WELFARE REFORM: Speech - Jonesboro, GA - 9/9/92 "A SECOND CHANCE" REMARKS BY BILL CLINTON CLAYTON COUNTY OFFICE OF FAMILY AND CHILDREN'S SERVICES JONESBORO, GA SEPTEMBER 9, 1992 Thank you. Thank you very much, Governor Miller and ladies and gentlemen. I want to say a special word of thanks to the fine people who work in this peach program and to the people who participate in it, not only to those who are here with me but those with whom I met behind this building in the play yard. While you were out here suffering in the sun, we were playing in the sand. Don't you just resent it? We'd actually talked for a few minutes. There were several parents and their children who were either present participants in the peach program or graduates. Most of them are right back here. Would y'all raise your hand? Let's give them a hand. They were very helpful to me. I'm here today to talk about this because I believe in the kind of work being done by the peach program and because I've worked with wonderful people back in my state, like the people who work in this program, to help move people off of welfare, out of dependency, to open their futures instead of to make them believe that life is a dead end waiting for another government check that is not enough to support your children or change your life. I became first involved in the work of welfare reform way back in 1980, and since then, I have believed passionately that we ought to change the welfare system as we know it. Most of what I have learned about welfare I have learned from the people who are on welfare or those who have been on it, or those who have worked with them. I share a common belief that I heard from these mothers today and the counsellors that the American people share, people on welfare are the people who dislike it most of all. Most people on welfare are dying for another alternative, willing to seize it, and they'd like to end the welfare system as we know it. Today, I want to share with you my plan to do that. It is more important today than it would have been a few years ago because of the alarming rate of increase in poverty. Here in Georgia and across the country there are more people who are working poor. Last week the Commerce Department reported that average family income dropped $1,100 last year alone. Over the last decade, the percentage of hard work low-wage jobs increased dramatically. And now--listen to this--one in every 10 Americans is on food stamps. America's welfare rolls are full to bursting, increasing five times faster under this administration than under the previous 12 years under Ronald Reagan and Jimmy Carter combined. Three million more people have gone on welfare since 1988; three million more are out of work. When poverty and jobless rolls rise, we all pay. In the past year--listen to this--we spent $8 billion more than we were spending three years ago on welfare and food stamps alone. A big part of the answer is obviously an economic program to put the American people back to work and to get our incomes going up again. And obviously that is what I have talked most about in this campaign. But the changing face of welfare, and the changing nature of it, and the enormous barriers to people moving from welfare to a productive life deserves special attention. Especially now, that most people on welfare are young women, and their little children. And the fact that only half of the people on welfare get off quickly. That's just my musical background. It proves the point. In the mid-1980s, on behalf of all the governors, Republicans and Democrats, I co-chaired a welfare reform task force. We worked in 1988 with the Congress and with the Reagan White House to write something called the Family Support Act of 1988, the first major, major reform in the welfare system in more than a generation. The law gave the states some financial help and some marching orders. It said try to end welfare by giving more education and training to mothers, and then requiring those who can go to work to go to work, either when their children turn three, or when their children are one if there is available child care. The problem with the law is, as Georgia knows, it's never been fully implemented, and it didn't go far enough. But Arkansas wanted to be in the forefront of that law, and so, as Governor Miller said, we started Project Success, to give child care, health care and education and training, and then move people off welfare. In three years, 17,000 have moved from welfare to work, saving our taxpayers $12 million, but far more important, opening a brighter future to parents and children. Independent researchers from the Manpower Demonstration Research Corporation concluded it was one of the three best programs in the country. This peach program is doing a great job. It is not in every county in Georgia, and not every state in America has implemented welfare reform, because the 1988 act has not been fully implemented by this administration. They talk a lot about moving people from welfare to work, but if you don't put the money in there for training, for education, for child care, for transportation, and you don't do it in every county in America, you cannot crack the welfare problem. So the first thing I think every person with whom I have ever talked on welfare agreed that welfare ought to be a second chance, not a way of life. It's time to end this system as we know it, and to start with two simple principles: first, people who can work ought to go to work, and no one should