[Congressional Record Volume 142, Number 59 (Thursday, May 2, 1996)]
[Senate]
[Pages S4637-S4639]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                             WELFARE REFORM

  Mr. ROTH. Mr. President, it has been 39 months since President 
Clinton outlined his welfare reform goals to the American people. But 
he has failed to deliver on his promise. Welfare reform was not enacted 
in 1993 nor in 1994.
  Sixteen months ago, President Clinton declared at a joint session of 
Congress that, ``Nothing has done more to undermine our sense of common 
responsibility than our failed welfare system. It rewards welfare over 
work. It undermines family values.''
  As a matter of record, the new Republican Congress passed welfare 
reform twice in 1995.
  H.R. 4, the ``Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act of 
1995,'' received bipartisan support in both the House and Senate as it 
was being drafted. But the President rejected this bipartisan approach. 
It has now been 16 weeks since he vetoed authentic welfare reform 
legislation for the second time.
  Mr. President, few people have dared to look inside H.R. 4 as it was, 
after all, a complex bill reflecting a complex welfare system. Today, I 
would like to recommend a recent article on the Republican welfare 
proposal. The article describes how the bill incorporates three 
different conservative approaches to solving the problems which plague 
our failed welfare system. Let me quote from the conclusion of the 
article entitled, ``Welfare Fixers.''

       What is especially interesting about the three conservative 
     strands of thought about welfare is that despite the 
     theoretical differences among them, together they provide a 
     coherent guide as to how to fix a broken system. As men are 
     not angels, Charles Murray's negative incentives have their 
     place. But neither are men brutes, and hence something more 
     is needed than a ``technology'' of behavioral change. As 
     Marvin Olasky reminds us, a rebirth of the spirit of 
     religious charity would change many lives for the better. And 
     as Lawrence Mead reminds us, in a commercial republic such as 
     ours, work is the proper condition for all who are able.

  The article goes on to say that:

       Indeed, the politicians have seen the big picture in a way 
     that is perhaps not so easy for the lone social thinker to 
     do. The Republican welfare-reform bills in Congress, along 
     with the many state plans being put into effect by Republican 
     governors, make use of Murray's incentives, Olasky's 
     religious charities, and Mead's workfare. If there are 
     theoretical and practical difficulties with each of these 
     approaches, it is precisely the combination that may make 
     conservative welfare reform politically palatable and even, 
     in the end, effective.

  Mr. President, you might expect such praise to come out of the 
Heritage Foundation or the National Review or another prestigious 
conservative organization. However, this particular article was written 
by Adam Wolfson, the Executive Editor of the Public Interest and was 
just published in this month's edition of Commentary.
  Republicans understand, and H.R. 4 reflects the reality, that there 
is not a singular approach to welfare reform. We believe that if 
families are going to escape from the vicious cycle of dependency, they 
must be enabled to find their own way out. Welfare reform is not simple 
because human beings are complex.
  The goal of welfare reform for all families to leave welfare.
  But the path on how they get there is not necessarily a straight 
line. Nor, under the Republican approach, must all families follow the 
same path.
  In contrast, this is precisely why Washington will never be able to 
end welfare as we know it. The bureaucrats in Washington see people 
only in terms of numbers, not as individuals. In the tradition of 
scientific management, everything must be reduced to bureaucratic 
procedures and mathematical equations.
  But by vetoing welfare reform, the President ignored the most 
important number of all. That is, if we do nothing, the number of 
children on welfare will increase in the coming years.
  When he talks about work and family values, President Clinton may 
talk like a Republican, or at least like a

[[Page S4638]]

