[Congressional Record Volume 142, Number 16 (Tuesday, February 6, 1996)]
[Senate]
[Pages S875-S876]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                                WELFARE

  Mr. ASHCROFT. Mr. President, the business of the Senate has been 
consuming and demanding this year. The debate over the balanced budget 
amendment and the debate over the achievement of a budget which will 
protect the fiscal integrity of this country and bring us into balance 
in the next 7 years has been an important one and it is a necessary 
one. It has consumed much of our energy and the opportunity of this 
Senate.
  I think it is important for us to understand while this is a task 
which must compel and will compel our attention, it must not do so to 
the exclusion of another important agenda that is essential to the 
progress that the American people sent us here to make. The American 
people not only sent us here to protect the fiscal health and integrity 
of the economics of the United States of America, but they expect us 

[[Page S876]]
to protect the physical health and the integrity of the people of 
America, in particular of the people who have been the victims of a 
welfare system the consequences of which have been tragic, to say the 
least.
  The welfare reform debate is not a debate about a revolution for a 
change. It is literally a debate about a revolution for survival. If we 
do not reform the welfare system there are going to be continuing 
numbers of individuals who simply will not survive in America because 
our welfare system not only dehumanizes and devalues them, but it 
literally threatens their continuing existence.
  The welfare reform debate is not just about change, it is about 
restoring hope, restoring dignity to the lives of individuals where 
hope and dignity have been destroyed. The missing ingredient in the 
current welfare system is the ingredient of hope, and the recipe for 
recovery must reinstitute hope. There is a structural problem with the 
current exclusively governmental system which precludes hope, which 
must exist if people are to get back on their feet.
  This is a matter of human survival and national sustenance and 
survivability. If our society is to be sustained, to survive to be 
successful in the next century, we must end the current welfare 
tragedy. It is tragic, indeed, that the Congress, which has acted to 
help end this tragedy, has been met with a Presidential tragedy: That 
is, the President has vetoed the effort of the Congress to stop this 
human cost of America's greatest tragedy, our welfare system.
  The President had the opportunity to reform the system but he vetoed 
it. Congress acted to stop rewarding illegitimacy, and the President 
vetoed it. Congress acted to stop penalizing marriage, undermining 
families, and the President vetoed it. Congress acted to stop the 
culture of entitlement, where individuals are conditioned to expect 
from Government rather than to work within themselves to solve 
problems, and the President vetoed it.
  The tragedy of our welfare system is borne out in the lives of the 
children of America, in the horror stories of opportunities that have 
been dashed, futures that have been destroyed. I will not burden you 
with a litany that is all too familiar, but I think of one of the 
children, little Ariel Hill, who was less than a year old when she 
died, weighing only 7 pounds at her death. Her mother was an addict 
sustained by a system which makes no judgment about behavior, but just 
continues to reinforce behavior regardless of its counterproductivity. 
Her mother, irritated with Ariel's crying one afternoon, scalded her in 
a sink of hot water. When the investigators came to the apartment after 
Ariel's death, they found a list of the children in the household and 
the amount of welfare that each child brought to the family.
  That is the tragedy of the welfare system where children, the most 
valuable resource of a society, develop a value only in the devaluing 
checks of an entitlement system. It is time we reform that system. We 
had an opportunity to do so and the President vetoed it. We cannot 
leave this task undone because the President vetoed welfare reform 
measures. We must proceed to change the system.

  Our system has been rewarding the wrong values. We have rewarded 
decadence--the out-of-wedlock birth rate has exploded from 5.3 percent 
in 1960 to 33 percent in 1995. That is up to 80 percent in some of the 
cities of this country. We need to replace that system, which values 
decadence and rewards it with checks, with a system that values and 
rewards decency.
  Our system has rewarded dependence. More than 3 million of the 5 
million welfare recipients will be on the rolls for more than 8 years. 
The average length of time a person is on the welfare system is 13 
years. It is a system that rewards dependence rather than discipline. 
It is time for our system to be changed. The opportunity that we had, 
and that we capitalized on to reform the system, would have substituted 
discipline for dependence. It is time for our system to reward 
discipline.
  We have established, as the way of operating in Government, a system 
of debt. We need to replace that system of debt with a system of 
dignity, of integrity, of paying for the things we consume rather than 
displacing the costs of what we consume to the next generation. But the 
devaluing system of welfare dependence and decadence has been a system 
which has driven the debt.
  We simply have to make a commitment within ourselves that we are not 
going to let this issue die. We are not going to walk away from the 
mandate of the American people to wage a war on poverty. We cannot 
leave in place a system that subsidizes decadence, that subsidizes 
dependence, that encourages debt--no. Our war on poverty will have to 
have a fundamental element of hope and will have to replace decadence 
with decency, replace dependence with integrity, independence and work, 
and replace debt with discipline.
  The welfare reform measure which Congress passed provided us with an 
opportunity to change our current system--an opportunity that was 
extinguished at the hand of a President who vetoed welfare reform. We 
must reform a system which is not only costing children in many cases 
their lives and their futures, but is undermining a set of values upon 
which this country must march forward.
  We must not turn our backs on this tragedy. We can ill afford to 
think that because there is a controversy on the budget that we can 
exclusively focus on it. We must address it. We must continue to be 
involved. But this war, this opportunity for change, cannot be confined 
to a single front. The budget is important, but we have an operation on 
the right, an operation on the left, and we have a revolution to wage 
in terms of rescuing what we believe is the greatest of all the 
cultures that have ever graced this planet, the free culture in the 
United States of America. We cannot turn our backs on the tragedy of 
welfare.
  So, today I rise, grateful for this opportunity to say we must look 
again to the responsibility that we have, to the call which we have 
received, to the demand which the American people are making upon us, 
to the expectation of this culture and to the duty we owe young people. 
It is a duty to protect, yes, their fiscal integrity and their 
financial futures, but it is also a duty to protect the very lives and 
the values and the potentials which they have. When we subsidize 
decadence as opposed to decency, when we subsidize debt as opposed to 
dignity, and when we subsidize dependence as opposed to integrity and 
industry, I believe we have to change that system and change it 
dramatically.
  So, I thank you, Mr. President, for this opportunity to speak, to 
remind the U.S. Senate that its obligation is substantial, its 
opportunity is significant, and the consequences of inaction could be 
as tragic as the system which is the status quo, because, unless we act 
to reform and to change it, we will have to live with it. And living 
with it has had deadly consequences.
  Mr. GRAMS addressed the Chair.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Minnesota.

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