[Congressional Record Volume 141, Number 197 (Tuesday, December 12, 1995)]
[Senate]
[Pages S18433-S18437]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                   REARRANGING FLOWERS ON THE COFFIN

  Mr. MOYNIHAN. Mr. President, we are now in the final days of the 1st 
session of the 104th Congress. In a short while we will have worked out 
some accommodations on the budget. We must do this, for we will now be 
engaged in the establishment of some measure of peace and lawful 
conduct in the Balkans. It would be unforgivable if we put our military 
in harm's way abroad without first getting our affairs in some minimal 
order here at home. 

[[Page S18434]]

  I am fearful, however, that as we close out this session we will also 
close down the provision for aid to dependent children that dates back 
60 years to the Social Security Act of 1935.
  If this should happen, and it very likely will, the first and 
foremost reason will be the monstrous political deception embodied in 
the term Welfare reform.
  In my lifetime there has been no such Orwellian inversion of truth in 
the course of a domestic debate. ``Welfare reform'' in fact means 
welfare repeal. The repeal, that is, of title IV-A of the Social 
Security Act. Everyone is to blame for this duplicity, everyone is an 
accomplice.
  For practical purposes, we can begin with the celebrated Contract 
With America, which pledged that within 100 days, a Republican House 
would vote on 10 bills, including:

       3. Welfare reform. The government should encourage people 
     to work, not to have children out of wedlock.

  This in itself was unexceptional, especially the second clause. By 
1994, the nation had become alarmed by an unprecedented rise in 
illegitimacy, to ratios altogether ahistorical--from practically nil to 
almost one-third in the course of a half-century. Since illegitimate 
children commonly end up supported by Aid to Families with Dependent 
Children (AFDC), a causal connection was inferred. Not proven. We know 
desperately little about this great transformation, save that it is 
happening in all the industrial nations of the North Atlantic.
  Undeterred, the new House majority promptly passed a bill which 
repealed AFDC. Such an act would have been unthinkable a year earlier, 
just as repealing Old Age pensions or Unemployment Compensation, other 
titles of the Social Security Act, would be today. At minimum, it would 
have seemed cruel to children. But the new Republicans succeeded in 
entirely reversing the terms of the debate. Instead of aiding children, 
AFDC was said to harm them. Last month, a Republican Member of the 
House remarked on the importance of child care:

       . . . because our welfare reform package is going to remove 
     people from welfare and get them to work. We understand that 
     child care is a critical step to ending the cruelty of 
     welfare dependency.

  What once was seen as charity, or even social insurance is redefined 
as cruelty.
  This happens. Social problems are continuously redefined. Malcolm 
Gladwell of The Washington Post has noted that, ``In the 19th century, 
the assumption had almost always been that a man without a job was 
either lazy or immoral. But following the depression of the 1890's, the 
Progressives `discovered' unemployment.'' Which is to say, a personal 
failing became a societal failing instead. This redefinition has 
wrought what would once have seemed miracles in the stabilization of 
our economy. Mass unemployment is now history. On the other hand, such 
cannot be said for the attempt to dissociate welfare dependency from 
personal attributes, including moral conduct. As we would say in the 
old Navy, I am something of a plank owner in this regard. It is just 30 
years since I and associates on the policy planning staff of the 
Department of Labor picked up the onset of family instability in the 
nation, in this case among African Americans. Interestingly, this 
followed our having failed to establish that macroeconomic problems 
were the source of the trouble. In the event, I was promptly accused of 
Blaming the Victim. For the 30 years that followed there was an awful 
tyranny of guilt mongering and accusation that all but strangled 
liberal debate. One consequence was that when a political force 
appeared that wished to change the terms of debate altogether, 
established opinion was effortlessly silenced and displaced. Again, 
Gladwell:

       But if anything is obvious from the current budget fight 
     and Capitol Hill's commitment to scaling back welfare and 
     Medicaid while lavishing extra billions on the Pentagon, it 
     is that this once formidable confidence has now almost 
     entirely slipped away. This is what has given Washington's 
     current re-examination of the size and shape of government 
     its strange ambivalence. In most revolutions the defenders of 
     the status quo have to be dragged from power, kicking and 
     screaming. In this revolution, the defenders of the old 
     activism toward the poor surrendered willingly, with the 
     shrugs and indifference of those who no longer believed in 
     what they stood for either.