New Democrat. But he acts like an old bureaucrat by opposing reforms 
which are not controlled by Washington. By his vetoes, he is protecting 
the bureaucracy and accepting the status quo in which more children 
will fall into the trap of dependency.
  The causes and cures of poverty involve some of the most intimate 
acts in human behavior. What many families on welfare need cannot be 
sent through the mail nor reproduced in the Federal Register.
  There is no flaw in admitting that we do not understand how or why 
individuals will respond to the various incentives and sanctions 
present in every day life in modern society. The mistake is believing, 
especially after 30 years of evidence to the contrary, that Washington 
does know how to apply these incentives and sanctions to the lives of 
millions of people.
  Under the present system, welfare dependency is allowed to become a 
permanent condition. This is one of the cruelest features of the 
welfare system because it saps the human spirit.
  The true measure of success will be whether the timeless values of 
work and family life are restored.
  Only then while we help free families from the present welfare trap 
and save future generations from its effects. To do this, we must give 
the State and local governments all of the tools they need to change 
the existing welfare system. Different families have different needs.
  These tools must include Medicaid, the largest welfare program. For 
some families, the potential loss of the value of health care coverage 
locks them into dependency.
  Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to have Adam Wolfson's 
article, ``Welfare Fixers,'' printed in the Record.
  There being no objection, the article was ordered to be printed in 
the Record, as follows:

                    [From the Commentary, Apr. 1996]

                             Welfare Fixers

                           (By Adam Wolfson)

