[Congressional Record Volume 141, Number 153 (Thursday, September 28, 1995)]
[Senate]
[Pages S14562-S14563]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                  PERSONAL RESPONSIBILITY ACT OF 1995

 Mr. NUNN. Mr. President, I rise to address H.R. 4, the 
Personal Responsibility Act of 1995, a bill to reform the Nation's 
welfare system.
  H.R. 4 is a radical departure in Federal welfare policy. This bill 
would end a 60-year-old Federal entitlement to poor families with 
children under the Aid to Families With Dependent Children Program 
[AFDC]. In the place of AFDC, the Senate bill would create a Federal 
welfare block grant that will give almost $17 billion annually to State 
governments over the next 7 years to provide cash assistance, child 
care, job training, and other services to our Nation's poor. The States 
will have nearly complete flexibility to design and carry out these 
programs. The Federal Government requires only that the States impose a 
5-year lifetime limit on welfare benefits and begin moving welfare 
recipients to work as rapidly as possible between now and the year 
2000.
  Opponents of H.R. 4 have talked extensively about this bill's flaws. 
It is said that the Federal money contained in the H.R. 4 is 
insufficient to meet the work requirements. We are told that funds for 
child care will make it impossible to care for the children of welfare 
recipients who go to work. Others have argued that States will cut 
welfare dramatically and set off a reverse bidding war as States reduce 
and eliminate benefits to avoid becoming welfare magnates.
  Mr. President, I supported amendments to this legislation that 
address many of these concerns. I voted for Senator Dodd's amendment 
that would have provided an additional $6 billion in Federal child care 
subsidies. We reached a compromise to increase Federal child care 
spending by some $3 billion. The Senate also agreed to require the 
States to continue spending at least 80 percent of their 1994 welfare 
dollars. I believe these amendments have significantly improved H.R. 4 
and increased the likelihood that it will succeed in reducing welfare 
dependence.
  The Senate also took up an amendment offered by Senator Domenici on 
the issue of limiting welfare benefit increases for women who have 
additional children while on welfare. When H.R. 4 emerged from the 
Finance Committee it allowed States to impose the so-called family cap 
but did not require it. The Dole substitute amendment made this policy 
mandatory. The Domenici amendment reinstated the state option on the 
family cap.
  New Jersey, Georgia, and several other states have imposed family 
caps based on the premise that increases in benefits for new births 
encourage illegitimacy. My instincts tell me this is probably true and, 
at the State level, I would have voted for this experiment. At this 
point, however, there is simply no firm analytical evidence to support 
it. A Rutgers University study published earlier this year found that 
the New Jersey family cap had no effect on illegitimacy rates and may 
have increased the State's abortion rate. Until the States have 
accumulated enough experience with the family cap to show it is 
effective in reducing illegitimacy, I believe it should remain a State 
option but should not be mandated by the Federal Government.
  Mr. President, I voted for the Dole substitute amendment to H.R. 4. I 
understand the concerns expressed by those who fear this legislation 
will not do enough to protect children whose parents have reached the 
end of their welfare time limits. If this bill becomes law, I believe 
its effects on the well-being of children should be monitored 
carefully. Further steps will likely be needed by Congress and the 
States to assure that children are adequately cared for.
  Mr. President, H.R. 4 is unlikely to be the last word in welfare 
reform. The problems we are trying to address in this legislation--
welfare dependency and the illegitimacy, violence, and drug abuse that 
it engenders--are probably the most complex, troubling, and intractable 
problems facing American society. Anyone who believes that they have 
the single set of reforms to solve these problems is wrong. As UCLA 
sociologist James Q. Wilson argued late last year in an essay entitled, 
``A New Approach to Welfare Reform: Humility,'' what is really needed 
is the kind of State-based experimentation that might yield innovations 
that could be replicated by other States. I voted for H.R. 4 because I 
believe it offers the best opportunity to encourage this kind of 
experimentation. It is my hope that the conference between the Senate 
and the House will produce a compromise that I can also support.
  Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the full text of the 
essay by James Q. Wilson be printed in the Record.
  The essay follows:

      [From the Wall Street Journal, Thursday, December 29, 1994]

      Firm Foundations: A New Approach to Welfare Reform: Humility

                          (By James Q. Wilson)

       We are entering the last years of the 20th century with 
     every reason to rejoice and little inclination to do so, 
     despite widespread prosperity, a generally healthy economy, 
     the absence of any immediate foreign threat, and 
     extraordinary progress in civil rights, personal health and 
     school enrollment. Despite all this and more, we feel that 
     there is something profoundly wrong with our society.
       That communal life is thought to be deficient in many 
     respects, plagued by crime, drug abuse, teenage pregnancy, 
     WELFARE dependency and the countless instabilities of daily 
     life. What these problems have in common in the eyes of most 
     Americans is that they result from the weakening of the 
     family.
       Having arrived at something approaching a consensus, we 
     must now face the fact that we don't know what to do about 
     the problem. The American people are well ahead of their 
     leaders in this regard. They doubt very much that government 
     can do much of anything at all. They are not optimistic that 
     any other institution can do much better, and they are 
     skeptical that there will be a spontaneous regeneration of 
     decency, commitment and personal responsibility.
       I do not know what to do either. But I think we can find 
     out, at least to the degree that feeble human reason is 
     capable of understanding some of the most profound features 
     of our condition.
       The great debate is whether, how and at what cost we can 
     change lives. If not the lives of this generation, then of 
     the next. There are three ways of framing the problem.
       First, the structural perspective: Owing to natural social 
     forces, the good manufacturing jobs that once existed in 
     inner-city areas have moved to the periphery, leaving behind 
     decent men and women who are struggling to get by without 
     work that once conferred both respect and money. Their place 
     is now taken by street-wise young men who find no meaningful 
     work, have abandoned the search for work, and scorn indeed 
     the ethic of work.
       Second is the rationalist perspective: Welfare benefits, 
     including not only aid to Families with Dependent Children 
     (AFDC), but also Medicaid, subsidized housing and Food 
     Stamps, have become sufficiently generous as to make the 
     formation of stable two-parent families either irrational 
     or unnecessary. These benefits have induced young women 
     wanting babies and a home of their own to acquire both at 
     public expense, and have convinced young men, who need 
     very little convincing on this score, that sexual conquest 
     need not entail any personal responsibilities.
       Third is the cultural perspective: Child rearing and family 
     life as traditionally understood can no longer compete with 
     or 

