[Congressional Record Volume 144, Number 16 (Thursday, February 26, 1998)]
[House]
[Pages H647-H649]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




            RETHINKING THE SAFETY NET FOR AMERICAN FAMILIES

  (Mr. LEWIS of Kentucky asked and was given permission to address the 
House for 1 minute and to revise and extend his remarks and include 
extraneous matter.)
  Mr. LEWIS of Kentucky. Mr. Speaker, I rise today to talk about an 
issue we have dealt with here in Congress and in the Family Caucus, of 
which I am chairman, and that is, ``Rethinking the Safety Net'' for 
American families.
  The article that I want to talk about was published over a year ago, 
but still it has merit in answering the question of government's role 
in developing and strengthening families.
  The author, Mr. Butler, calls for several reforms which have already 
been implemented, reforms in areas such as adoption laws, in tax 
relief, and welfare. However, the theme of the article is still very 
applicable and relevant to today's debate about the role of government 
in American families.
  ``Rethinking the Safety Net'' states what many of us here in Congress 
have concluded, that government has done more damage than good for the 
American family. Mr. Butler points to many areas to prove this point, 
including the high burden of taxes, the dependency of entire 
generations on welfare, and how the decline of religion in this country 
is partly due to government actions.
  This article about rethinking the safety net tells us the current 
safety net of government programs is not working. The true safety net 
consists of social institutions like family and religion. Therefore, 
Congress should promote programs that strengthen the family, rather 
than weakening it.
  When Congress debates how to best implement and create social 
programs, let us keep in mind that communities and families are the 
most important areas to look at.
  Mr. Butler shows us how programs created by Congress have had an 
adverse impact in the past. Let's not make the same mistakes again.

[[Page H648]]

  Mr. Speaker, I include for the Record the article by Mr. Butler.
  The material referred to is as follows:

                       Rethinking the Safety Net

                         (By Stuart M. Butler)


                              introduction

       In the conventional wisdom of Washington, everything turns 
     on federal spending. So it is not surprising that when a 
     ``Stand Up for Children'' rally took place recently, the 
     explicit assumption of the sponsors was that if one really 
     cared about children, he would support more spending on 
     ``children's'' programs and, of course, he should condemn 
     those anti-child politicians who would cut these programs. 
     Needless to say, it is an article of faith among the inside-
     the-Beltway media that compassion itself is synonymous with 
     voting to spend other people's money on the children and the 
     poor.
       This attitude permeates the entire debate over the social 
     safety net. What is it that prevents people from falling into 
     poverty or enables them to bounce back after a spell on hard 
     times? To most liberals the essential fabric of the net is 
     cash--it is making sure, through government programs, that a 
     generous cash cushion is available. So the more generous and 
     comprehensive the cash assistance programs are, the more 
     effective will be the social safety net. That is why liberals 
     have fought so bitterly during this Congress to defend 
     spending levels on these programs, and why they have 
     castigated as heartless any lawmaker voting to reduce 
     spending.
       But if the purpose of an effective social safety net is to 
     prevent poverty and to restore the lives of those now in 
     poverty, the fierce battle over government spending is 
     largely irrelevant. Spending money on these programs matters 
     a great deal to the debate over deficits, taxes and economic 
     growth, but it has little to do with creating an effective 
     social safety net. If you examine the mountain of scholarly 
     evidence, and if you spend much time in poverty-ridden and 
     crime-infested communities, it becomes crystal clear that the 
     real social safety net consists of two things: stable 
     families and religious practice. The presence or absence of 
     these two things overwhelms everything else--and especially 
     it overwhelms the effect of government social welfare 
     programs. It is hardly an exaggeration to say that nothing 
     else matters.


