President Clinton on Welfare Reform Bill
THE WHITE HOUSE
Office of the Press Secretary
______________________________________________________________________
For Immediate Release July 31, 1996
STATEMENT BY THE PRESIDENT
The Briefing Room
2:27 P.M. EDT
THE PRESIDENT: Good afternoon. When I ran for
President four years ago, I pledged to end welfare as we know it. I
have worked very hard for four years to do just that. Today, the
Congress will vote on legislation that gives us a chance to live up
to that promise -- to transform a broken system that traps too many
people in a cycle of dependence to one that emphasizes work and
independence; to give people on welfare a chance to draw a paycheck,
not a welfare check.
It gives us a better chance to give those on welfare
what we want for all families in America, the opportunity to succeed
at home and at work. For those reasons I will sign it into law. The
legislation is, however, far from perfect. There are parts of it
that are wrong, and I will address those parts in a moment.
But, on balance, this bill is a real step forward for
our country, our values and for people who are on welfare. For 15
years I have worked on this problem, as governor and as a President.
I've spent time in welfare offices, I have talked to mothers on
welfare who desperately want the chance to work and support their
families independently. A long time ago I concluded that the current
welfare system undermines the basic values of work, responsibility
and family, trapping generation after generation in dependency and
hurting the very people it was designed to help.
Today we have an historic opportunity to make welfare
what it was meant to be -- a second chance, not a way of life. And
even though the bill has serious flaws that are unrelated to welfare
reform, I believe we have a duty to seize the opportunity it gives us
to end welfare as we know it. Over the past three and a half years I
have done everything in my power as President to promote work and
responsibility, working with 41 states to give them 69 welfare reform
experiments. We have also required teen mothers to stay in school,
required federal employees to pay their child support, cracked down
on people who owe child support and crossed state lines.
As a result, child support collections are up 40
percent, to $11 billion, and there are 1.3 million fewer people on
welfare today than there were when I took office. From the outset,
however, I have also worked with members of both parties in Congress
to achieve a national welfare reform bill that will make work and
responsibility the law of the land. I made my principles for real
welfare reform very clear from the beginning. First and foremost, it
should be about moving people from welfare to work. It should impose
time limits on welfare. It should give people the child care and the
health care they need to move from welfare to work without hurting
their children. It should crack down on child support enforcement
and it should protect our children.
This legislation meets these principles. It gives us a
chance we haven't had before -- to break the cycle of dependency that
has existed for millions and millions of our fellow citizens, exiling
them from the world of work that gives structure, meaning, and
dignity to most of our lives.
We've come a long way in this debate. It's important to
remember that not so very long ago, at the beginning of this very
Congress, some wanted to put poor children in orphanages and take
away all help for mothers simply because they were poor, young and
unmarried. Last year the Republican majority in Congress sent me
legislation that had its priorities backward. It was soft on work
and tough on children. It failed to provide child care and health
care. It imposed deep and unacceptable cuts in school lunches, child
welfare and help for disabled children. The bill came to me twice
and I vetoed it twice.
The bipartisan legislation before the Congress today is
significantly better than the bills I vetoed. Many of the worst
elements I objected to are out of it. And many of the improvements I
asked for are included. First, the new bill is strong on work. It
provides $4 billion more for child care so that mothers can move from
welfare to work, and protects their children by maintaining health
and safety standards for day care. These things are very important.
You cannot ask somebody on welfare to go to work if they're going to
neglect their children in doing it.
It gives states powerful performance incentives to place
people in jobs. It requires states to hold up their end of the
bargain by maintaining their own spending on welfare. And it gives
states the capacity to create jobs by taking money now used for
welfare checks and giving it to employers as income subsidies as an
incentive to hire people, or being used to create community service
jobs.
Second, this new bill is better for children than the
two I vetoed. It keeps the national nutritional safety net intact by
eliminating the food stamp cap and the optional block grant. It
drops the deep cuts and devastating changes in school lunch, child
welfare and help for disabled children. It allows states to use
federal money to provide vouchers for children whose parents can't
find work after the time limits expire. And it preserves the
national guarantee of health care for poor children, the disabled,
pregnant women, the elderly and people on welfare.
Just as important, this bill continues to include the
child support enforcement measures I proposed two years ago, the most
sweeping crackdown on deadbeat parents in history. If every parent
paid the child support they should, we could move 800,000 women and
children off welfare immediately. With this bill we say to parents,
if you don't pay the child support you owe, we will garnish your
wages, take away your drivers license, track you across state lines
and, as necessary, make you work off what you owe. It is a very
important advance that could only be achieved in legislation. I did
not have the executive authority to do this without a bill.
