Welfare Reform Bill: Senate Speeches, Articles Opposing Bill

Mr. MOYNIHAN. Mr. President, yesterday, after the President announced he would sign this legislation, I said: ``The President has made his decision. Let us hope that it is for the best.''

Today, I continue to hope for the best, even if I fear the worst. As I have stated on this floor many times, this legislation does not reform aid to families with dependent children; it simply abolishes it. It terminates the basic Federal commitment of support for dependent children in hopes of altering the behavior of their mothers. We are putting those children at risk with absolutely no evidence that this radical idea has even the slightest chance of success.

In our haste to enact this bill--any bill--before the November elections, we have chosen to ignore what little we do know about the subject of poverty. Just 2 days ago, on July 30, 11 of the Nation's leading researchers in this field issued a statement urging us not to do this. Among them were seven current and former directors of the Institute for Research on Poverty at the University of Wisconsin established in the aftermath of the Economic Opportunity Act of 1964. Scholars of the stature of Sheldon Danziger of the University of Michigan; Irwin Garfinkel of Columbia University; Eugene Smolensky of the University of California at Berkeley; and Edward Gramlich of the University of Michigan. They write:

As researchers who have dedicated years to the study of poverty, the labor market, and public assistance, we oppose the welfare reform legislation under consideration by Congress. The best available evidence is that this legislation would substantially increase poverty and destitution while doing too little to change the welfare system to one that provides greater opportunity for families in return for demanding greater responsibility.

Real welfare reform would not impose deep food stamp cuts on poor families with children, the working poor, the elderly, the disabled, and the unemployed. It would not eliminate the safety net for most poor legal immigrants, including the very old and the infirm. It would not place at risk poor children whose parents are willing to work but are unable to find unsubsidized employment. It would not back up work requirements with the resources needed to make them effective.

We strongly support an overhaul of the nation's welfare system. But the pending legislation will make a troubled welfare system worse. It is not meaningful welfare reform. It should not become law.

I repeat what these social scientists have concluded: ``The best available evidence is that this legislation would substantially increase poverty and destitution.''

What is the evidence? Dr. Paul Offner, the distinguished Commissioner of Health Care Finance for the District of Columbia, summarized it nicely last week. Respected research organizations such as the Urban Institute here in Washington, and the Manpower Demonstration Research Corporation in New York have, over the years, undertaken careful evaluations of various welfare reform demonstration projects. As Offner recounts, they found that welfare caseloads were reduced in only 4 of the 23 welfare demonstrations they studied.

Dr. Offner points out that even the program in Riverside, CA, which is regarded by many experts as the most successful ever, has achieved caseload reductions of less than 10 percent.

This should not surprise us; it is not easy to change human behavior. Notwithstanding this fact, the premise of this legislation is that the behavior of certain adults can be changed by making the lives of their children as wretched as possible. This is a fearsome assumption. In my view. It is certainly not a conservative one.

If we acknowledge the difficulty in bringing about the transition from welfare to work, we must recognize that putting people to work on a large scale would require a large-scale public jobs program, and that would require a great deal of money.

Let me say that Democrats were the first to fail in this regard. In the company of Sargent Shriver and Adam Yarmolinsky, I attended the Cabinet meeting in the spring of 1964 where we presented the plans for a war on poverty. Our principal proposal, backed by Secretary of Labor Willard Wirtz, was a massive jobs program, along Works Progress Administration lines, to be financed by a cigarette tax. President Johnson listened for a moment or two; announced that in that election year we were cutting taxes, not raising them. He thereupon picked up the telephone attached to the Cabinet table, called someone, somewhere, about something else, and the war on poverty was lost before it began.

This legislation is even worse.

In fact, this legislation provides some $55 billion less over the next 6 years. There are work requirements in the bill, but we seem tacitly willing to admit they will never be met. Dr. June O'Neill, Director of the Congressional Budget Office, has been most forthcoming on this subject. The CBO report on this bill bluntly states that

Given the costs and administrative complexities involved, CBO assumes that most states would simply accept penalties rather than implement the [work] requirements.

What else does the evidence show? It shows quite clearly that the central feature of this legislation, the time limit, will affect millions of children. CBO estimates that ``under current demographic assumptions, this provision could reduce cash assistance rolls by 30 to 40 percent'' within the decade. I should say that again: 30 to 40 percent of the caseload will be cut off in less than 10 years' time. Let me put that in terms of how many children will be cut off. According to the Urban Institute, 3,500,000 children will be dropped from the rolls in 2001. By 2005, 4,896,000 children will be cut off.

The Urban Institute has also estimated, in a report released just last Friday, July 26, that this bill will cause 2.6 million persons to fall below the poverty line; 1.1 million of those impoverished will be children. To say nothing of those persons already living in poverty. They will be pushed even further below the poverty line; The average loss in income for families already below the poverty line will be $1,040 per year. I note that the Urban Institute's estimates are based on quite conservative assumptions, so the actual impact could well be even worse than predicted.