               the crucial importance of stable families

       As far as children are concerned, there are two distinct 
     communities in America--traditional two-parent households and 
     single-parent households. Whichever of these communities a 
     child is born into will profoundly affect his or her future 
     development and probable course in life. A child born into a 
     single-headed family, for instance, is far more likely to be 
     poor and to be brought up poor than a child born into a 
     traditional, intact family. The most recent Census Bureau 
     data (for 1994) underscores this. The poverty rate among 
     intact families in 1994 was less than 11 percent. But among 
     children in broken families, the rate was a stunning 53 
     percent. Significantly, the poverty rates for these two types 
     of households, if one considers only black families, are 
     almost the same as among the general population (11.4 per 
     cent and 54 per cent in 1994). Race as such is not the factor 
     in the general poverty rate differences between black and 
     whites. The crushing problem in the black community is the 
     huge rate of illegitimacy. About two-thirds of all African-
     American babies today are born to women without a husband; in 
     some urban areas the proportion is even higher.
       It is not just that income typically is lower in single-
     parent households (the point noted by most liberals to argue 
     that cash assistance would change the outcomes for children). 
     What the evidence shows is that it is the absence of a father 
     which matters. Whether there was a father in the house, not 
     the household income as a child, is more the crucial 
     indicator of how someone will turn out as an adult. Even 
     within middle-class households the average child born without 
     a father in the home will not do as well as a child who lives 
     in a home where the father is present.
       Studies also consistently show the probability of running 
     into trouble with the law is linked closely to the lack of 
     family stability and, in particular, to the permanent absence 
     of a father in the house. Among these studies, an analysis of 
     census data by The Heritage Foundation found recently that a 
     10 percent rise in illegitimacy in a state is associated with 
     a 17 percent increase in later juvenile crime. The study 
     found that in the case of Wisconsin (the only state for which 
     usable data is available), a child from a female-headed 
     household is 20 times more likely to end up in jail as a 
     teenager than a child from a traditional family. And all over 
     America, members of juvenile gangs are almost entirely from 
     broken families.
       An extensive survey of medical and social science 
     literature by Heritage senior analyst Patrick Fagan also 
     found that a child born in a female-headed household is less 
     likely to do well in a variety of ways in later life. For 
     example, these children (especially boys) exhibit lower 
     levels of cognitive development and other measures of 
     intellectual ability. They do less well in school, are 
     generally less healthy, are two to three times as likely to 
     have emotional and behavioral problems, and have a shorter 
     life expectancy. Moreover, their likely future annual income 
     is thousands of dollars less than that of children in 
     traditional families. The effects also tend in continue from 
     one generation to the next. The children of single mothers 
     are much more likely to be poor and to have children out of 
     wedlock than children who are brought up with two parents. 
     Murphy Brown scriptwriters take note--these problems 
     characterize children born to affluent mothers as well as to 
     poor mothers.


                          the role of religion

       An intact family is perhaps the strongest safety net we 
     have. It is certainly far more effective than the plethora of 
     government assistance programs now available. The only 
     possible competitor would be a commitment to religious 
     values. As in the case of intact families, the evidence is 
     overwhelming. A recent survey of the scholarly literature by 
     Fagan found that regular church or synagogue attendance had 
     several profound effects. For one thing, Americans who 
     practice religious commitment are more likely to get married, 
     stay married and have their children when married. They are 
     also less likely to have trouble with the law or to take 
     drugs. And children in such households tend to do much better 
     in school than children in otherwise identical households. 
     Not only are people less likely to fall into poverty if they 
     have a commitment to religion, but a spiritual awakening is 
     typically behind the most dramatic cases of people in poverty 
     or crime turning their lives around. Religion is the safety 
     net that helps countless troubled people to bounce back.
       A few months ago I attended a remarkable celebration in 
     Washington. The ``Achievement Against the Odds Awards'' 
     dinner, organized each year by Robert Woodson of the National 
     Center For Neighborhood Enterprise, recognizes low-income 
     individuals from across the country who have achieved a 
     remarkable transformation in their own lives or in their 
     community. Dubbed ``the low-income Oscars'' by Woodson, the 
     event honored such people as former urban gang leaders who 
     have given up a life of crime on the streets, former teenage 
     prostitutes who are now married and finishing graduate 
     degrees and former crack users who are now drug-free and 
     running drug rehabilitation centers for the worst cases--with 
     80 to 90 percent success rates.
       As these heroes received their awards, they told the 
     audience of the people and events that had turned around 
     their lives. Significantly, nobody thanked the government. 
     Nobody said that a $20 increase in monthly AFDC payments 
     had been responsible for their success. Nobody paid 
     tribute to a government training program. Nobody praised 
     America's generous welfare system. Indeed, to the extent 
     speakers mentioned welfare, it was to condemn it as having 
     imprisoned them. But without exception they declared that 
     their lives had been saved by a religious experience, or 
     by someone introducing them to God. The more desperate had 
     been their plight, the more they emphasized how religious 
     faith had been their real safety net.


