provides financial assistance to lots of people. But those lottery winners who have collected unemployment insurance wouldn't have to repay the state. Nor would college students who have gotten tuition grants or nursing-home residents who receive Medicaid. Welfare recipients are being singled out because they have replaced Nazis and child molesters as the people Americans most love to hate.

They are seen as lazy freeloaders 1 ripping off taxpayers. But these demons are two-thirds children i and, mostly, their undereducated mothers, i The harsh but unavoidable truth is that many are unemployable in today's job market. To I jackpot if you've ever committed the sin of collecting welfare benefits. Columnist William Safire has called state-sanctioned gambling a whopping tax on the poor. Now Florida can tax them even further.

Given all this, fair-minded Floridians might conclude that there's more than a little hypocrisy in Rodriguez-Chomat's little scheme that, in fact, there's a whole Lotto hypocrisy going on. Richard Grayson is a staff attorney with the Center for Governmental Responsibility at the University of Florida's College of Law. income neighborhoods with lottery outlets. A 1993 computer study of lottery data revealed that the state authorized a much higher concentration of sales outlets in poverty-stricken areas than in wealthier ones. For example, the most active lottery machine in all of Duval County one that had sold $4.4 million in tickets during five years was a small grocery in one of the lowest-income areas of Jacksonville.

Florida Lottery officials say that the Legislature ordered them to put lottery outlets into minority-owned small businesses and most of these just happen to be in low-income neighborhoods. 'I'm sorry, sir. We already have a robbery in progress. Would you care to Two-earner couples: Time to debunk the myth By Robert J. Samuelson WASHINGTON POST WRITERS GROUP rASHINGTON Few ideas are so deeply embedded in popular consciousness and political debate as what I'll call the "two- dom to live as they see fit.

But the new choices have spawned new anxieties, complaints and consequences. One unexpected surprise is more economic inequality. Well-paid workers increasingly marry each other and dominate the top of the income spectrum, while poorly paid workers increasingly don't marry (or don't have two workers) and drift toward the bottom. Between 1970 and 1995, the share of families with only a single mother rose from 11 percent to 18 percent. Since the late 1970s, these changes may explain about half of the increase in family income inequality, estimate Burtless and economist Lynn Karo-ly of the Rand Corp.

Another unintended consequence is that families do increasingly need two earners for a middle-income lifestyle, while only one was required for the 1950s' or 1960s' version. But here's the catch: Today's middle-income lifestyle is a lot richer. If people want to duplicate their parents' lifestyles, they can unplug their air conditioners, sell one of their cars, discard their videocassette recorders and personal computers and stop sending all their kids to college. As more wives work, the two-earner couple becomes the norm. Couples still can have one partner stay at home, but only if they don't mind sliding down the income ladder or are exceptionally rich.

Everyone wonders how Mom and Dad could have done it all while Mom stayed at home. One reason is that Mom and Dad didn't live so well, materially at least. Another reason is that Mom didn't have much choice and may occasionally have yearned to do something aside from making the bed, checking the homework and cooking dinner. The larger point is that the dilemmas of the two-earner couple don't arise mainly because incomes (men's or otherwise) are growing slowly. People compare themselves to people like themselves.

As more women work, the comparisons adjust quietly. It's women's wages, more than men's, that create pressures for women to work. We have more choices now than ever, but they aren't necessarily easier. earn more, but their wages and salaries have shown the best gains. By contrast, wages for many low-skilled workers have dropped (after adjusting for inflation).

The "real" incomes of most two-earner couples have consistently risen. Among poorer workers, wives' earnings may offset some drop in their husbands' wages; but that isn't true at the top of the income spectrum or probably in the middle. In 1995, the median two-earner couple the one in the middle of the income distribution made $55,823, about 23 percent more in "real" dollars than a similar couple in 1970, according to the Census Bureau. If men's wages suddenly surged, some wives might stampede back into the kitchen. Most would not.

We've had an upheaval in attitudes and customs. Call it feminism, call it ambition, call it anything. Most women and most men, too now think that women should have the chance to work and pursue a career. In 1945, that wasn't true. As a society, we've created more social choices.

In general, this is progress. It gives people more free But the theory is mostly, bogus, though not the feelings that go with it (as I will explain in a moment). Here's what actually has happened: Women didn't initially enter the job market to make up losses in their husbands' salaries. The influx began in the 1950s, two decades before any slowdown in men's wages. Between 1950 and 1970, the proportion of wives with paid jobs rose from 23 percent to 39 percent.

By 1995, it was 61 percent. Maybe the pioneer working wives of the 1950s and 1960s sought to raise their families' incomes; if so, the reason wasn't their husbands' falling wages. Most wages rose rapidly during these decades. Since the early 1970s, men's wage growth has slowed. But the increase in wives with jobs is concentrated among upper-income couples precisely those who need the extra money least.