I cite this evidence because it is important that we cast our votes with full knowledge of the consequences. This information has been widely available, and I have made these arguments on the floor previously, so I believe we are all on notice of the implications for children.

The implications of this legislation for our State and local governments are another matter. These are not widely known, but they will be very real indeed. On Thursday of last week, 2 days after the Senate passed its version of this legislation, I received in the mail a four-page letter from the Honorable Rudolph W. Giuliani, mayor of the city of New York. He wrote of his concern that the major provisions of the bill would impose huge new costs on New York City totaling some $900 million per year. The mayor listed the added costs to New York City as follows: $380 million for child care for welfare recipients; $290 million for aid to legal immigrants; $100 million to support persons dropped from Federal rolls due to time limits; $100 million for work programs.

Mayor Giuliani wrote that the bill's ban on Federal assistance for legal immigrants was of particular concern to New York City, where 30 percent of the population is foreign-born.

The sum of $900 million a year is a lot of money. New York City's total annual budget is $33 billion. And other, smaller local governments will also be hit hard.

The total additional cost to New York State will be in the neighborhood of $1.3 billion per year. We estimate the loss of Federal funds to some of our larger counties as follows: Albany County $15 million; Erie County $75 million; Monroe County $60 million; Onondaga County $30 million; Westchester County $45 million..

These are sums that New York State and New York City simply cannot afford. It will be ruinous for us. In March of this year, the New York State Financial Control Board reported that ``the city's finances continue to deteriorate.'' The board said that over the next 4 years, the growth in New York City's spending will be more than double the growth in its income. Spending will grow by approximately 2 percent per year, while revenues will grow by less than 1 percent. In the absence of this welfare legislation, the gap between the city's outlays and revenues will increase by $400 million annually. With the new additional costs imposed by this bill, the annual increase in the shortfall will more than triple.

New York will not be alone in this, of course. Senator Feinstein said on the floor last week that the bill will cost California $17 billion over 6 years, or about $3 billion annually. Other States--Illinois, Texas, Florida--will also bear immense new burdens. I wonder if they are ready for what is coming.

More importantly, I wonder if the Nation is ready for the social change this legislation will set in motion. There are great issues of principle at stake here, as leaders of the religious community have said with such clarity and force. Bishop Anthony M. Pilla, president of the National Conference of Catholic Bishops, wrote to the President on Friday to urge that this bill be vetoed. Quoting St. Matthew's Gospel, Bishop Pilla wrote that ``the moral measure of our society is how we treat `the least among us.' ''

I know what the outcome will be today, but before we cast our votes, I hope Senators will ask themselves how this legislation will treat the least among us.

I began these remarks with a comment on language. The conference report before us is not welfare reform, it is welfare repeal. It is the first step in dismantling the social contract that has been in place in the United States since at least the 1930's. Do not doubt that Social Security itself, which is to say insured retirement benefits, will be next. The bill will be called the Individual Retirement Account Insurance Act. Something such. John Westergaard points out that this legislation breaks the social contract of the 1930's. We would care for the elderly, the unemployed, the dependent children. Drop the latter; watch the others fall.

Fred C. Ikle has coined the fine term ``semantic infiltration'' to describe the technique in international relations whereby one party persuades another to use its terms to discuss the issues being negotiated. We now have its domestic counterpart in egregious display. Recalling George Orwell's essay, ``Politics and the English Language,'' we would do well to be wary. Henry Friedlander has reminded us recently of the stages by which genocide evolved from the soothing and supportive notion of euthanasia.

And so to one other matter of language. We are told that this legislation is a defeat for liberals. We are assured in private, and it is hinted at in print, that many of the President's most liberal advisers opposed this legislation. Liberals are said to have lost.

This is nonsense. It is conservatives who have lost.

For the best part of 2 years now, I have pointed out that the principal--and most principled--opponents of this legislation were conservative social scientists who for years have argued against liberal nostrums for changing society with the argument that no one knows enough to mechanistically change society. Typically liberals think otherwise; to the extent that liberals can be said to think at all. The current batch in the White House, now busily assuring us they were against this all along, are simply lying, albeit they probably don't know when they are lying. They have only the flimsiest grasp of social reality; thinking all things doable and equally undoable. As, for example, the horror of this legislation. By contrast, the conservative social scientists--James Q. Wilson, Lawrence Mead, John DeIulio, William Bennett--have warned over and over that this is radical legislation, with altogether unforeseeable consequences, many of which will surely be loathsome.

All honor to them. They have kept to their principles. Honor on high as well to the Catholic bishops, who admittedly have an easier task with matters of this sort. When principles are at issue, they simply look them up. Too many liberals, alas, simply make them up.