            how washington has weakened the real safety net

       It is bad enough that Congress, over the years, has failed 
     to recognize the real social safety net. Instead, it has 
     spent staggering amounts of money on service and cash 
     assistance programs that have clearly failed to reduce 
     poverty and dependence. In many ways government action has 
     for several decades actually had the effect of weakening the 
     safety net of family and religion.
       Destructive Incentives. It is now recognized even by most 
     liberals that the welfare system has not only failed to end 
     poverty but has also undermined the family. Since 1965, 
     according to calculations by Robert Rector of The Heritage 
     Foundation, America has spent over $5 trillion, in today's 
     dollars, on means-tested programs intended to alleviate 
     property. That is more, in real terms, than America spent in 
     World War II to defeat Germany and Japan. Yet, although the 
     poverty rate was falling sharply in the decade before the War 
     on Poverty programs were launched, the rate has been stuck at 
     12 to 14 per cent ever since 1965. And as Charles Murray 
     pointed out in his landmark book Losing Ground, there has 
     been a steady rise in the ``latent poor,'' these Americans 
     who are entirely dependent on government aid to keep them 
     above the poverty line.
       How could this enormous expenditure have had such a dismal 
     effect? The reason is that in most states today a young 
     mother can receive tax-free government cash and in-kind 
     benefits worth between $8,500 and $15,000, depending on the 
     state. But there are two conditions: she must not have a real 
     job; and she must not marry anyone with a real job. Thus the 
     incentive for the father is not to marry the mother and take 
     financial responsibility for the child. The result is a 
     destructive penalty against the formation of traditional 
     working families for the very households most in need of that 
     stabilizing institution. It is little wonder that Rector 
     describes the welfare system as ``the incentive system from 
     Hell.''
       Anti-family legislation. In addition, many rules and 
     statutes at the federal and state levels have the effect of 
     weakening the family. For instance, the federal tax code is 
     anti-family in many ways. While the ``marriage penalty'' is 
     more of an irritant than a real problem for most couples, the 
     erosion of the personal exemption because of inflation is a 
     very serious obstacle to couples trying to raise children. In 
     the late 1940s, the median-income family of four paid only 
     two percent of its income in federal income taxes because of 
     a generous exemption for children. But because of the 
     declining value of

[[Page H649]]

     the exemption, a similar family today struggles with a 24 
     percent federal tax burden (including payroll taxes).
       At the state level, ``no-fault'' divorce laws have helped 
     push up the divorce rate dramatically in recent decades. In 
     1950 some 300,000 American children suffered the pain of a 
     marriage breakup. By the 1970s, however, over a million 
     children each year saw their parents split up, and the annual 
     number has stayed above one million ever since. This easy-out 
     approach to marriage has been very damaging for children. 
     Several major studies indicate that the children of divorced 
     parents experience significantly more problems in later life, 
     such as elevated rates of unemployment, premarital sex, 
     school dropouts, depression and suicide.
       No Religion. Almost as damaging to the real social safety 
     net of family and religion is the almost fanatical insistence 
     by judges and many lawmakers that a ``wall of separation'' 
     must be maintained between religious practice and government 
     activity. This means hard-working and tax-paying parents in a 
     public housing project, struggling to send their son to a 
     school teaching religious values, cannot use a government 
     grant or voucher to help defray the cost. And it means that 
     faith-based solutions to property and other social problems 
     are generally denied inclusion in taxpayer-funded programs, 
     even though they routinely outperform other programs. To 
     obtain government support, these successful approaches have 
     to remove any religious emphasis, in most instances the very 
     basic of their success.
       But even organizations that do not apply for government 
     assistance are routinely constrained or harassed by 
     government. Robert Woodson complains bitterly of highly 
     successful faith-based shelters for teenage ex-gang members 
     being threatened with closure because they are not state-
     approved ``group homes,'' or because the organizer (typically 
     a former gang member) is not a credentialed social worker. 
     And consider the case of Freddie Garcia's Victory Fellowship. 
     Himself a former drug addict, some years ago Garcia opened a 
     church-based center for hard-core heroin addicts in San 
     Antonio, Texas. The program has since spread to 60 churches 
     in Texas and New Mexico and has a 60 percent success rate 
     (compared with single-digit successes in typical government 
     programs). But the Texas Drug and Alcohol Commission has told 
     Garcia to stop promoting his center as a ``drug 
     rehabilitation'' program because it does not comply with 
     state standards.