So I will sign this bill. First and foremost because
the current system is broken. Second, because Congress has made many
of the changes I sought. And, third, because even though serious
problems remain in the non-welfare reform provisions of the bill,
this is the best chance we will have for a long, long time to
complete the work of ending welfare as we know it by moving people
from welfare to work, demanding responsibility and doing better by
children.
However, I want to be very clear. Some parts of this
bill still go too far. And I am determined to see that those areas
are corrected. First, I am concerned that although we have made
great strides to maintain the national nutritional safety net, this
bill still cuts deeper than it should in nutritional assistance,
mostly for working families with children. In the budget talks, we
reached a tentative agreement on $21 billion in food stamp savings
over the next several years. They are included in this bill.
However, the congressional majority insisted on another
cut we did not agree to, repealing a reform adopted four years ago in
Congress, which was to go into effect next year. It's called the
Excess Shelter Reduction, which helps some of our hardest pressed
working families. Finally, we were going to treat working families
with children the same way we treat senior citizens who draw food
stamps today. Now, blocking this change, I believe -- I know -- will
make it harder for some of our hardest pressed working families with
children. This provision is a mistake, and I will work to correct
it.
Second, I am deeply disappointed that the congressional
leadership insisted on attaching to this extraordinarily important
bill a provision that will hurt legal immigrants in America, people
who work hard for their families, pay taxes, serve in our military.
This provision has nothing to do with welfare reform. It is simply a
budget-saving measure, and it is not right.
These immigrant families with children who fall on hard
times through no fault of their own -- for example because they face
the same risks the rest of us do from accidents, from criminal
assaults, from serious illnesses -- they should be eligible for
medical and other help when they need it. The Republican majority
could never have passed such a provision standing alone. You see
that in the debate in the immigration bill, for example, over the
Gallegly amendment and the question of education of undocumented and
illegal immigrant children.
This provision will cause great stress for states, for
localities, for medical facilities that have to serve large numbers
of legal immigrants. It is just wrong to say to people, we'll let
you work here, you're helping our country, you'll pay taxes, you
serve in our military, you may get killed defending America -- but if
somebody mugs you on a street corner or you get cancer or you get hit
by a car or the same thing happens to your children, we're not going
to give you assistance any more. I am convinced this would never
have passed alone and I am convinced when we send legislation to
Congress to correct it, it will be corrected.
In the meantime, let me also say that I intend to take
further executive action directing the INS to continue to work to
remove the bureaucratic roadblocks to citizenship to all eligible,
legal immigrants. I will do everything in my power, in other words,
to make sure that this bill lifts people up and does not become an
excuse for anyone to turn their backs on this problem or on people
who are generally in need through no fault of their own. This bill
must also not let anyone off the hook. The states asked for this
responsibility, now they have to shoulder it and not run away from
it. We have to make sure that in the coming years reform and change
actually result in moving people from welfare to work.
The business community must provide greater private
sector jobs that people on welfare need to build good lives and
strong families. I challenge every state to adopt the reforms that
Wisconsin, Oregon, Missouri and other states are proposing to do, to
take the money that used to be available for welfare checks and offer
it to the private sector as wage subsidies to begin to hire these
people, to give them a chance to build their families and build their
lives. All of us have to rise to this challenge and see that -- this
reform not as a chance to demonize or demean anyone, but instead as
an opportunity to bring everyone fully into the mainstream of
American life, to give them a chance to share in the prosperity and
the promise that most of our people are enjoying today.
And we here in Washington must continue to do everything
in our power to reward work and to expand opportunity for all people.
The Earned Income Tax Credit which we expanded in 1993 dramatically,
is now rewarding the work of 15 million working families. I am
pleased that congressional efforts to gut this tax cut for the
hardest pressed working people have been blocked. This legislation
preserves the EITC and its benefits for working families. Now we
must increase the minimum wage, which also will benefit millions of
working people with families and help them to offset the impact of
some of the nutritional cuts in this bill.
Through these efforts, we all have to recognize, as I
said in 1992, the best anti-poverty program is still a job. I want
to congratulate the members of Congress in both parties who worked
together on this welfare reform legislation. I want to challenge
them to put politics aside and continue to work together to meet our
other challenges and to correct the problems that are still there
with this legislation. I am convinced that it does present an
historic opportunity to finish the work of ending welfare as we know
it, and that is why I have decided to sign it.
Q Mr. President, some civil rights groups and
children's advocacy groups still say that they believe that this is
going to hurt children. I wonder what your response is to that.
