[Congressional Record Volume 141, Number 203 (Monday, December 18, 1995)]
[Senate]
[Pages S18826-S18827]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                              WELFARE 2015

 Mr. MOYNIHAN. Mr. President, since the publication of Michael 
Young's ``The Rise of Meritocracy'' in 1957, a book written from the 
perspective of Great Britian in the year 2034, there has not been so 
brilliant an exercise in this format than Jason DeParle's ``Welfare, 
End of'' in yesterday's New York Times Magazine, looking back from the 
year 2015. It foresees a social disaster that will follow the repeal of 
title IV-A of the Social Security Act, Aid to Families with Dependent 
Children, in this the 104th Congress. Mr. DeParle speculates that 
President Clinton will look back upon this as one of the greatest 
regrets of his Presidency.
  Mr. President, I ask that the article be printed in the Record.
  The article follows:

           [From the New York Times Magazine, Dec. 17, 1995]

  Welfare, End of--The Events That Led to its Demise in 1995, and the 
               Striking Consequences in the Years Since.

                           (By Jason DeParle)

       The following interactive encyclopedia entry looks back 
     from the year 2015. References to events before December 1995 
     are real; subsequent developments may become so all too 
     quickly.


                                SUMMARY

       For 60 years, until 1995, the United States Government ran 
     a social program technically called Aid to Families with 
     Dependent Children, and commonly known as welfare. The 
     program, which provided cash grants to indigent families, was 
     abolished as part of a bipartisan deal that reduced Federal 
     spending and transferred power to state governments. At the 
     time of its demise, welfare was a thoroughly discredited 
     program--often accused of causing long-term poverty rather 
     than helping people survive it.
       A handful of critics accurately predicted that ending 
     welfare would bring rising numbers of ``street families,'' 
     just as the closing of mental hospitals had produced ``street 
     people'' in the 1970's and 80's. But most welfare 
     abolitionists argued that the poor would be better off 
     without the program. They would have been astonished to learn 
     that today, in 2015, the program they reviled as ``welfare'' 
     is often described nostalgically as 

[[Page S18827]]
     the last thread of the ``Federal safety net.'' This entry summarizes 
     the consequences of abolishing welfare, and the odd political 
     dynamics that led to its end.


                               the states

       Though it grew into a potent symbol of social decay, the 
     A.F.D.C. program was established amid little controversy, as 
     a sidelight of the Social Security Act. It was intended to 
     provide small pensions to indigent widows, instead of placing 
     their children in orphanages. But the program changed during 
     a period of explosive growth in the late 1960's, as millions 
     of never-married women joined the rolls. If the program's 
     public face was once that of a West Virginia miner's widow, 
     it then became that of a young black woman in an urban 
     ghetto. There were about 14 million women and children 
     receiving benefits when the program ended, with the average 
     family of three getting about $370 a month.
       Initially, those who warned of social catastrophe seemed 
     alarmist. In abolishing welfare, Congress gave the states 
     annual lump-sum payments, called block grants, to assist the 
     poor virtually any way they saw fit. The states were barred 
     from aiding families for more than five years, but most set 
     much shorter limits. By later standards, the sizes of the 
     first block grants were generous, and difficult as it is now 
     to imagine, the late 1990's seemed a golden age of state 
     experimentation.
       In 1997, Mississippi contracted with church groups to run 
     its relief programs; within a few years the teen-age 
     pregnancy rate dropped 10 percent. Vermont placed a two-year 
     limit on benefits but offered subsidized jobs to those who 
     were still unemployed. Tennessee took a tougher tack, 
     imposing a strict 18-month cutoff with no further aid. But in 
     the late 1990's, Tennessee had a 3 percent unemployment rate, 
     and most mothers found at least part-time work. While 
     millions of poor families still led hand-to-mouth existences, 
     they always had; local control, whatever its problems, was 
     not unambiguously worse.
       Then came the 1999 recession. Faced with declining revenues 
     and rising aid requests, states slashed their payments; the 
     mother of two who had received $370 in 1995 was now getting 
     $180 a month. With families crossing borders in search of 
     aid, the ``race to the bottom'' ensued, with each state 
     trying to be as tough as its neighbors. Just months after 
     Texas barred payments to legal immigrants, for instance, the 
     other border states followed. As an entitlement, the old 
     A.F.D.C. system promised, a check to any qualifying family 
     within 45 days; waiting lists now grew as long as two years. 
     As many as a million families who have received aid under the 
     Federal system now received nothing.
       Though the economy recovered in subsequent years, state 
     spending did not. As the number of neglected children 
     skyrocketed, the child welfare system snapped. In 1995, there 
     were approximately 460,000 children in foster-care programs; 
     a decade later, the number approached one million. As the 
     numbers grew, the Federal Government began a 10-city 
     experiment to test the performance of orphanages--an idea 
     first broached by former House Speaker Newt Gingrich.
       The experiment earned high marks, but Congress balked at 
     its cost. A year at the latter-day Boys' Towns cost more than 
     a year at Harvard, and lawmakers refused to keep financing 
     them.