       In 1982, the journalist Ken Auletta defined the question of 
     the underclass: how do we explain why ``violence, arson, 
     hostility, and welfare dependency rose during a time when 
     unemployment dropped, official racial barriers were lowered, 
     and government assistance to the poor escalated''?
       Indeed, government spending on welfare increased from about 
     $33 billion in 1964 to over $300 billion in 1992 (both 
     figures in 1992 dollars). During the Reagan and Bush years 
     alone, total welfare spending rose more than 50 percent. But 
     all the while, rates of poverty, illegitimacy, non-work, 
     crime, and family break-up got worse, not better. From 1965 
     to 1990, the illegitimacy rate for blacks rose from 28 to 65 
     percent, and for whites from 4 to 21 percent. Meanwhile, work 
     among the poor plummeted, to the point where today only about 
     11 percent of poor households are headed by a full-time 
     worker. For many, Aid to Families with Dependent Children 
     (AFDC)--what most of us think of when we speak of welfare--
     has become a permanent condition, with over 50 percent of its 
     recipients remaining on the rolls for over ten years.
       One thing, however, has changed. Since 1935, when AFDC was 
     first created, through President Lyndon Johnson's War on 
     Poverty in the 1960's, to Bill Clinton's 1992 promise to 
     ``end welfare as we know it,'' welfare innovation and welfare 
     reform were pretty much a Democratic affair. That is no 
     longer the case. When conservative Republicans gained control 
     of Congress in 1994, they also assumed a major share of 
     responsibility for the nation's welfare system and those 
     trapped in it.
       How do they intend to proceed? As it happens, although most 
     conservatives agree on the permanent need to end welfare as a 
     federal entitlement, there have been three different and, to 
     some extent, rival schools of thought about how to reform the 
     system. All three have been incorporated in the Personal 
     Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act, which formed the 
     basis of the Republican welfare bill that President Clinton 
     eventually vetoed this past January, and also in the many 
     state plans now being put into effect by such Republican 
     governors as Tommy Thompson of Wisconsin and John Engler of 
     Michigan. The three approaches therefore bear scrutiny, for 
     it is no exaggeration to say that the well-being of America's 
     welfare population, and indeed of American society, depends 
     upon the conceptual clarity with which we approach this long-
     festering problem.
       The most influential of the three schools is associated 
     preeminently with the name of Charles Murray, and its guiding 
     premise is that humans respond rationally to economic 
     incentives. It is a tribute to the sheer rhetorical force and 
     intellectual brilliance of Murray's extensive writings that, 
     although conservatives often tend to resist mechanistic views 
     of human nature, they have embraced this analysis almost 
     without reservation. The most important parts of the 
     Republican welfare bill, those dealing with ``personal 
     responsibility,'' are in fact based on Murray's logic. I am 
     referring in particular to those sections which attempt to 
     curb the high rates of family disintegration and out-of-
     wedlock births by the application of negative economic 
     incentives. Under these provisions, states would be permitted 
     (though not required) to deny cash assistance to children 
     born out of wedlock to teenage mothers, and would also be 
     permitted (though again not required) to deny additional cash 
     assistance to mothers on welfare who continue to have more 
     children.
       Why, Senator Daniel P. Moynihan asked in connection with 
     this aspect of the conservative reform effort, should 
     children have to pay for the sins of their fathers (and 
     mothers)? The answer is to be found in certain assumptions 
     that were first spelled out by Murray over a decade ago in 
     his now-classic book, Losing Ground: American Social Policy 
     1950-1980. The crucial passage appears midway through the 
     book:
       ``It is not necessary to invoke the Zeitgeist of the 
     1960's, or changes in the work ethic, or racial differences, 
     or the complexities of post-industrial economies, in order to 
     explain . . . illegitimacy and welfare dependency. All were 
     results that could have been predicted . . . from the changes 
     that social policy made in the rewards and penalties, carrots 
     and sticks, that govern human behavior. All were rational 
     responses to changes in the rules of the game of surviving 
     and getting ahead.'' [Emphasis added]
       In other words, according to Murray, the welfare state has 
     provided exactly the wrong incentives to the poor and the 
     underclass by rewarding non-work, family dissolution, and 
     out-of-wed-lock births. It follows that if we change the 
     rules of the game, behavior will change with it. Get rid of 
     the economic supports (e.g., AFDC) that enable poor single 
     mothers to support additional children, and they will 
     eventually either abstain from sex, or use birth control, or 
     (one supposes) have abortions.
       There is much to Murray's argument. But implementing it 
     might also entail more than the American people and their 
     representatives are willing to swallow. The key to his 
     rationalist approach is ``the overriding threat, short-term 
     and tangible.'' Here is how he describes the threat in a 
     recent article on reducing illegitimacy:
       ``A major change in the behavior of young women and the 
     adults in their lives will occur only when the prospect of 
     having a child out of wedlock is once again so immediately, 
     tangibly punishing that it overrides everything else. . . . 
     Such a change will take place only when young people have it 
     drummed into their heads from their earliest memories that 
     having a baby without a husband entails awful consequences.''
       Murray relies heavily on a calculus of pleasure and pain in 
     part because, as a libertarian, he sees no other way. Since 
     government ``does not have the right to prescribe how people 
     shall live or to prevent women from having babies,'' it is 
     left with no options for affecting people's lives other than 
     the tax code. But there is also a deeper reason for Murray's 
     reliance on what he labels ``the technology of changing 
     behavior.'' He thinks it the only effective means of training 
     the human animal. Thought he acknowledges the roles of 
     religion and morality in forming people's sensibilities and 
     attitudes, much of the force of these other agencies, he 
     writes, has always been ``underwritten by economics.''
       It is perhaps this oddly materialist version of human 
     volition that has led some conservatives to look beyond 
     Murray for solutions to the welfare problem. What if, they 
     ask, gutting the welfare system does not have the desired 
     effect forthwith? It will take a very resolute legislator 
     indeed to go on applying negative incentives for as long as 
     it takes. And even if we concede that negative incentives 
     have their place in any plan of welfare reform, how can we 
     expect young people to aspire to the roles of motherhood and 
     fatherhood unless we offer a more elevated conception of 
     these roles in their own terms?
       Interestingly enough, Murray himself wrote the preface to a 
     recent book, Marvin Olasky's The Tragedy of American 
     Compassion, which embodies an alternative to the 
     ``technology'' of behavior control. The book's legislative 
     impact has thus far been slight, but its influence can be 
     felt in measures that would authorize states to contract out 
     their welfare services to private religious charities and to 
     churches. Its stamp is also to be found on Republican efforts 
     to restore civil society, like Senator Dan Coats's Project 
     for American Renewal. The book has garnered the endorsements 
     of such heavyweights as William J. Bennett and Newt Gingrich, 
     and later this spring a more policy-oriented sequel will be 
     published by the Free Press under the title Renewing American 
     Compassion.
       Though Olasky (who teaches at the University of Texas at 
     Austin) agrees with Murray that we should scrap the current 
     welfare system, his analysis of how we got where we are is 
     quite different from Murray's and, correctly understood, 
     leads down different paths. In fact, Olasky turns Murray's 
     thesis on its head. Although he acknowledges the impact of 
     economic incentives on people's behavior, in his view the 
     underlying forces are spiritual and, broadly speaking, 
     religious. Thus, according to Olasky, ``the key change of the 
     1960's'' was ``not so much new benefit programs [Murray's 
     claim] as a