And, also, it took you a little while to decide whether you would go
along with this bill or not. Can you give us some sense of what you
and your advisers kind of talked about and the mood in the White
House over this?
THE PRESIDENT: Sure. Well, first of all, the
conference was not completed until late last evening, and there were
changes being made in the bill right up to the very end. So when I
went to bed last night, I didn't know what the bill said. And this
was supposed to be a day off for me, and when I got up and I realized
that the conference had completed its work late last night and that
the bill was scheduled for a vote late this afternoon, after I did a
little work around the house this morning, I came in and we went to
work I think about 11:00.
And we simply -- we got everybody in who had an interest
in this and we went through every provision of the bill, line by
line, so that I made sure that I understood exactly what had come out
of the conference. And then I gave everybody in the administration
who was there a chance to voice their opinion on it and to explore
what their views were and what our options were. And as soon as we
finished the meeting, I went in and had a brief talk with the Vice
President and with Mr. Panetta, and I told them that I had decided
that, on balance, I should sign the bill. And then we called this
press conference.
Q And what about the civil rights groups --
THE PRESIDENT: I would say to them that there are some
groups who basically have never agreed with me on this, who never
agreed that we should do anything to give the states much greater
flexibility on this if it meant doing away with the individual
entitlement to the welfare check. And that is still, I think, the
central objection to most of the groups.
My view about that is that for a very long time it's
hard to say that we've had anything that approaches a uniform AFDC
system when the benefits range from a low of $187 a month to a high
of $655 a month for a family of three or four. And I think that the
system we have is not working. It works for half the people who just
use it for a little while and get off. It will continue to work for
them. I think the states will continue to provide for them.
For the other half of the people who are trapped on it,
it is not working. And I believe that the child support provisions
here, the child care provisions here, the protection of the medical
benefits -- indeed, the expansion of the medical guarantee now from
1998 to 2002, mean that on balance these families will be better off.
I think the problems in this bill are in the non-welfare reform
provisions, in the nutritional provisions that I mentioned and
especially in the legal immigrant provisions that I mentioned.
Q Mr. President, it seems likely there will be a kind
of political contest to see who gets the credit or the blame on this
measure. Senator Dole is out with a statement calling
-- saying that you've been brought along to sign his bill. Are you
concerned at all that you will be seen as having been kind of dragged
into going along with something that you originally promised to do
and that this will look like you signing onto a Republican
initiative?
THE PRESIDENT: No. First of all, because I don't
-- you know, if we're doing the right thing there will be enough
credit to go around. And if we're doing the wrong thing there will
be enough blame to go around. I'm not worried about that. I've
always wanted to work with Senator Dole and others. And before he
left the Senate, I asked him not to leave the budget negotiations.
So I'm not worried about that.
But that's a pretty hard case to make, since I vetoed
their previous bills twice and since while they were talking about it
we were doing it. It's now generally accepted by everybody who has
looked at the evidence that we effected what the New York Times
called a quiet revolution in welfare. There are 1.3 million fewer
people on welfare today than there were when I took office.
But there are limits to what we can do with these
waivers. We couldn't get the child support enforcement. We couldn't
get the extra child care. Those are two things that we had to have
legislation to do. And the third thing is we needed to put all the
states in a position where they had to move right now to try to
create more jobs. So far -- I know that we had Wisconsin and
earlier, Oregon, and I believe Missouri. And I think those are the
only three states, for example, that had taken up the challenge that
I gave to the governors in Vermont a couple of years ago to start
taking the welfare payments and use it for wage subsidies to the
private sector to actually create jobs. You can't tell people to go
to work if there is no job out there.
So now they all have the power and they have financial
incentives to create jobs, plus we've got the child care locked in
and the medical care locked in and the child support enforcement
locked in. None of this could have happened without legislation.
That's why I thought this legislation was important.
Q Mr. President, some of the critics of this bill say
that the flaws will be very hard to fix because that will involve
adding to the budget and in the current political climate adding to
the expenditures is politically impossible. How would you respond to
that?
THE PRESIDENT: Well, it just depends on what your
priorities are. For one thing, it will be somewhat easier to balance
the budget now in the time period because the deficit this year is
$23 billion less than it was the last time we did our budget
calculations. So we've lowered that base $23 billion this year.
Now, in the out years it still comes up, but there's some savings
there that we could turn around and put back into this.
Next, if you look at -- my budget corrects it right now.
I had $42 billion in savings, this bill has about $57 billion in
savings. You could correct all these problems that I mentioned with
money to spare in the gap there. So when we get down to the budget
negotiations either at the end of this year or at the beginning of
next year, I think the American people will say we can stand
marginally smaller tax cuts, for example, or cut somewhere else to
cure this problem of immigrants and children, to cure the nutritional
problems. We're not talking about vast amounts of money over a six
year period. It's not a big budget number and I think it can easily
be fixed given where we are in the budget negotiations.