                               the people

       The end of welfare was accompanied by major cuts in food, 
     housing and medical programs. And it came when the wages of 
     low-skilled workers were already in a free fall because of 
     global competition. So it is not surprising that poor people 
     have seen their standard of living decline, while their 
     numbers are rapidly increasing. Until 1995, for instance, all 
     poor children in America had health insurance under a program 
     called Medicaid. The successor state programs have largely 
     devoted their resources to the elderly, leaving about half 
     the nation's poor children uninsured.
       Not all former recipients have fared poorly. As many as a 
     quarter of the five million A.F.D.C. families found and 
     retained full-time work. For them, the end of welfare worked 
     much as it was intended--as a prompt to greater self-
     reliance. They received considerable publicity in the late 
     1990's as welfare abolitionists tried to rebut charges that 
     the cuts had been cruel. A coalition of conservative groups 
     sponsored the ``Million Mothers March,'' a day of speeches 
     and prayer by former recipients to celebrate their new lives. 
     While their earnings remained quite modest--often little more 
     than they had received on welfare--many mothers praised the 
     psychic rewards of serving as ``positive role models.''
       Far more numerous are those in a second category: 
     ``cyclers,'' who have alternated between short-term 
     employment and charitable aid. The cycling phenomenon was 
     first identified in the mid-1980's by researchers at Harvard 
     University who hoped to see expanded Government aid. Part of 
     the cyclers' continuing problem has been economic: whether 
     they work as telemarketers, cosmetologists, cashiers or 
     clerks, they are typically the last hired and first fired.
       But even in good times, the chaos of many low-income homes 
     spills onto the job. Brokendown cars, sick relatives and a 
     lack of child care are perennial problems--indeed, a 2007 
     study by the Children's Defense Fund found that dozens of 
     mothers were arrested each year for locking their children in 
     cars as they worked. Sociologists estimate that since welfare 
     ended, about half the former population has fallen into this 
     pattern of sporadic work with little hope for advancement.
       At the same time, about 25 percent of the A.F.D.C. 
     families--that is, more than a million of them--have fallen 
     into utter destitution. The public now sees them lining up at 
     shelters, stealing into abandoned buildings and begging on 
     street corners. At the time of abolition, half the welfare 
     mothers lacked a high-school diploma, and in inner cities as 
     many as one in three had histories of some drug or alcohol 
     abuse; a subsequent study by the Rockefeller Foundation 
     emphasized how many remained deeply disturbed. It found that 
     by 2005, three-fourths of the families entering shelters were 
     those of welfare mothers who had exhausted their lifetime 
     eligibility.
       The Rockefeller study, ``Repeating Mistakes,'' compared the 
     1995 law ending welfare with the 1960's move that 
     deinstitutionalized the mentally ill. Schizophrenics were 
     supposed to find community-based programs; welfare recipients 
     were entrusted to state agencies. In neither case did the 
     local safety net appear. Like the 1980's street people, the 
     homeless families of the early 21st century enjoyed a brief 
     period of Hollywood vogue. Meryl Streep won an Oscar in 2006 
     for her portrayal of a destitute woman.
       But one again, charity chic faded.
       The end of welfare also brought unintended consequences in 
     the area of morality. The abolitionists had hoped to spur a 
     return to work, marriage and responsibility. But for some of 
     the poorest women, the loss of aid had the opposite effect. 
     Some became more reliant on abusive boyfriends, and reports 
     of domestic violence rose. Abortion rates hit record levels 
     and so did arrests for prostitution, leading several cities 
     to decriminalize the practice in specified red-light zones.


                                politics

       Antipathy for the dole is as old as the country itself, but 
     it gained a sudden new potency in the mid-1990's, just before 
     the program's demise. Oddly enough, it was President William 
     Jefferson Clinton, a Democrat, who set the new forces into 
     motion. In his 1992 campaign, he famously promised to ``end 
     welfare as we know it'' by imposing time limits and work 
     requirements. When he later failed to promote his plan, the 
     Republicans pushed his rhetoric to a conclusion he had not 
     envisioned.
       Clinton's initial plan for ending welfare had included new 
     training, universal health care and job guarantees. But the 
     actual end meant only that. And a President who had pledged 
     to expand the income and medical security of all Americans 
     wound up presiding over an unprecedented contraction of the 
     safety net.
       In his recent memoirs, the ex-President describes his 
     handling of the issue as ``one of my greatest regrets.'' He 
     acknowledges that his party's defeat in the 1994 elections 
     left him reluctant to spend political capital on the welfare 
     poor. His own plan had included the toughest work 
     requirements any President had ever proposed. But by the fall 
     of 1995 Clinton had joined those dismissing it as weak, 
     apologizing in an interview: ``I wasn't pleased with it 
     either.''
       At the same time, Clinton argues in his memoirs that he was 
     genuinely surprised that the subsequent state-based system 
     collapsed so quickly. Throughout 1995 he had looked 
     skeptically at his own aides' predictions that poverty would 
     rise sharply. But the memoirs do recount one moment of doubt. 
     On the day before Thanksgiving 1995, Clinton served dinner at 
     a homeless shelter in Washington, where, as he explained at 
     the time, he was distributed to see that ``the fastest 
     growing group of homeless people in our country are young 
     women and their young children.''
       Looking back 20 years later, Clinton confessed something he 
     did not disclose that day at the shelter. Standing in the 
     serving line, a month before welfare's end, he feared that he 
     had just got a glimpse of America's future.

                          ____________________