  This was painfully evident in the Senate. On August 3, 1995, the 
Republican majority introduced a Welfare reform bill which abolished 
AFDC. That same day, the Democratic minority introduced a competing 
Welfare reform bill--which also abolished AFDC. On the minority side an 
enormous fuss is now being made over adding a little extra child care, 
some odd bits of child nutrition aid, perhaps a little foster care. 
Literally arranging flowers on the coffin of the provision for children 
in the Social Security Act. Coming from devious persons this would have 
been a conscious strategy--distracting attention from what was really 
going on. But these were not, are not, devious persons. Sixty years of 
program liberalism--a bill for you, a bill for me--had made this 
legislative behavior seem normal. The enormity of the event was 
altogether missed.

  I hope this is not mere innocence on my part. The Washington Post 
editorial page has been unblinking on this subject. An editorial of 
September 14 described the bill on the Senate floor as ``reckless,'' 
adding with a measure of disdain: ``Some new money for child care may . 
. . be sprinkled onto this confection.'' Those seeking to define 
welfare repeal as welfare reform by improving the Republican measure 
should have known better, but I truly think they did not. In recent 
years, child care has been something of a mantra among liberal 
advocates for the poor. For all its merits, it has awesome defects, 
which are the defects of American social policy. The most important is 
that it creates two classes of working mothers: one that gets free 
government provided child care; another that does not.
  The Clinton administration arrived in Washington sparking with such 
enthusiasms. At this time, I was chairman of the Committee on Finance, 
charged with producing $500 billion in deficit reduction, half through 
tax increases, half through program cuts. I thought deficit reduction a 
matter of the first priority, as did my fabled counterpart in the 
House, Dan Rostenkowski, chairman of Ways and Means. In the end, we got 
the votes. Barely. Fifty, plus the Vice President in the Senate. But 
all the while we were taking on this large--and as we can now say 
hugely successful--effort, we were constantly besieged by 
administration officials wanting us to add money for this social 
program or that social program. Immunization was a favorite. Rosty and 
I were baffled. Our cities had had free immunization for the better 
part of a century. All children are vaccinated by the time they enter 
school. If they aren't vaccinated at earlier ages, it is surely the 
negligence or ignorance of the parents that has most explanatory value. 
But nothing would do: had to add whatever billion dollars for yet a new 
Government service.
  My favorite in this miscellany was something called family 
preservation, yet another categorical aid program-- 
there were a dozen in place already--which amounted to a dollop of 
social services and a press release for some subcommittee chairman. The 
program was to cost $930 million over 5 years, starting at $60 million 
in fiscal year 1994. For three decades I had been watching families 
come apart in our society; now I was being told by seemingly everyone 
on the new team that one more program would do the trick. The New 
Family Preservation Program was included in the President's first 
budget, but welfare reform was not. In fact, the administration 
presented no welfare plan until June of 1994, a year and a half after 
the President took office. At the risk of indiscretion, I ask unanimous 
consent to have printed in the Record at this point a letter I wrote to 
Dr. Laura D'Andrea Tyson, then the distinguished Chairman of the 
Council of Economic Advisors.
  There being no objection, the letter was ordered to be printed in the 
Record, as follows:

                                                  U.S. Senate,

                                    Washington, DC, July 28, 1993.
     Dr. Laura D'Andrea Tyson,
     Council of Economic Advisers, The Old Executive Office 
         Building, Washington, DC.
       Dear Dr. Tyson: You will recall that last Thursday when you 
     so kindly joined us at a meeting of the Democratic Policy 
     Committee you and I discussed the President's family 
     preservation proposal. You indicated how much he supports the 
     measure. I assured you I, too, support it, but went on to ask 
     what evidence was there that it would have any effect. You 
     assured me there was such data. Just for fun, I asked for two 
     citations. 
     