[[Page S4639]]

     change in consciousness concerning established ones, with 
     government officials approving and even advocating not only 
     larger payouts but a war on shame.''
       To Olasky, American social-welfare policy has always 
     reflected the dominant theology of the day. In the 18th and 
     early 19th centuries, theology emphasized a merciful but just 
     God and a sinful human nature that only God's grace could 
     cure. This produced a hardheaded approach to social policy: 
     aid to the poor was given in kind, but not in cash; charity, 
     understood as ``suffering with'' the needy, was personal and 
     paternalistic; material aid was considered secondary to, and 
     dependent upon, saving souls; aid was for the ``deserving,'' 
     not the ``undeserving,'' poor.
       But this Calvinist theology lost out in the late 19th 
     century to a universalistic, liberalized view that 
     ``emphasized God's love but not God's holiness,'' that 
     jettisoned belief in original sin for a Rousseau-like belief 
     in the natural goodness of man, and that essentially 
     secularized a whole range of Christian beliefs. The effects 
     on social policy were dramatic and devastating--and, in 
     Olasky's opinion, completely predictable. The state took over 
     the care of the poor, crowding out private charity. Shame and 
     the work ethic were supplanted by the attitude that the poor 
     have a constitutional right--that is, an entitlement--to 
     welfare. Emphasis shifted from improving the spiritual 
     conditions of the poor to improving their material 
     conditions. As Owen Lovejoy, president of the National 
     Conference of Social Work, put it in 1920, the goal would no 
     longer be private salvation but rather the creation of ``a 
     divine order on earth as it is in heaven.''
       Olasky's history describes, in short, a descent, a fall 
     from grace. As a nation, he claims sweepingly, we have been 
     making war not on poverty but on God, and ``the corruption is 
     general.'' Therefore, although he too, like Murray, would 
     tear down the welfare state, he does not expect any sudden 
     alteration in behavior. Rather, he sees in the end of the 
     welfare state an opportunity for private charities, and in 
     particular private religious charities, to take over some of 
     the responsibilities of caring for the poor, especially in 
     the (for him) primary arena of their spiritual needs.
       After all, writes Okasky, it was the federal government's 
     entry into the welfare arena that ``crowded out'' private 
     religious charities in the first place. Remove the 
     government, and the charities will come surging back. Yet he 
     is honest enough to admit that the historical record is not 
     entirely clear on this point: which came first, the 
     increasing involvement of professionals and the government in 
     the lives of the poor, or a decline in voluntarism and 
     religiosity? This is a crucial question, for if something in 
     the culture led to a decline in voluntarism prior to the 
     federal government's takeover of welfare, then a simple 
     withdrawal of the latter will not necessarily lead to an 
     increase in the former.
       ``In the end,'' predicts Okasky, ``not much will be 
     accomplished without a spiritual revival that transforms the 
     everyday advice people give and receive, and the way we lead 
     our lives.'' If that were really so, it would be reasonable 
     to conclude that public-welfare programs should not be 
     scrapped at all, but rather kept in place until the hoped-for 
     spiritual revival occurs, lest the poor be left without God 
     and without material support at once. Be that as it may, 
     however, there is much else in Olasky's thinking, 
     particularly about the role of private ``compassion,'' that 
     reformers can make use of in the months and years to come.
       This brings us to the third current. Unlike the first two, 
     both of which see big government as the principal culprit in 
     the welfare mess, this one envisions a role for government in 
     its solution.
       Perhaps the principal figure here is Lawrence Mead of New 
     York University. In his book, The New Politics of Poverty, 
     Mead argues, against Murray, that the marginal economic 
     disincentives created by welfare do not explain the really 
     staggering extent of non-work and family dissolution in the 
     welfare population. Moreover, having a baby out of wedlock in 
     order to receive a welfare check is not really ``rational,'' 
     in Mead's judgment. Rather, this and other aspects of the 
     behavior of the underclass are the results of a certain 