Mr. President, I thank the Senate for its courteous attention. I thank my friend from Minnesota for reserving this time for me, seeing to it I was able to speak, and I yield the floor.

"From Workhouse to Workfare," Frances Fox Piven, New York Times

Mr. WELLSTONE. Mr. President, I wish to insert into the Record an op-ed piece today by Frances Fox Piven in the New York Times called ``From Workhouse to Workfare.''

This is a very powerful piece. It concludes with the statement that the ``facts don't seem to matter'' in the debate over this welfare bill. ``We may have to relive the misery and moral disintegration of England in the 19th century to learn what happens when society deserts its most vulnerable members.''

That is the conclusion of this article. I ask unanimous consent that it be printed in the Congressional Record.

There being no objection, the article was ordered to be printed in the Record, as follows:

[From the New York Times]
From Workhouse to Workfare
(By Frances Fox Piven)

If Bill Clinton, as an Oxford student, had studied the history of the poor in early 19th century England, he might not have decided to sign the welfare reform bill.

Eminent English social thinkers developed a justification for an 1834 law that eliminated relief for the poor. Learned arguments showed that giving them even meager quantities of bread and coal harmed both the larger society and the poor themselves.

Never mind the rapid enclosure by the rich of commonly used agricultural land; never mind the displacement of hand-loom weavers by mechanized factories; never mind the decline in the earnings of rural workers. The real causes of poverty and demoralization were not to be found in these large economic changes, the thinkers said, but rather in the too-generous relief for the poor. The solution was to stop giving relief to people in their own homes; instead, survival for the family meant entering prison-like workhouses.

The misery and reduced life spans that ensued were well- documented not only by historians but ultimately by Parliament, which investigated the workhouses and the riots against them. England came to learn that the theory that relief itself caused poverty was wrong, and replaced the Poor Law with a modern system of social assistance.

No matter what England learned, the United States Government is eagerly following the 1834 script by ending Federal responsibility for welfare and turning it over to the states. The arguments are the same: welfare encourages young women to quit school or work and have out-of-wedlock babies. Once on the doll these women become trapped in dependency, unable to summon the initiative to get a job or to raise their children property. Welfare, in short is responsible for the spread of moral rot in society.

Never mind low wages and irregular work; never mind the spreading social disorganization to which they lead; never mind changes in family and sexual norms occurring among all classes and in all Western countries. The solution is to slash welfare. ``Tough love,'' it is said, will deter young women from having babies and force those already raising children to go to work.

But slashing welfare does not create stable jobs or raise wages. It will have the opposite effect. By crowding the low- wage labor market with hundreds of thousands of desperate mothers, it will drive wages down.

The basic economic realities of high unemployment levels and falling wages for less-educated workers; guarantee a clamaity in the making--and not only for welfare mothers It is true that the United States has a higher proportion of single-parent families than other Western countries. But since other rich countries provide far more generous assistance to single mothers, this very fact suggests that welfare has little to do with it.

Other facts also argue against the welfare-causes- illegitimacy argument. Most obvious, welfare benefits set by the states have declined sharply since 1975, while the out- of-wedlock birth rate has risen nationwide. In addition, there is no discernible relationship between the widely varying levels of benefits provided by the states and the out-of-wedlock birth rates in the states.

But fact don't seem to matter. We may have to relive the misery and moral distintegration of England in the 19th century to learn with happens when a society deserts its most vulnerable members.

Newspaper Editorials Opposing Welfare Reform Bill

Mr. WELLSTONE. Mr. President, first of all, I ask unanimous consent that a representative sample of editorials on this subject be printed in the Record.

There being no objection, the material was ordered to be printed in the Record, as follows:

[From the Star Tribune, July 31, 1996]

Welfare Bill--It Deserves a Forthright Veto

For most of his presidency, Bill Clinton has tried to have it both ways on welfare. He's curried favor with both welfare's tough-talking reformers and its defenders. He's argued both for changes, such as work requirements and time limits, and for preservation of welfare's protections for poor children.

It's understandable that congressional Republicans would want their final-offer, election-year welfare bill to force the president to show his true stripes. They've crafted a bill that ought to do just that.

The bill that's moving toward the House and Senate floors is one Clinton might be tempted to sign for political reasons. But he should veto it, for moral reasons.. If he doesn't, he will have put the lie to all his claims of concern for the well-being of the nation's most vulnerable children.

For all its reformist window-dressing, the bill that emerged from conference committee Monday is too hard on America's poor. It doesn't spend enough money to hold the line against hunger, or to make workable the requirement that a job take the place of welfare within two years after benefits start.