be able to stay on welfare forever. And second, no one who does work, and who has children in the home, should live in poverty, as too many are today. I am running for president on a plan that would give everyone the funding they need for education, training, child care, and transportation. But after two years, or after the end of an education-and-training program, everyone on welfare would have to go to work, either with a private-sector job, or if none is available, with a job provided by the state or the local government in community service. A strict time limit for AFDC recipients, coupled with a real commitment to help them support their children, provide them the education and transportation they need, would literally make welfare what it ought to be, a temporary hand to people who have fallen on tough times. This is not a conservative or a liberal idea. It's both. It's different. And the people who have lived with the present system know it will work if we invest what we ought to and are firm in our administration of it. By the time we are through, we shouldn't have a welfare system in America; we ought to have a helping-hand program, followed by a jobs program. The plan that I have offered sets money aside, up to $6 billion over the next four years, up to $6 billion a year, mounting up to that over the next four years, and pays for it from the cuts that we will make in wasteful government spending; in defense savings; and in raising taxes on the wealthiest two percent of Americans, whose incomes went up in America while their tax rates went down, the direct reverse of what happened to the middle class. When you consider that if we do not change welfare, 25 percent of the people who are on welfare today will still be on it in the year 2000, you can be sure that we have to do it, and that doing it will save a lot of money down the road. Spending a couple of thousand dollars a year on a welfare recipient today; helping that person to become independent, to lead their children in a different direction; to open up new avenues of possibility; will mean more incomes and more taxes, and less dependence in the future. More important, it will improve the quality of life not only for people on welfare but for their friends and neighbors as well. We've heard a lot of talk this year about family values, and that's fine with me; most of us wouldn't be here today without them. But if we're going to be pro-family, we ought to be pro-child and pro-work, and that's what this plan is. Today for people on welfare, going to work too often means taking a job that will never do anything, because you don't have any education and training; and you may lose it in a couple of weeks. It often means losing medical coverage, and child care benefits; giving up Medicaid. It often means struggling to find a job that will keep you mired in poverty forever. I want to make work pay by simply expanding the earned income tax credit for the working poor. If you work 40 hours a week and you've got a child in the house, the income tax system ought to give you a refund to lift you above the poverty line. It'd be the cheapest thing we could ever do to say we are for work and for family, and we'll reward the right values in this country. We have to provide medical coverage to working people with children, and to control health care costs while we're doing it. To do that, we'll have to take on insurance companies, the way the government regulates health care, the unbelievable paperwork and bureaucracy and waste in our system. But don't let anybody tell you we can't do it. Your nation spends 30 percent more of its income than any country in the world on health care, and yet we don't provide primary and preventive care, in poor rural areas in inner cities, and we don't do the things that other countries do to control health care costs. We're going to do that if I win this election. We also need to find a way for poor people to get into the free enterprise system. There's a community development bank in Chicago called the South Shore Development Bank I've talked about all over this country that actually loans money to poor people to go into business for themselves or in small groups. And they've made money doing it, because they understand that poor people are like other people. Some are smart, some have skills, some have ideas, some can make money. And they've made money in a bank loaning money to people who are redlined in most communities in this country. I want to set up a network of community development banks to bring free enterprise to poor people in rural areas and in inner cities. The next thing we have to do is be pro-savings. Earlier this year, the government ordered a young woman in New Haven, Connecticut, and her family, to repay welfare benefits because she had scrimped and saved money from a part-time job to put herself through college. I think we ought to raise the asset limit, and encourage poor people to save money for job training, for college, and for other paths to independence. And I recommend raising it from $1,000 to $10,000 a year to encourage people to save who are in tough times. Finally if we believe in family values, we simply have got to toughen up our system of child support enforcement, and launch a nationwide campaign to get money from deadbeat parents who can pay and won't. I might say, one of the most impressive things to me about the conversation I just had back there is, a lot of these young women who are here working in this program, taking