     personality profile. The non-working poor, says Mead, are 
     defeatist, passive, and psychologically resistant to taking 
     low-skilled jobs. A ``culture of poverty'' exists that cannot 
     be fully explained by the rationalist model.
       What to do? The answer, according to Mead, is workfare, an 
     approach that would require able-bodied recipients of welfare 
     to enter the labor market. By forcing the poor to be like the 
     rest of us, workfare seeks to manage and even (in the words 
     of Congressman Bill Archer) to ``transform'' them.
       The thinking of Mead and others who favor workfare--Mickey 
     Kaus of the New Republic is another well-known proponent of 
     such schemes--is evident in the various versions of the 
     Republican welfare-reform bill. All include the basic 
     requirement that for any aid poor people receive from the 
     government, they must work, in the private sphere if possible 
     but in the public sector if not. According to the bill, 50 
     percent of welfare recipients must be working by 2002; even 
     single mothers with children (over the age of one) should be 
     required to work; and families receiving benefits will be cut 
     off after five years.
       Mead argues that workfare represents, in effect, a ``new 
     paternalism,'' a ``tutelary regime.'' And indeed his ideas 
     have alarmed more than a few conservatives, especially those 
     of a libertarian bent. Many believe that any attempt by the 
     government to mold behavior, even that of the poor, marks a 
     break from the American tradition of limited government. Such 
     fears are in Mead's view well-founded. But the appearance of 
     the contemporary underclass itself marks, he believes, a 
     watershed development in our national life, if not ``the end 
     . . . of an entire political tradition.'' That tradition--the 
     tradition of the Founders, and of such classical liberals as 
     Hobbes, Locke, and Montesquieu--``took self-reliance for 
     granted.'' It assumes that people are, by nature, rational 
     maximizers of their economic interests. But now it appears 
     that many are not; and so a ``new tradition,'' a ``new 
     political theory,'' even a ``new political language'' is 
     needed.
       All this seems somewhat overheated. For some reason, many 
     of those who propose work as a solution to the welfare 
     problem cannot resist militaristic metaphors. (Thus Mickey 
     Kaus, in The End of Equality, urges Americans to build a 
     ``Work Ethic State.'') But we need not really move beyond our 
     own liberal tradition in order to enforce the norm of work. 
     The Founders themselves recognized that humans are frequently 
     irrational, indeed even lazy. And Adam Smith, the classical 
     liberal par excellence, was not mincing words when he 
     observed that among the ``inferior ranks'' of society there 
     was a surfeit of ``gross ignorance and stupidity.'' Rather 
     than positing rational self-interest as a universal human 
     trait, Smith and other classical liberals thought that 
     through persuasion and law, it would be possible to turn men 
     away from their former pursuits of military glory and 
     religious enthusiasm toward ``small savings and small 
     gains.'' A little bit of workfare for those still unmindful 
     of their economic self-interest thus need hardly spell the 
     end of the American political tradition.
       What is especially interesting about the three conservative 
     strands of thought about welfare is that despite the 
     theoretical differences among them, together they provide a 
     coherent guide as to how to fix a broken system. As men are 
     not angels, Charles Murray's negative incentives have their 
     place. But neither are men brutes, and hence something more 
     is needed than a ``technology'' of behavioral change. As 
     Marvin Olasky reminds us, a rebirth of the spirit of 
     religious charity would change many lives for the better. And 
     as Lawrence Mead reminds us, in a commercial republic such as 
     ours, work is the proper condition for all who are able.
       Indeed, the politicians have seen the big picture in a way 
     that this perhaps not so easy for the lone social thinker to 
     do. The Republican welfare-reform bills in Congress, along 
     with the many state plans being put into effect by Republican 
     governors, makes use of Murray's incentives, Olasky's 
     religious charities, and Mead's workfare. If there are 
     theoretical and practical difficulties with each of these 
     approaches, it is precisely the combination that may make 
     conservative welfare reform politically palatable and even, 
     in the end, effective.

                          ____________________