The bill's goal of quickly replacing welfare checks with paychecks is something most Americans support. But making that happen in a way that gives poor families lasting self- sufficiency takes more than the hammer of a time limit. It takes job training, counseling, public-works jobs where private employment is unavailable, child care and transportation. Those tools cost money. This bill doesn't provide it.

As a result, in the name of overcoming poverty, this bill would likely push some of America's least employable adults and their children into more desperate circumstances.

And, because of the bill's big cuts in food-stamp spending, that desperation could well include hunger. Admittedly, the food-stamp provisions in the final bill aren't as extreme as earlier versions. A guarantee of food-stamp eligibility-- though not of food-stamp amounts--was preserved for families with children. No so for unemployed adults without dependents. They'd be cut off from the government's food lifeline after six months.

The welfare bill is especially punitive toward legal immigrants. Under this legislation, the nation's official message to its legitimate newcomers would be, ``You are welcome only as long as you remain gainfully employed.'' A down-on-his-luck immigrant could get no cash assistance whatsoever from his new country.

Had Clinton more boldly taken sides in the nation's welfare debate earlier in his presidency, a bill this harsh might not be heading toward his desk a few months before an election. He should have been calling all along for more realistic and compassionate reform, the kind that spends more in the short term in order to redeem lives in the long term.

Here's hoping Clinton has learned that presidential equivocation carries a high price--and that his equivocation on welfare ends with a forthright veto of the bill Congress is about to send him.

____

Philadelphia Inquirer, July 22, 1996, "Reform on the Cheap"

Who'll blink on this latest shot at changing welfare? And, in the long run, who'll wind up paying for it?

Voters liked Bill Clinton's promise to ``end welfare as we know it.'' So Republicans are aching to show he didn't mean it. The result is a game of political chicken that's far more likely to hurt poor Americans than to uplift them.

The Republican Congress is about to dare the President to veto a wrong-headed bill that would cut welfare spending, toughen the rules, and shift a lot of decision-making to the states. Since this would be his third straight veto of a so- called welfare reform bill, Mr. Clinton may blink. It's possible he'll sign a bill that pretends the feds can turn welfare into a helpful, job-oriented network even as they squeeze about $10 billion a year in savings from the system. That's a pipe dream.

Unfortunately, if he does veto it and a better, bipartisan plan doesn't emerge, Mr. Clinton will have to follow through on a promise that he made last week to give himself political cover on this emotional issue. Absent a bill, he vowed to issue an executive order letting states cut off benefits after two years.

The terms of this order are still in the works. But it could let penny-pinching states give welfare recipients far too little help toward employment and self-sufficiency.

That's the basic problem with what Congress is cooking up. It pretends that helping poor people become self-sufficient doesn't cost more money in the short term. But it does cost more, for child care, for training, for government-created jobs for those who can't find work in the private sector. Committed reformers such as Gov. Tommy Thompson, the Wisconsin Republican, are up-front about this.

Chances are, the public will respond positively to major parts of the GOP package, such as a two-year limit on benefits before work is required, and a lifetime limit of five years. But work requirements are meaningless if there aren't enough low-skilled jobs available. If politicians are serious about breaking the cycle of dependency, government has to be an employer of last resort.

By promising to act on his own, Mr. Clinton was trying to show Republicans that--politically--they need a welfare bill more than he does. He was trying to coax Republicans toward compromise.

The House did consider a bipartisan plan sponsored by Reps. Mike Castle (R., Del.) and John Tanner (D., Tenn.)--a plan whose spending cuts weren't so extreme. But it died when only eight House Republicans were willing to buck their leaders and line up with Mr. Castle.

Since Republicans seem uninterested in a sensible, bipartisan reform, Mr. Clinton should get his veto pen ready. As for the executive order he promised--every bit the political gimmick that Republicans charged--it should be loaded with conditions to protect poor families from politicians peddling welfare reform on a dime.

____

The Washington Post, July 25, 1996, "A Children's Veto"

``I just don't want to do anything that hurts kids,'' President Clinton said as the Senate passed its supposed reform of welfare the other day. Why did the sentence strike us as yet another cynical manipulation of the welfare issue for political purposes? Because if Mr. Clinton were determined not to hurt children, he would have indicated days ago that he intended to veto this legislation or any bill remotely like it.

Instead, he, the Senate's Democrats and moderate Republicans continued to try to prettify the bill around the edges. A couple of the amendments that they succeeded in making were consequential, and they may yet make more in conference. But mainly these are marginal and cosmetic changes. They are sops to conscience meant to justify a regressive vote that for political reasons these politicians are afraid not to cast. They are determined to vote in this selection year in favor of a bill that bears the label ``welfare reform''; it doesn't matter that the label is not deserved.