[[Page S18435]]

       The next day we received a fax from Sharon Glied of your 
     staff with a number of citations and a paper, ``Evaluating 
     the Results'', that appears to have been written by Frank 
     Farrow of the Center for the Study of Social Policy here in 
     Washington and Harold Richman at the Chapin Hall Center at 
     the University of Chicago. The paper is quite direct: ``. . . 
     . solid proof that family preservation services can effect a 
     state's overall placement rates is still lacking.''Just 
     yesterday, the same Chapin Hall Center released an 
     ``Evaluation of the Illinois Family First Placement 
     Prevention Program: Final Report''. This was a large-scale 
     study of the Illinois Family First initiative authorized by 
     the Illinois Family Preservation Act of 1987. It was 
     ``designed to test effects of this program on out-of-home 
     placement of children and other outcomes, such as subsequent 
     child maltreatment.'' Data on case and service 
     characteristics were provided by Family First caseworkers on 
     approximately 4,500 cases; approximately 1,600 families 
     participated in the randomized experiment. The findings are 
     clear enough.
       ``Overall, the Family First placement prevention program 
     results in a slight increase in placement rates (when data 
     from all experimental sites are combined). This effect 
     disappears once case and site variations are taken into 
     account.''
       In other words, there are either negative effects or no 
     effects.
       This is nothing new. Here is Peter Rossi's conclusion in 
     his 1992 paper, ``Assessing Family Preservation Programs''. 
     Evaluations conducted to date ``do not form a sufficient 
     basis upon which to firmly decide whether family preservation 
     programs are either effective or not''.
       May I say to you that there is nothing the least surprising 
     in either of these findings? From the mid-'60s on this has 
     been the repeated, I almost want to say consistent pattern of 
     evaluation studies. Either few effects or negative effects. 
     Thus, the negative income tax experiments of the 1970s 
     appeared to produce an increase in family break-up.
       This pattern of ``counterintuitive'' findings first 
     appeared in the '60s. Greeley and Rossi, some of my work, 
     Coleman's. To this day I can't decide whether we are dealing 
     here with an artifact of methodology or a much larger and 
     more intractable fact of social programs. In any event, by 
     1978 we had Rossi's Iron Law. To wit:
       ``If there is any empirical law that is emerging from the 
     past decade of widespread evaluation research activities, it 
     is that the expected value for any measured effect of a 
     social program is zero.''
       I write you at such length for what I believe to be an 
     important purpose. In the last six months, I have been 
     repeatedly impressed by the number of members of the Clinton 
     Administration who have assured me with great vigor that 
     something or other is known in an area of social policy 
     which, to the best of my understanding, is not known at all. 
     This seems to me perilous. It is quite possible to live with 
     uncertainty; with the possibility, even the likelihood that 
     once is wrong. But beware of certainty where none exists. 
     Ideological certainty easily degenerates into an insistence 
     upon ignorance.
       The great strength of political conservatives at this time 
     (and for a generation) is that they are open to the thought 
     that matters are complex. Liberals have got into a reflexive 
     pattern of denying this. I had hoped twelve years in the 
     wilderness might have changed this; it may be it has only 
     reinforced it. If this is so, current revival of liberalism 
     will be brief and inconsequential.
           Respectfully,
                                          Daniel Patrick Moynihan.

  Mr. MOYNIHAN. Note that concluding paragraph: If we don't get as good 
at asking questions as conservatives have become, ``the current revival 
of liberalism will be brief and inconsequential.'' In the course of the 
recent debate on ``Welfare reform,'' specifically on September 14, I 
took occasion to note that almost the only serious critique of the 
Republican proposal, and its Democratic variant, was coming from 
conservative social analysts and social scientists. Let me cite three 
such criticisms which in sum, or so I would argue, make a devastating 
case against what Congress and the administration seem bent on doing.
  First George Will, who in the high tradition of conservative thought, 
asks us to consider the unanticipated consequences of what we are about 
to do to children in the course of disciplining their parents. He wrote 
in September:

       As the welfare reform debate begins to boil, the place to 
     begin is with an elemental fact: No child in America asked to 
     be here. * * * No child is going to be spiritually improved 
     by being collateral damage in a bombardment of severities 
     targeted at adults who may or may not deserve more severe 
     treatment from the welfare system.

