Politics & Power Quote by Charles Foster Bass

Bass frames this as a modest, technocratic fix, but the real move is moral: he’s trying to reclassify foster youth from a “private” social problem into a public obligation with a clear endpoint. The sentence is built like legislation because it’s aiming at legitimacy. “State and local government, with financial support from the federal government” is a carefully stacked coalition, a nod to American federalism that also smuggles in a power shift. It flatters local control while insisting Washington has to pay up. That’s not just budgeting; it’s politics calibrated for voters who want compassion without the specter of a centralized welfare state.

The intent is narrowly practical: employment training and financial assistance “as needed” through age 21. But the subtext is about the cliff foster kids hit at 18, when the state’s parental role abruptly ends. By extending support to 21, Bass is quietly arguing that foster care is not charity; it’s substitute parenthood with duties that don’t disappear on a birthday. The mention of employment isn’t incidental, either. It’s an ideological bridge: help is justified as workforce preparation, not mere relief. That framing makes the policy harder to dismiss as dependency and easier to sell as investment.

Context matters: late-20th-century welfare debates pushed policymakers to prove programs produced “self-sufficiency.” Foster youth became a politically legible exception - kids the state already took responsibility for. Bass leverages that consensus, translating empathy into a programmatic promise: don’t just remove children from harm; equip them to land somewhere stable after the system lets go.