The president and his followers are the prisoners of four years of sloganeering on the subject that he himself set off. It was he who, in an effort to preempt the welfare issue and show himself to be a different kind of Democrat, famously promised in the 1992 campaign to end the system as we know it. He set off a process that he could not control, in part because he has been unwilling to take the tough and unpopular positions necessary to control it.

No one--or very few, anyway--would argue that the current welfare system is a good one. Mr. Clinton was and remains right to try to change it. But his original position also was right--that the change should involve equal amounts of added pressure on welfare mothers to go to work and additional resources to help them make the move successfully. The current bills fail to provide the resources; they walk away from the second half of the strategy. They would dismantle the federal welfare program, limit future federal aid and shift to the states a financial burden that many states will find hard to meet. An eighth of the children in the country now are on welfare. No one can know for sure how many would be affected adversely by the legislation, but the best guess seems to be that at least a million more children would end up living below the poverty line. A fifth of the children in the country already are there.

The bills would disestablish or greatly weaken the food stamp program as well, while basically cutting off federal benefits to legal immigrants--people who are legitimately here and theoretically welcome but have not become U.S. citizens. Technically, this is budget-balancing legislation, a reconciliation bill. The noble-sounding legislation, a reconciliation bill. The noble-sounding budget-balancing process of a year ago has come down to a bill that would cut only programs for the poor, and programs on which people who are black and brown particularly depend.

This legislation can't be fixed. Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle, who opposed it the other day, said that even though there were only 25 votes against, he was sure that a veto, if it were cast, would be sustained. We have no doubt that's so. It is another way of saying that if only the president would take the lead and provide the political cover, instead of joining in stripping it away, he could--and should--defend to the voters. If instead he signs the bill, he no doubt will claim it as a triumph, but in moral and policy terms it will be the low point of his presidency.

Buffalo, NY News, July 23, 1996, "Don't Let Rush to Welfare `Reform' Leave Some of Needy Without Help"

What if time limit is reached and there's no job to get?

In his eagerness to outflank Republicans on the welfare issue and sign almost anything billed as ``reform,'' President Clinton should resist the urge to abandon the long- established concept that there is a national interest in helping the poor become self-sufficient.

That is the chief danger now as Washington's warring factions undertake a mad scramble to produce some sort of welfare legislation before taking time off to go into full campaign mode.

The Republican-led Congress made sensible welfare legislation a little more possible last week by dropping plans to attach Medicaid reform to the welfare bill and to turn Medicaid into a block-grant program controlled by the states.

Ending the guarantee of medical care for the poor never made any sense because the impoverished deserve health care as much as they deserve help with life's other basic necessities.

But it also doesn't make any sense to end the federal guarantee of food and other aid for those who play by the rules and whose only offense is that they're impoverished. Nor does imposing time limits on welfare recipients make sense except in cases where they refuse to work even though a job is available. The poor--and their children--should not be blamed for economic cycles that may well make finding a job impossible at any given time.

Those are bedrock principles that the nation--and the president--should not forsake amid an understandable distaste for the small percentage of welfare recipients who are slackers.

Unfortunately, the House the other day cast aside those principles by passing a reform plan that ends welfare as a federal entitlement program that takes care of all who deserve help. Instead, the House bill would slash funding and turn the reduced money over to states in block grants.

The states could then structure programs largely as they please, ending the national safety net and competing with one another in a ``race to the bottom'' as they cut benefits and drive out the poor.

That's no way for an enlightened nation to lift its most vulnerable people. But the final bill that emerges from House-Senate negotiations seems sure now to take that tack.

The other failure of the GOP approach is its time limits regardless of job availability. Clinton, too, recently endorsed time limits, saying the White House will administratively impose a two-year limit but that his action would be unnecessary if Congress could produce an acceptable reform plan.

Details of the new White House initiative--such as how to protect children whose parents get cut off--have yet to be worked out. But in addition to safeguarding kids, the new rule should safeguard those who simply can't find work through no fault of their own.

These basic safeguards should be part of whatever reform bill ultimately reaches the president's desk. If they are not, he should use the same veto pen he's waved at other times--regardless of what the calender says about the election season.

Atlanta Constitution, July 28, 1996, "Welfare Bills Suffer From Politics"

The welfare system must be reformed, and the goal of that reform must be twofold:

It must reinforce a work ethic that has faltered among some welfare recipients;

It must protect the children of poor Americans from hunger and deprivation in an increasingly fickle economy.

Unfortunately, the reform effort making its way through Congress focuses too much on the first goal and too little on the second.

That's not surprising. From the life experience of prosperous, middle-aged, college-educated white males--which describes most of the members of Congress--the rewards of the work ethic seem obvious. It gives you a six-figure salary, a taxpayer-provided staff and free parking, among other things.

But from the perspective of an unemployed mother trying to raise two kids on welfare, the case can seem a little cloudier.