Q The last couple days in these meetings among your
staff and this morning, would you say there was no disagreement among
people in the administration about what you should do? Some
disagreement? A lot of disagreement?
THE PRESIDENT: No, I would say that there was -- first
of all, I have rarely been as impressed with the people who work in
this administration on any issue as I have been on this. There was
significant disagreement among my advisers about whether this bill
should be signed or vetoed, but 100 percent of them recognized the
power of the arguments on the other side. It was a very moving
thing. Today the conversation was almost 100 percent about the
merits of the bill and not the political implications of it. Because
I think those things are very hard to calculate anyway. I think
they're virtually impossible.
I have tried to thank all of them personally, including
those who are here in the room and those who are not here, because
they did have differences of opinion about whether we should sign or
veto, but each side recognized the power of the arguments on the
other side. And 100 percent of them, just like 100 percent of the
Congress, recognized that we needed to change fundamentally the
framework within which welfare operates in this country. The only
question was whether the problems in the non-welfare reform
provisions were so great that they would justify a veto and giving up
what might be what I'm convinced is our last best chance to
fundamentally change the system.
Q Mr. President, even in spite of all the details of
this, you as a Democrat are actually helping to dismantle something
that was put in place by Democrats 60 years ago. Did that give you
pause, that overarching question?
THE PRESIDENT: No. No, because it was put in place 60
years ago when the poverty population of America was fundamentally
different than it is now. As Senator Moynihan -- you know, Senator
Moynihan strongly disagrees with me on this --but as he has pointed
out repeatedly, when welfare was created the typical welfare
recipient was a miner's widow with no education, small children,
husband dies in the mine, no expectation that there was a job for the
widow to do or that she ever could do it, very few out-of-wedlock
pregnancies and births. The whole dynamics were different then.
So I have always thought that the Democratic party
should be on the side of creating opportunity and promoting
empowerment and responsibility for people, and a system that was in
place 60 years ago that worked for the poverty population then is not
the one we need now. But that's why I have worked so hard too to
veto previous bills. That does not mean I think we can walk away
from the guarantee that our party gave on Medicaid, the guarantee our
party gave on nutrition, the guarantee our party gave in school
lunches, because that has not changed. But the nature of the poverty
population is so different now that I am convinced we have got to be
willing to experiment, to try to work to find ways to break the cycle
of dependency that keeps dragging folks down.
And I think the states are going to find out pretty
quickly that they're going to have to be willing to invest something
in these people to make sure that they can go to work in the ways
that I suggested.
Yes, one last question.
Q Mr. President, you have mentioned Senator Moynihan.
Have you spoken to him or other congressional leaders, especially
congressional Democrats? And what was the conversation and reaction
to your indication?
THE PRESIDENT: Well, I talked to him as recently, I
think, as about a week ago. When we went up to meet with the TWA
families, we talked about it again. And, you know, I have an
enormous amount of respect for him. And he has been a powerful and
cogent critic of this whole move. I'll just have to hope that in
this one case I'm right and he's wrong -- because I have an enormous
regard for him. And I've spoken to a number of other Democrats, and
some think I'm right and some don't.
This is a case where, you know, I have been working with
this issue for such a long time -- a long time before it became -- to
go back to Mr. Hume's question -- a long time before it became a
cause celeb in Washington or anyone tried to make it a partisan
political issue. It wasn't much of a political hot potato when I
first started working on it. I just was concerned that the system
didn't seem to be working. And I was most concerned about those who
were trapped on it and their children and the prospect that their
children would be trapped on it.
I think we all have to admit here -- we all need a
certain level of humility today. We are trying to continue a process
that I've been pushing for three and a half years. We're trying to
get the legal changes we need in federal law that will work to move
these folks to a position of independence where they can support
their children and their lives as workers and in families will be
stronger.
But if this were an easy question, we wouldn't have had
the two and a half hour discussion with my advisers today and we'd
all have a lot more answers than we do. But I'm convinced that we're
moving in the right direction. I'm convinced it's an opportunity we
should seize. I'm convinced that we have to change the two problems
in this bill that are not related to welfare reform, that were just
sort of put under the big shade of the tree here, that are part of
this budget strategy with which I disagree. And I'm convinced when
we bring those things out into the light of day we will be able to do
it. And I think some Republicans will agree with us and we'll be
able to get what we need to do to change it.
Thank you.
THE PRESS: Thank you.