  Let me attach numbers to this statement. In 1968, as part of the 
social science undertakings associated with the Economic Opportunity 
Act of 1965, the Federal government helped establish the Panel Study of 
Income Dynamics at the Survey Research Center of the University of 
Michigan. The thought was to follow cohorts of real, named individuals 
over the years to see how income rose and fell over time. Earlier this 
year, using this data, Greg J. Duncan and Wei-Jun J. Yeung calculated 
that of children born between 1973 and 1975, some 24 percent received 
AFDC at some point before turning 18. Among African-Americans this 
proportion was 66 percent, while for whites it was 19 percent. All told 
some 39 percent of this cohort received AFDC, Food Stamps, or 
Supplementary Security Income. (Duncan, Greg J. and Yeung, Wei-Jun J. 
``Extent and Consequences of Welfare Dependence Among America's 
Children.'' Children and Youth Services Review. Vol. 17, Nos. 1-2, pp. 
157-182, 1995.)
  And so we know what we are talking about. A quarter of our children.
  A year ago November, James Q. Wilson gave the Walter Wriston lecture 
at the Manhattan Institute, entitled ``Welfare Reform and Character 
Development.'' He began by insisting on how little we know:

       Let me confess at the outset that I do not know what ought 
     to be done and assert that I do not think anyone else knows 
     either. But I think that we can find out, at least to the 
     degree that feeble human reason is capable of understanding 
     some of the most profound features of the human condition. 
     What we may find out, of course, is that we have created a 
     society that can no longer sustain a strong family life no 
     matter what steps we take. I am not convinced of that, for 
     the very people who express the deepest pessimism are 
     themselves leading, in most cases, decent lives amid strong 
     human attachments and competent and caring families.
       What we worry about is the underclass. There has always 
     been an underclass and always will be one. But of late its 
     ranks have grown, and its members have acquired greater power 
     to destroy their own children and inflict harm beyond their 
     own ranks. The means for doing so--guns, drugs, and 
     automobiles--were supplied to them by our inventive and 
     prosperous economy. We must either control more rigorously 
     those means or alter more powerfully the lives of those who 
     possess them. I wish to discuss the latter, because the 
     public is rightly dubious about how great a gain in public 
     safety can be achieved by the legal methods at our disposal 
     and is properly indignant about the harm to innocent children 
     that will result from neglecting the processes by which the 
     underclass reproduces itself.
       The great debate is whether, how, and at what cost we can 
     change lives--if not the lives of this generation then those 
     of the next.

  He then set forth three precepts. Note that the first is precisely 
where Will began:

       First precept: Our overriding goal ought to be to save the 
     children. Other goals--reducing the cost of welfare, 
     discouraging illegitimacy, and preventing long-term welfare 
     dependency--are all worthy. But they should be secondary to 
     the goal of improving the life prospects of the next 
     generation.
       Second precept: Nobody knows how to achieve this goal on a 
     large scale. The debate that has begun about welfare reform 
     is largely based on untested assumptions, ideological 
     posturing, and perverse priorities. We are told that worker 
     training and job placement will reduce the welfare rolls, but 
     we know that worker training and job placement have so far 
     had at best very modest effects on welfare rolls. 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. We are told by 
     others that a mandatory work requirement, whether or not it 
     leads to more mothers working, will end the cycle of 
     dependency. We don't know that it will. Moreover, it is 
     fathers whose behavior we most want to change, and nobody has 
     explained how cutting off welfare to mothers will make 
     biological fathers act like real fathers. We are told that 
     ending AFDC will reduce illegitimacy, but that is, at best, 
     an informed guess. Some people produced many illegitimate 
     children long before welfare existed, and others in similar 
     circumstances now produce none, even though welfare has 
     become quite generous. I have pointed out that group homes 
     and boarding schools once provided decent lives for the 
     children of stable, working-class parents who faced 
     unexpected adversity, but I do not know whether such 
     institutions will work for the children of underclass parents 
     enmeshed in a cycle of dependency and despair.
       Third precept: 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 worst possible way: uniformly, 
     systematically, politically, and ignorantly. Today official 
     Washington rarely bothers even to give lip service to the 
     tattered principle of states' rights. Even when it allows the 
     states some freedom, it does so only at its own pleasure, 
     reserving the right to set terms, issue waivers, and attach 
     conditions. Welfare politics in Washington is driven by 
     national advocacy groups that often derive their energy from 
     the ideological message on which they rely to attract money 
     and supporters. And Washington will find ways either to deny 