Usually, the family lives in an inner city or isolated rural area, where jobs are scarce and transportation difficult. If the mother overcomes those obstacles and gets a job, and if she works 40 hours per week, every week of the year at $5.10 an hour--which is 20 percent above the minimum wage--she stands to make a grand total of $10,608 a year. In the process, she may also lose health insurance for her family, because most low-wage jobs do not include a benefits package.

Imagine trying to raise two children on $10,000 a year in today's economy. Child care alone would take a huge chunk of her pay. She has the option, of course, of choosing not to pay for child care, to leave her children on their own while she's working. Given our problems with juvenile crime, that's not a choice to encourage.

If welfare reform is to work, it has to make work a viable option. It must subsidize child care for that working mother. It must extend health insurance coverage for the working poor. And it must offer training and education, so that she has at least the hope of rising out of that $5.10-an- hour job into something better.

Some of those steps cost money, at least in the short term. In the long term, such reform will benefit the mother; benefit her children, to whom she is a role model; and benefit society, which is currently losing the value of her labor and incurring the expense of supporting her and her children.

The House and Senate have passed separate but similar welfare bills, and are trying to resolve their differences and send a measure to President Clinton for his signature. Their effort is fatally flawed, however, because in addition to the goals listed above, Congress is using the legislation to pursue two less admirable goals.

It is trying to balance the budget on the backs of the poor. Even though true welfare reform will cost more money in the short term, and even though entitlement programs for the middle class are far more expensive than welfare programs, deficit cutters have focused on the poor, cutting $60 billion from food stamps and other programs over the next six years.

The bill is calculated as an election-year dare to Clinton. He has made clear his uneasiness with the bill's impact on poor children, but has nonetheless indicated a willingness to consider signing the Senate's more reasonable approach. But Republicans seem intent on forcing him to veto the legislation. As Bob Dole grumbled on the campaign trail, ``He's not going to get that bill. He's going to get a tougher bill.''

And as House Speaker Newt Gingrich put it, ``I believe we win from this point on no matter what happens.''

Welfare reform is important, but apparently less important than election-year politicking.

Chicago Tribune, July 21, 1996,"Playing `Gotcha!' on Welfare Reform"

The House passed a new welfare bill Thursday, and the talk afterward was not of what the bill would mean for the children and adults who depend on the kindness of the taxpayers, but of a political calculus.

``In the end,'' said House Majority Leader Dick Armey, ``the president is going to have to make a determination whether or not he's going to sign this bill and satisfy the American people while he alienates his left-wing political base, or if he's going to veto the bill in order to satisfy the left wing of the Democrat Party and thereby alienate the American people.''

In other words, ``Gotcha!''

And that pretty much captures what's been wrong from the beginning with the effort to legislate welfare reform. Clinton has exploited the issue to establish his bona fides as a ``new Democrat.'' The Republicans, suspecting insincerity on Clinton's part, have used it to bash him and back him into a corner.

Suffusing the entire debate have been two notions, one simply wrongheaded and the other both wrongheaded and pernicious.

The first is that reforming welfare is a way to save money. It is not, at least initially. Done properly--that is, with the purpose of getting welfare parents into the work force-- reform will actually cost more money, for job training, child care and so forth. (And whatever else the 9 million children on welfare suffer from, it is not from having too much money spent on them.)

The second notion, which partisans on neither side have done enough to counter, is that welfare reform is about getting black layabouts off the public dole. In fact, most welfare recipients are not black. But that continues to be the accepted stereotype and, one suspects, a substantial motivator of the welfare-reform push.

In its broad outlines, the newly passed House bill differs little from the measure that Clinton vetoed earlier this year. It ends welfare as a federal entitlement and converts it into a program of block grants to the states, which would be free, within very broad limits, to devise their own programs of poor support.

This devolution is a good idea. Clinton has acknowledged that implicitly by granting numerous waivers for state welfare experiments over the last 3\1/2\ years. Perhaps the most promising such experiment, Wisconsin's W-2 program, which substitutes private and public jobs for cash assistance and ought to be the paradigm for all welfare, is awaiting waiver approval even now.

But eliminating welfare's entitlement status is a grievous error of historic proportions. Indeed, Sen. Carol Mosely- Braum (D-Ill.) did not exaggerate when she called it an ``abomination.''

That the world's richest nation would not guarantee help for poor children--and Aid to Families With Dependent Children is nothing except a vast childcare program--is outrageous. It represents not progress but regression. And while Dick Armey may be convinced that that's what the American people want, we are not.

Senator Wellstone

Mr. WELLSTONE. Mr. President, I do want to talk about this piece of legislation. I have heard some discussion about doing good. Let me start out with what is a very important framework to me as a Senator from Minnesota. It is a question. Will this legislation, if passed, signed into law by the President, create more poverty and more hunger among children in America? And if the answer to that question is yes, then my vote is no.