[[Page S 14563]]
     bring under prudent control a culture of radical self-indulgence and 
     oppositional defiance, fostered by drugs, television, video 
     games, street gangs and predatory sexuality.
       Now, a visitor from another planet hearing this discourse 
     might say that obviously all three perspectives have much to 
     commend themselves and, therefore, all three ought to be 
     acted upon. But the public debate we hear tends to emphasize 
     one or another theory and thus one or another set of 
     solutions. It does this because people, or at least people 
     who are members of the political class, define problems so as 
     to make them amenable to those solutions that they favor for 
     ideological or moral reasons. here roughly is what each 
     analysis pursued separately and alone implies:
       (1) Structural solutions. We must create jobs and job-
     training programs in inner-city areas, by means either of 
     tax-advantaged enterprise zones or government-subsidized 
     employment programs. As an alternative, we may facilitate the 
     relocation of the inner-city poor to places on the periphery 
     where jobs can be found and, if necessary, supplement their 
     incomes by means of the earned-income tax credit.
       (2) Rationalist solutions. Cut or abolish AFDC or, at a 
     minimum, require work in exchange for welfare. Make the 
     formation of two-parent households more attractive than 
     single parenthood and restore work to prominence as the only 
     way for the physically able to acquire money.
       (3) Cultural solutions. Alter the inner-city ethos by means 
     of private redemptive movements, supported by a system of 
     shelters or group homes in which at-risk children and their 
     young mothers can be given familial care and adult 
     supervision in safe and drug-free settings.
       Now, I have my own preferences in this menu of 
     alternatives, but it is less important that you know what 
     these preferences are than that you realize that I do not 
     know which strategy would work, because so many people 
     embrace a single strategy as a way of denying legitimacy to 
     alternative ones and to their underlying philosophies.
       Each of those perspectives, when taken alone, is full of 
     uncertainties and inadequacies. These problems go back, first 
     of all, to the structural solution. The evidence that links 
     family dissolution with the distribution of jobs is, in fact, 
     weak. Some people--such as many recent Latino immigrants 
     in Los Angeles--notice that jobs have moved to the 
     periphery from the city and board buses to follow the 
     jobs. Other people notice the very same thing and stay 
     home to sell drugs.
       Now, even if a serious job mismatch does exist, it will not 
     easily be overcome by enterprise zones. If the costs of crime 
     in inner-city neighborhoods are high, they cannot be 
     compensated for by very low labor costs or very high customer 
     demand. Moreover, employers in scanning potential workers 
     will rely, as they have always relied, on the most visible 
     cues of reliability and skill--dress, manner, speech and even 
     place of residence. No legal system, no matter how much we 
     try to enforce it, can completely or even largely suppress 
     these cues, because they have substantial economic value.
       Second, let's consider some of the inadequacies of the 
     rational strategy. After years of denying that the level of 
     welfare payments had any effect on child-bearing, many 
     scholars now find that states with higher payments tend to be 
     ones in which more babies are born to welfare recipients; and 
     when one expends the definition of welfare to include not 
     only AFDC but Medicaid, Food Stamps and subsidized housing, 
     increases in welfare were strongly correlated with increases 
     in illegitimate births from the early 1960s to about 1980. At 
     the point, the value of the welfare package in real dollars 
     flattened out, but the illegitimacy rate continued to rise.
       Moreover, there remain several important puzzles in the 
     connection between welfare and child-bearing. One is the 
     existence of great differences in illegitimacy rates across 
     ethnic groups facing similar circumstances. Since the Civil 
     War at least, blacks have had higher illegitimacy rates than 
     whites, even though federal welfare programs were not 
     invented until 1935.
       These days, it has been shown that the illegitimacy rate 
     among black women is more than twice as high as among white 
     women, after controlling for age, education and economic 
     status. David Hayes Bautista, a researcher at UCLA, compared 
     poor blacks and poor Mexican-Americans living in California. 
     He found that Mexican-American children are much more likely 
     than black children to grow up in a two-parent family, and 
     that poor Mexican-American families were only one-fifth as 
     likely as black ones to be on welfare.
       Even among blacks, the illegitimacy rate is rather low in 
     states such as Idaho, Montana, Maine and New Hampshire, 
     despite the fact that these states have rather generous 
     welfare payments. And the illegitimacy rate is quite high in 
     many parts of the Deep South, even though these states have 
     rather low welfare payments.
       Clearly, there is some important cultural or at least 
     noneconomic factor at work, one that has deep historical 
     roots and that may vary with the size of the community and 
     the character of the surrounding culture.
       Finally, the cultural strategy. Though I have a certain 
     affinity for it, it has its problems, too. There are many 