[[Page S18436]]
     public money to churches (even though they are more deeply engaged in 
     human redemption than any state department of social welfare) 
     or to enshroud those churches that do get public money with 
     constraints that vitiate the essential mission of a church.

  Finally, to Wilson's point that any welfare program significantly 
funded from Washington will be run ``uniformly, systematically, 
politically, and ignorantly.'' I don't disagree. The Family Support Act 
of 1988 had two basic premises. The first was that welfare could not be 
a way of life; that it had to be an interlude in which mothers learn 
self-sufficiency and fathers learn child support, and also that this 
goal was to be pursued in as many different ways as State and local 
governments could contrive. I would like to think that I am not the 
only person still in Washington who recalls that in debate we would 
continually refer to the experiments being carried out by a liberal 
Democratic Governor in Massachusetts, Michael Dukakis, and a 
conservative Republican Governor of California, George Deukmejian. Our 
expectations, very much under control I should say, were based on the 
careful research of such programs by the Manpower Demonstration 
Research Corporation based in New York.
  On December 3rd, Douglas J. Besharov of the American Enterprise 
Institute, the third of the conservative analysts I will cite, wrote in 
support of the welfare measure now in conference, stating that the 
experience of the JOBS program under the Family Support Act showed just 
how innovative and responsible States can be. He said:

       Since 1992, the federal government has allowed states 
     almost total freedom to reshape their welfare systems through 
     the waiver process. According to the Center for Law and 
     Social Policy (CLASP), as of last week, 42 states had 
     requested waivers and well over half had already been 
     granted.

  As some will know, earlier this year I introduced the Family Support 
Act of 1995, seeking to update the earlier legislation, given seven 
years experience. In the current issue of The National Journal, in 
which I am referred to as the ``champion'' of ``left-of-center advocacy 
groups,'' this measure, which got 41 votes on the Senate floor, is 
simply dismissed: ``. . . Moynihan's bill is principally a vehicle for 
defending the status quo . . .'' Dreadful charge, but not unwarranted. 
The status quo is meant to be one of experiment and change. And it is. 
I so state: the idea of changing welfare has even taken hold in New 
York City.
  Now to what I think of as a constitutional question, the source of my 
greatest concern.
  I have several times now, here on the floor, related an event which 
took place in the course of a ``retreat'' which the Finance Committee 
held last March 18 at the Wye Plantation in Maryland's Eastern shore. 
Our chairman, Senator Packwood, asked me to lead a discussion of 
welfare legislation, the House bill, H.R. 4, having by then come over 
to the Senate where it was referred to our committee.
  I went through the House bill, and called particular attention to the 
provision denying AFDC benefits to families headed by an unwed female 
under 18 years of age. I said that these were precisely the families we 
had been most concerned about in the Family Support Act. The welfare 
population is roughly bi-modal. About half the families are headed by 
mature women who for one reason or another find themselves alone with 
children and without income. AFDC is income insurance, just as 
unemployment compensation is income insurance. Or, if you like, social 
insurance, which is why we call it Social Security. These persons are 
typically in and out of the system within 2 years. The other AFDC 
families, rather more than half, begin as AFDC families. Young women 
with children typically born out of wedlock. These are the families the 
Family Support Act was concerned with. There are millions of families 
in just this circumstance.
  A few days later, a colleague on the Finance Committee came up to say 
that he had checked on this matter at home. In his state there were 
four such families; two had just moved in from out of state. I can 
imagine the state welfare commissioner asking if the Senator wanted to 
know their names.
  Here is the point as I see it. Welfare dependency is huge, but it is 
also concentrated. That portion of the caseload that is on welfare for 
two years or less is more or less evenly distributed across the land. 
But three-quarters of children who are on AFDC at a point in time will 
be on for more than five years. They are concentrated in cities. In 
Atlanta, 59 percent of all children received AFDC benefits in the 
course of the year 1993; in Cleveland, 66 percent; in Miami, 55 
percent; in Oakland, 51 percent; in Newark, 66 percent; in 
Philadelphia, 57 percent.
  By contrast there are many States that do not have large cities and 
do not have such concentrations. The Department of Health and Human 
Services has estimated the number of children who would be denied 
benefits under the 5-year time limit contained in both the House and 
Senate welfare bills, now in conference. For California, 849,300. For 
neighboring Nevada, 8,134. For New York, 300,527. For neighboring 
Vermont, 6,563.
  If welfare were a smallish problem--if this were 1955, or even 1965--
an argument could be made for turning the matter back to State 
Government. But it is now so large a problem that governments of the 
states in which it is most concentrated simply will not be able to 
handle it. On December 3rd, Lawrence Mead had an excellent article in 
the Washington Post in which he described the recent innovations in 
welfare policy, all provided under the Family Support Act, in 
Wisconsin. His article is entitled: ``Growing a Smaller Welfare State: 
Wisconsin's Reforms Show That To Cut the Rolls, You Need More 
Bureaucrats''
  It begins:

       The Politicians debating welfare reform would have us 
     believe that their efforts will greatly streamline the 
     current system, help balance the nation's books and reverse 
     the growing tide of unwed pregnancy among the poor. What they 
     aren't telling us is that, at the state and local level, the 
     federal cuts in the offing are apt to increase--not shrink--
     the size of the welfare bureaucracy.

  Mead's point is one we understood perfectly at the time we enacted 
the Family Support Act. The cheapest thing to do with chronic welfare 
dependent families is simply to leave them as they are. Changing them 
in ways that Wilson speaks of is labor intensive, costly and 
problematic. A nice quality of the Wisconsin experiments is that job 
search begins the day an adult applies for welfare. But this takes 
supervision. Mead notes that high performing areas of the 
state ``feature relentless followup of clients to see that they stay on 
track.'' The term client is important; it is a term of professional 
social work. This sort of thing is not for amateurs. Most importantly, 
he concludes:

       Even with Wisconsin's successes so far, important questions 
     remain unanswered: What happens to the people who were 
     formerly on the welfare rolls? Are they better or worse off 
     than before? Can they sustain themselves long term? Anecdotes 
     don't suggest great hardship, but nobody knows for sure. And 
     what evidence is there that this approach can flourish in 
     inner cities where the social problems are far more serious? 
     In Milwaukee, which has half the state's welfare caseload, 
     the success has been far more modest than in the rest of the 
     state.
       These questions need answers before a case can be made that 
     Wisconsin is the model on which other states should base 
     their reforms. But this much is clear: Wisconsin's fusion of 
     generosity and stringency does represent what the voters say 
     they're looking for.

  In Milwaukee, 53 percent of children are on AFDC in the course of a 
year.
  I have been taken to task for suggesting that the time limits in the 
House and Senate bills will produce a surge in the number of homeless 
children such that the current problem of the homeless will seem 
inconsequential. So be it; that is my view. I believe our present 
social welfare system is all but overwhelmed. Witness the death of 
Elisa Izquierdo in Brooklyn. If 39 percent of all children in New York 
City were on AFDC at some point in 1993, I would estimate that the 
proportion for Brooklyn would have been at least 50 percent, probably 
higher. Hundreds of thousands--I said hundreds of thousands--of these 
children live in households that are held together primarily by the 
fact of welfare assistance. Take that away and the children are blown 
to the winds. A December 6 administration analysis concludes that the 
welfare conference agreement will force 1.5 million children into 
poverty. To say what I have said before here in the Senate: The young 
males can be horrid to themselves, horrid to one another, horrid to the 
rest of us.
  By way of example, or analogue, or what you will, I have frequently 
referred to the Federal legislation that 