Mr. President, we were discussing welfare reform several years ago, and we said that we should move from welfare to work, that that would include job training, education training, making sure the jobs were available that single parents--mostly mothers--could support their children on, and a commitment to child care.

Just about every single scholar in the United States of America has said that this is what reform is all about. You have to invest some additional resources. Then, in the long run, not only are the mothers and children better off, but we are all better off. That is real welfare reform. Slashing close to $60 billion in low-income assistance is not reform, colleagues. It is punitive, it is harsh, and it is extreme.

Mr. President, we have been focusing in this Congress on the budget deficit. I think, today, what we see in the U.S. Senate is a spiritual deficit because, Mr. President, I know some of my colleagues do not want to look at this. They push their gaze away from unpleasant facts and an unpleasant reality. Sometimes people do not want to know what they do not want to know.

Mr. President, the evidence is irrefutable and irreducible: This legislation, once enacted into law, will create more poverty and hunger among children in America. That is not reform.

Mr. President, we have here about $28 billion of cuts in nutrition assistance. I believe when the President spoke yesterday he was trying to say that does not have anything to do with reform, and he intends to fix that next Congress. But I worry about what will happen now. Mr. President, 70 percent of the citizens that will be affected by these cuts in food nutrition programs are children, 50 percent of the families have incomes of under $6,300 a year. Our incomes are $130,000 a year.

Mr. President, there will be a $3 billion cut over the next 6 years in food assistance, nutrition assistance, even for families who pay over 50 percent of their monthly income for housing costs. So now we put families in our country--poor families, poor children--in the situation of ``eat or heat,'' but they do not get both. At the same time, my colleagues keep wanting to cut low-income energy assistance programs. This is goodness? This is goodness?

Mr. President, I was involved in the anti-hunger struggles in the South. I saw it in North Carolina, and I remind my colleagues, maybe they want to go back and look at the exposes, look at the Field Foundation report, look at the CBS report, ``Hunger USA.'' Where are the national media? Why are we not seeing documentaries right now about poverty in America?

Mr. President, the Food Stamp Program, which we dramatically expanded in the late 1960's and early 1970's, with Richard Nixon, a Republican, leading the way, has been the most effective and important safety-net practice in this country. As a result of expanding that program, we dramatically reduce hunger and malnutrition among children in America.

Now we are turning the clock back, and some of my colleagues are calling this reform. Mr. President, how did it get to be reform, to cut by 20 percent food nutrition assistance for a poor, 80-year-old woman? How dare you call it reform. That is not reform. How did it get to be reform to slash nutrition programs that are so important in making sure that children have an adequate diet? How dare you call it reform. That is not reform. How did it get to be reform to essentially eliminate all of the assistance for legal immigrants, people who pay taxes and work? How dare you call that reform. That has not a thing to do with reform.

The Urban Institute came out with a report several weeks ago. Isabel Sawhill, one of the very best, said this legislation will impoverish an additional 1.1 million children. We have had these analyses before. The Office of Management and Budget had a similar analysis. So did the Department of Health and Human Services. How dare you call a piece of legislation that will lead to more poverty among children in America reform?

Marian Wright Edelman of the Children's Defense Fund is right: To call this piece of legislation reform is like calling catsup a vegetable. Except this time it is more serious, because many more children, many more elderly, many more children with disabilities will be affected.

Mr. President, the evidence is really irreducible and irrefutable. Bob Greenstein, who has won the MacArthur Genius Award for his work, crunched the numbers about what it means in personal terms, real terms for the most vulnerable citizens in America, but my colleagues are too worried about polls. They are too worried about the politics of it, and they turn their gaze away from all this.

Mr. President, I do not particularly care about words like ``entitlement.'' But I do think as a nation we are a community, and up until the passage of this legislation, if signed into law, we as a nation said, as a community we will make sure there is a floor beneath which no child can fall in America. Now we have eliminated that floor. We are now saying as a Senate that there will no longer be any floor beneath which no child can fall. And you call that reform?

Mr. President, we had a proposal out here on the floor of the Senate that said, if you are going to cut people off from work, if you are going to cut people off from welfare, at least require the States to provide vouchers. The CBO tells us we do not have the money for the job training slots, and people will not necessarily find work, and then you will cut the adult off work. So we added an amendment that said, ``For God's sake, at least make sure there are vouchers for Pampers, for health care, for food for the children.'' That amendment was rejected.

So we have no requirement that at the very minimum, even if you are going to cut a parent off of welfare, at least make sure the law of the land says that every State from Mississippi to Missouri to Minnesota to California to Georgia, that at least there will be vouchers for Pampers, for food, for medical assistance, and you vote ``no'' and you say there will be no vouchers. And you call that reform?