Among the richest fifth of husbands, the share of working wives rose from 45 percent to 71 percent between 1973 and 1993, reports economist Gary Burtless of the Brookings Institution. Wealthier husbands not only earner myth." The myth holds that two workers a husband and a wife are now needed to make the same income that one worker the husband attained in the 1950s and 1960s. Women have flooded into the labor market (the theory holds) mostly to offset the lost earnings of their husbands. Her income gets the couple back to where it would have been if his wages weren't dropping. Families feel stressed.

And why not? Mothers must choose between putting food on the table and caring for their children. The theory has broad appeal. Conservatives see it as one reason that "traditional" families are under assault; liberals view it as a pretext for aggressive government programs to raise economic growth. THOMASVILLE i Employers must try harder to integrate workplace BIG WINTER HQM But the researchers' results are a bit more complicated than that. White males were more "qualified," if you look at education alone.

They averaged from a few months to a year more schooling than minorities or women holding similar jobs. Yet, after some time on the job, surprisingly little differences appeared in the routine performance evaluations of so-called preference hires, WASHINGTON As the battle over affirmative action heats up, I am bracing myself for the time when my side the side that supports it loses. The winners will be my rivals like Ward Conner-ly, the black businessman who led the anti-affirmative-action proposition that California voters passed in November. Connerly recently formed an compared with white men. In fact, when broken down into subgroups, African-American women generally outperformed white men, according to the job evaluations.

Curiously, only Latino men were "significantly" lower than their Anglo counterparts in the performance ratings. In a telephone interview, Neumark declined to speculate on the reasons. Because the sample of Latino men was smaller than those of other groups, the researchers wisely refrained from making too many fine distinctions. Whatever the reasons for the disparity regarding Latino men, it does not de TRIBUNE MEDIA SERVICES value the need for today's employers to broaden the pool of qualified applicants organization to spread the movement to other states. Martin Luther King III organized a group to counter Connerly's.

But though King's organization may have some successes, ultimately the pro-affirmative-action side will lose. Affirmative action was never supposed to be permanent. The question has never been whether, but when, affirmative action is going to end. Affirmative action as we know it has been around for about 30 years, more or less. This is as good a time as any to consider how well it has worked and whether it is still needed.

I expect it to end. I just don't want affirmative action to end before its job is done. In the meantime, it pays to ask, what harm is it doing? Is it opening the flood- gates to unqualified or underperforming workers at the expense of deserving white males? With exquisite timing, two economists I at Michigan State University have uncovered strikingly persuasive evi- dence that, despite the concerns voiced by angry white males and others, so-called affirmative-action hires do just as well or even better than white men do. Economists Harry Holzer and David Neumark studied the education, qualifications and performance evaluations of workers at more than 3,200 randomly selected employers in Detroit, Atlanta. Boston and Los Angeles.

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Christopher Dodd of Connecticut during a panel on which we sat in Hartford on the recent anniversary of the birthday of Martin Luther King Jr. He defined it like this: "Look harder. Affirmative action as we know it has been around for 30 years, more or less. This is as good a time as any to consider how well it has worked and whether it is still needed. Employers facing an apparent lack of qualified candidates should try hard er," he said.

They should take a second look at their selection process to ensure that standards are closely relevant to the job's requirements. Otherwise they amount to a perpetuation of America's oldest affirmative action, preferences for PARTICIPATING AIRLINES EARN I 'American Airlines white males. ONE FREE Affirmative action as we have known it appears to be on its way out. But I expect the lessons it has taught us REGISTER TO WIN AN RCA DIGITAL SATELLITE SYSTEM! NO PURCHASE NECESSARY! THROUGH 12797 I AAOVANTAGE MlLES I 'Continental I One Pass 'Delta Air Lines I SkyMiles Northwest I Would Perm United Airlines I Mileage Plus USAir I Frequent Traveler about the nature of job qualifications to endure. AIR NILE FOR EVERY DOLLAR SPENT! THROUGH 22897 Because white men are the slowest-growing rtci group in the workplace, forward-looking employ ers already are finding that they must cast a wider net for skilled job applicants and produce a more Bonus Miles hospitably diverse workplace, whether the govern Employers had identified workers mmB hired at least in part as a consequence of affirmative-action plans.

(Most were government contractors, who are bound by strict affirmative-action requirements.) Their quahfica-i tions and performance evaluations were compared I with those of white men in comparable jobs and I with those of workers hired by companies without I affirmative-action plans. The results indicate that affirmative-action hires I appear to do just as well or better on the job than white males and others who were not hired with affirmative action in mind. That revelation immediately brought up memories of my elders warning me years ago that I would have to set my goals high to be "twice as good to get half as much" as my white counterparts in school and on the job. ment tells them to or not, just to compete for the most talented workers. So far, the damage done by affirmative action ville appears to be, as Mark Twain once said of reports of Altamonte South Orlando 1260 E.

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It pays to try harder..