The help for working parents plan: some potentials and problems

While the Help for Working Parents (HWP) proposal represents a fundamental and costly change in the nation's safety net for poor families with children, it contains a variety of attributes that should give us pause. Its presumptions regarding the expectations for women's work should be made explicit; it would do well to add provisions that would increase the direct reward for supplying labor and working and provide incentives for employers to offer them work; and it should give more recognition to the fact that many if not most welfare recipients do not have the cognitive skills and experience that will remove them from the end of the queue of low-wage job seekers. However, HWP does make explicit the proposition that the nation's poverty and welfare problems are not likely to be solved “on the cheap.”