Mr. President, in the Senate, I introduced an amendment, and it was accepted. It said in all too many cases, too many of these women have been victims of domestic violence, they have been battered, and welfare is the only alternative for too many women to a very abusive and dangerous situation at home. So every State will be required to have services for these women and not force people off the rolls if, in fact, there needs to be additional support.

It took Monica Seles 2 years to play tennis again after she was attacked. Imagine what it would be like to be beaten up over and over again. That amendment was knocked out in the conference--no national requirement, no protection. Maybe it will be done in the States and maybe it won't.

Mr. President, I had a safety valve amendment. It was defeated. Senator Kerry from Massachusetts had another one which was watered down, but important. It was knocked out in conference committee. It said, why don't we at least look at what we have done, and if in fact there is more poverty and hunger, then we will take corrective action in 2 years. That was knocked out in conference committee. You call that reform?

Mr. President, let me be crystal clear. You focus on work, you focus on job training, you focus on education, you focus on making sure that families can make a transition from welfare to work, and that is great. Eliminating services for legal immigrants, draconian cuts in food nutrition programs for children and the elderly, deep cuts in assistance for children with disabilities--none of this has anything to do with reform. This is done in the name of deficit reduction.

When I had an amendment on the floor that dealt with all of the breaks that go to some of the oil companies, or tobacco companies, or pharmaceutical companies, that was defeated. When we had a budget that called for $12 billion more than the Pentagon wanted and we tried to eliminate that, that was defeated. But now when it comes to poor children in America, who clearly are invisible here in Washington, DC-- at least in the Congress--faceless and voiceless, how generous we are with their suffering. And you dare to call that reform? You dare to say that, in the name of children, when you are passing a piece of legislation that every single study says will increase poverty and hunger among children. Vote for it for political reasons, but you can't get away with calling it reform. It is reverse reform. It is reformatory, it is punitive, it is harsh, it is extreme. It targets the most vulnerable citizens in America--poor children.

Mr. President, in this insurance reform bill we are going to be dealing with, late last night someone inserted a 2-year monopoly patent extension for an anti-arthritis drug, a special interest gift to one drug company, because then you don't have the generic drugs. Late last night, someone put this into the insurance reform bill. There you go. There is some welfare for a pharmaceutical company. But they are the heavy hitters. They have the lobbyists. They are well-connected. We do just fine by them. But for these poor children, who very few Members of the Senate even know, we are all too generous with their suffering.

Mr. President, I had an amendment that was passed by a 99-to-0 vote that said the Senate shall not take any action that shall create more hunger or homelessness among children. Now we are slashing $28 billion in food nutrition programs with the harshest effect being on children in America. Can my colleagues reconcile that for me? I would love to debate someone on this. I doubt whether there will be debate on it, because the evidence is clear.

Mr. President, President Clinton said yesterday that he will sign the bill, and he said that he will work hard, I presume next Congress, to correct what he thinks is wrong. He pointed out that these draconian cuts in food nutrition programs and in assistance to legal immigrants are wrong, they have nothing to do with reform. He is absolutely right.

Personally, it is difficult for me to say, well, with the exception of these draconian cuts in food assistance programs for children and the elderly, with the exception of these draconian cuts for children with disabilities, and draconian cuts for legal immigrants, this is a pretty good bill otherwise. I can't make that argument. But I will work with the President because, clearly, this is going to pass, and, quite clearly, corrective action is going to have to be taken next Congress.

But, for myself, Mr. President, I am a Senator from the great State of Minnesota. As Senator Hubert Humphrey said, the test case for a society or government is how we treat people in the twilight of their lives--the elderly; how we treat people at the dawn of their lives--the children; and how we treat people in the shadow of their lives--the poor, and those that are struggling with disabilities. We have failed that test miserably with this piece of legislation.

Mr. President, I come from a State that I think leads the Nation in its commitment to children and its commitment to fairness and its commitment to opportunity. As a Senator from Minnesota that is up for reelection this year, there can be one zillion attack ads--and there already have been many, and there will be many more--and I will not vote for legislation that impoverishes more children in America. That is not the right thing to do. That is not a Minnesota vote.

Mr. President, in my next term as a U.S. Senator from Minnesota, I am going to embark on a poverty tour in our country. I am going to bring television with me, and I am going to bring media with me, and I am going to visit these children. I am going to visit some of these poor, elderly people. I am going to visit these families. I am going to visit these legal immigrants. I am going to have my Nation focus its attention, and I am going to have my colleagues, Republicans and Democrats alike, focus their attention on these vulnerable citizens. And, if in fact we see the harshness, the additional poverty, and the additional malnutrition, which is exactly what is going to happen, I am going to bring all those pictures and all of those voices and all of those faces and all of those children and all of those elderly people back to the floor of the U.S. Senate, and we will correct the terrible mistake we are making in this legislation.

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