care of their kids, said, if you want to run this program right, you're going to have to crack down on people who don't take care of their kids the way we do. People who use drugs instead of feeding their kids with that money, you ought to take it away from them and take care of their kids; that's what they said, not me. I was impressed by that. Today an awful lot of the money you as taxpayers spend on welfare goes for children whose parents should be giving them support, but who aren't. If we want to do something about the fact that one in five children plus is in poverty; almost one in four children under the age of five is in poverty; we can start by tracking down an estimated $25 billion in owed and unpaid child support. As president, I will push for the toughest child support enforcement possible. In our state, if you fall more than $1,000 behind, we report you to every major credit agency in the state. If you don't take care of your kids, you shouldn't be able to borrow money for yourself. And last year, we collected $41 million plus, money that we don't have to pay in welfare and other public spending. Under my plan, we'll set up a national deadbeat parents' data bank; begin a national system of child support collections through automatic wage withholding; and make an all- out effort to establish paternity in the hospital when the baby is born; not in the courts after the father has left. We ought to use our national data collecting systems like the IRS to make sure that you cannot cross the state lines and meet your court-ordered obligations to take care of your children. We ought to challenge major credit agencies nationwide to report on all people who are seriously deficient in their child support. You simply shouldn't be able to borrow money for yourself if you don't take care of your kids. It's time to send a clear message to people who bring children into this world: governments don't raise kids, people do. In the end, this isn't about government. This is about people and their futures. There will never be a government program for every problem, and the government can never take responsibility for people that they ought to take for themselves. The only thing that really holds us together as a nation, a free nation, is that most of us get up every day and do the right thing. We go to work; we do our best by our family; we honor the law; we treat our neighbor with respect; we just do the right thing. Nobody makes us do it. We have got to empower people to assume that level of personal responsibility for themselves and for their children. It is one way we can bring people together. Surely every American, without regard to political party or religious faith or philosophical convictions, can agree that we can stop the division and blame and finger-pointing that has characterized welfare while things have gotten worse, and challenged people, then given them the means to make the most of their lives. That is what this is all about. I want to tell you my favorite story. A few years ago when I started working on welfare reform, I brought some people from my state to Washington, D.C., who had been on welfare, and who had gone through one of our experimental programs before we went statewide. And one of these women was very articulate, and I was just questioning her. And there were all these governors just sitting around just absolutely fascinated listening to this lady talk. And I said, do you think that this ought to be mandatory? You think that people ought to have to be in this program to get a check? She said, I sure do, otherwise I might be home watching TV instead of up here talking to you. And I said, well, now that you've got this job, what's the best thing about it. And you could have heard a pin drop, and that lady looked out at that crop of governors, and she said, when my boy goes to school, and they ask him, what does your momma do for a living, he can give an answer. The Georgia Peach program is testament to the fact that these women behind and those women who talked to me, and this fine lady over here who now works for the state senate, people want to take care of their kids, and they want to take care of themselves. This is a crazy old world we're living in, and a lot of things happen to people that we wish didn't happen. But what brings us together today is the conviction that if we get up tomorrow, we can do better than we're doing today, and that life is full of potentials, and that we need to look at these folks on welfare, as potential, full blown, vibrant, active, constructive American citizens who are doing a great job raising their kids. And we need them. We do not have a person to waste in this country. So I say to you that I hope that in the next 55 days all of you will reflect on this. Because one of the things that will chart the future of America as we move toward the 21st century if whether we can do a better job in making sure that every person lives up to the fullest of their potential. Every person who's on welfare, and every kid who doesn't make it in school, is another person who's not out there in a job making America the strongest power in the world, and helping all the rest of us to see to our parents in their old age; our children in their youth; and to our own lives in their full flower. This is a very important issue for every American. It's time to end the welfare system as we know it, and lift the people on welfare by providing more responsibility, and more opportunity. Thank you very much.