     efforts in many cities by public and private agencies, 
     individuals and churches to persuade young men to be fathers 
     and not just impregnators, to help drug addicts and 
     alcoholics, to teach parenting skills to teenage mothers. 
     Some have been evaluated, and a few show signs of positive 
     effects. Among the more successful programs are the Perry 
     Pre-School Project in Yipsilanti, Mich.; the Parent Child 
     Development Center in Houston; the Family Development 
     Research Project in Syracuse, N.Y.; and the Yale Child 
     Welfare Project in New Haven, Conn. All of these programs 
     produce better behavior, lessened delinquency, more success 
     in school.
       The Manhattan Institute's Myron Magnet (author of ``The 
     Dream and the Nightmare: The Sixties' Legacy to the 
     Underclass'') and I have both endorsed the idea of requiring 
     young unmarried mothers to live in group homes with their 
     children under adult supervision as a condition of receiving 
     public assistance. I also have suggested that we might revive 
     an institution that was common earlier in this century but 
     has lapsed into disuse of late--the boarding school, 
     sometimes mistakenly called an orphanage, for the children of 
     mothers who cannot cope. At one time such schools provided 
     homes and education for more than 100,000 young people in 
     large cities.
       Though I confess I am attracted to the idea of creating 
     wholly new environments in which to raise the next generation 
     of at-risk children, I must also confess that I do not know 
     whether it will work. The programs that we know to be 
     successful, like the ones mentioned above, are experimental 
     efforts led by dedicated men and women. Can large versions of 
     the same thing work when run by the average counselor, the 
     average teacher? We don't know. And even these successes 
     predated the arrival of crack on the streets of our big 
     cities. Can even the best program salvage people from that 
     viciously destructive drug? We don't know.
       There is evidence that such therapeutic communities as 
     those run by Phoenix House, headquartered in New York, and 
     other organizations can salvage people who remain in them 
     long enough. How do we get people to stay in them long 
     enough? We don't know.
       Now, if these three alternatives or something like them are 
     what is available, how do we decide what to do? Before trying 
     to answer that question, let me assert three precepts that 
     ought to shape how we formulate that answer.
       The first precept is that our overriding goal ought to be 
     to save the children. Other goals--such as reducing the costs 
     of welfare, discouraging illegitimacy, preventing long-term 
     welfare dependency, getting even with Welfare cheats--may all 
     be worthy goals, but they are secondary to the goal of 
     improving the life prospects of the next generation.
       The second precept is that nobody knows how to do this on a 
     large scale. The debate has begun about welfare reform, but 
     it is a debate, in large measure, based on untested 
     assumptions, ideological posturing and perverse principles. 
     We are told by some that worker training and job placement 
     will reduce the welfare rolls, but we now know that worker 
     training and job placement have so far had only a very modest 
     effect. And few advocates of worker training tell us what 
     happens to children whose mothers are induced or compelled to 
     work, other than to assure us that somebody will supply day 
     care.
       The third precept that should guide us is that the federal 
     government cannot have a meaningful family policy for the 
     nation, and it ought not to try. Not only does it not know 
     and cannot learn from experts what to do, whatever it thinks 
     it ought to do, it will try to do in the worse possible way. 
     Which is to say, uniformly, systematically, politically and 
     ignorantly.
       Now, the clear implication of these three precepts, when 
     applied to the problem we face now, is that we ought to turn 
     the task and the money for rebuilding lives, welfare 
     payments, housing subsidies, the whole lot, over to cities 
     and states and private agencies, subject to only two 
     conditions. First, they must observe minimum for fundamental 
     precepts of equal protection, and second, every major new 
     initiative must be evaluated by independent observers 
     operating in accordance with accepted scientific canons.
       Some states or counties in this regime may end AFDC as we 
     know it. Others may impose a mandatory work requirement. A 
     few may require welfare recipients to turn their checks over 
     to the group homes in which the recipients must reside or the 
     boarding schools that their children must attend. Some may 
     give the money to private agencies that agree to supply 
     parent training, job skills and preschool education. Some may 
     move welfare recipients out of the inner city and to the 
     periphery.
       Any given state government may do no better than 
     Washington, but the great variety of the former will make up 
     for the deadening uniformity of the latter. And within the 
     states, the operating agencies will be at the city and county 
     level, where the task of improving lives and developing 
     character will be informed by the proximity of government to 
     the voices of ordinary people.
       Mr. Wilson is professor of management and public policy at 
     UCLA. A longer version of this essay will appear in the 
     Manhattan Institute's City Journal.

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