[[Page S18437]]
commenced the deinstitutionalization of mental patients. I was present 
at the creation of this movement. Early in 1955, our former esteemed 
House colleague, Jonathan B. Bingham, at that time secretary to 
Governor Averell Harriman of New York brought Dr. Paul Hoch, the new 
commissioner of mental health, in to meet the Governor. I was present, 
along with Paul H. Appleby, the new budget director. Dr. Hoch, a 
wonderful, humane man of science, told of a new chemical treatment for 
mental illness which had been developed by Dr. Nathan Kline at Rockland 
State Hospital in the lower Hudson Valley. It had been tested 
clinically. Hoch proposed that it be given to all patients, throughout 
the New York mental hospital system, which then held some 94,000 
patients. Today there are 8,000. Harriman asked what the program would 
cost. Hoch mentioned a sum in the neighborhood, as I recall, of $4 
million. Harriman asked Appleby if he could find the money. Appleby, I 
cannot doubt having been cued by Bingham, replied that he could find 
it. Done. said Harriman, I am an investment banker and believe in 
investment. And so reserpine medication commenced.
  Eight years later, on October 22, 1963, in his last public bill-
signing ceremony at the White House, President John F. Kennedy signed 
the Community Health Center Construction Act of 1963. I was present, 
since I had worked on the legislation, and the President gave me a pen 
which I have in my hand here. We were going to empty out our great 
mental hospitals and treat patients in local community centers. We 
would build 2,000 by the year 1980, and thereafter one for each 
additional 100,000 persons in the population. Alas, we built some 400 
centers, and then just forgot about our earlier plans. But we emptied 
out the hospitals. A decade or so later, the problem of the homeless 
appeared, to our general bafflement. I have commented that in New York, 
with our singular ability for getting problems wrong, homelessness has 
been defined as a problem of lack of affordable housing. We will very 
likely think up some equally misleading explanation for the growing 
numbers of homeless children when they appear, and so I would like to 
put this on the record now.
  On December 3, a newspaper of considerable circulation did just this, 
however inadvertently. A long article on ``welfare reform'' was 
accompanied by a photograph of an overstuffed chair on which a broken, 
or battered doll had been placed. The caption read: ``Republicans blame 
failed welfare policies for today's problems. Above, an easy chair at a 
Philadelphia homeless encampment.'' A photograph, I dread to say, of 
things to come.
  Republicans must look to their own consciences. I would appeal to 
that of my own party. Last week, our distinguished majority leader, 
Senator Bob Dole, stated that he hoped to bring welfare reform to the 
floor this week.

       It is very likely next week there will also be a conference 
     report on welfare reform. I think we have about concluded the 
     conference. [T]he original bill passed in the Senate by a 
     vote of 87 to 12. We believe we have retained most of the 
     Senate provisions in the conference, and I ask my colleagues 
     on both sides--this bill had strong bipartisan support--to 
     take a close look.
       Eighty-eight percent of the American people want welfare 
     reform. We will have it on the floor, we hope, next week. We 
     hope the President of the United States will sign it. In my 
     view, it is a good resolution of differences between the 
     House and the Senate. We still have one or two minor--well 
     not minor--issues in disagreement we hope to resolve 
     tomorrow, and then we hope to bring it up by midweek next 
     week.

  What is one to say? The Senate bill did indeed have ``strong 
bipartisan support.'' If we do get a conference committee report, it 
will pass and will, I am confident, be vetoed. What I fear is that the 
repeal of the Social Security Act provision will return as part of a 
general budget reconciliation, and that bill will be signed into law. 
Should it do so, the Democratic Party will be to blame, and blamed it 
will be. It will never again be able to speak with any credibility to 
the central social issue of our age.
  We will have fashioned our own coffin. There will be no flowers.

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