                 how to strengthen the real safety net

       If thoughtful politicians at all levels of government 
     really want to strengthen the social safety net there are 
     several things they and policy experts must do:
       (1) Talk about what kind of safety net actually works. 
     There is not going to be a decisive shift in the debate over 
     the safety net until ordinary Americans, as well as most 
     lawmakers, actually understand how important intact families 
     and religious values are to social stability and improvement. 
     Fortunately that process of education has been gaining 
     traction. A decade or so ago there was little public 
     understanding outside the conservative movement of the 
     crucial importance of intact families to a child's life. When 
     Vice President Dan Quayle had the temerity in 1988 to suggest 
     that the media should not paint a rosy picture of single 
     motherhood, he was widely denounced as a Neanderthal. But 
     since then the sheer weight of the evidence has persuaded 
     all but the most diehard liberals that single-parent 
     households are bad for children. Even the left-learning 
     Atlantic magazine felt forced in 1993 to carry a cover 
     story entitled ``Dan Quayle was Right.''
       More work still has to be done to inform Americans of the 
     relationship between religious activity and the social 
     economic condition of families. Fortunately the evidence is 
     beginning to be discussed in the media and among scholars. 
     For instance, a recent Heritage survey of this scholarly work 
     was summarized, uncritically, in The Washington Post (not 
     normally a good platform for such ideas), and the beneficial 
     impact of religious practice to the lives of low-income 
     families is being discussed and accepted by politicians 
     across the political spectrum. But much more needs to be 
     done. For example, the General Accounting Office is the 
     government's accounting arm, which evaluates and reports on 
     the effectiveness of programs for members of Congress. But 
     the GAO has never been asked to carry out a systematic 
     comparison of faith-based and government-funded secular drug 
     rehabilitation programs. Fortunately, surveys of this kind 
     are now under way.
       (2) Have government focus on family finances, not elaborate 
     programs. The history of government attempts to create a 
     system of social services for those in serious need has been 
     a costly failure. These programs are inflexible, bureaucratic 
     and, as discussed earlier, have eligibility criteria that 
     create the debilitating dependence and social collapse they 
     are intended to alleviate. The more profound the problems are 
     of an individual or family, the less able to deal with them 
     is the government safety net and the more decisive is the 
     private safety net of family and religion.
       What government can do is to let low-income Americans keep 
     more of their own money. Thus policymakers should concentrate 
     on such things as overhauling the tax system to make sure 
     that families with children are not overburdened. A tax 
     credit or improved exemption for families with children would 
     go a long way to strengthen the stability of these families. 
     Meanwhile, Congress needs to enact sweeping reform of the 
     welfare system to end programs that hinder rather than help 
     the poor.
       (3) Reform divorce laws and encourage adoption. At the 
     state level, government should begin to roll back many of the 
     ill-conceived ``reforms'' of divorce laws enacted in recent 
     decades, focusing especially on situations where children are 
     involved. At the very least, to discourage easy-out divorce, 
     couples who have children and are seeking a divorce should be 
     required to undertake extensive counseling and complete a 
     longer waiting period before a divorce is granted. Moreover, 
     in the granting of a divorce and the distribution of 
     property, the interests of the children and the parent with 
     custody would be the overriding factor in court decisions.
       Besides the need to make sure children are less often the 
     victims of family breakup, action is also needed to make it 
     easier for children without homes to be adopted by loving 
     families. Several studies indicate that adopted children do 
     as well or actually better in life than children brought up 
     with both of their biological parents, and they do far 
     better than children in single-headed households. Yet in 
     most states there are still enormous barriers placed 
     between couples who want to adopt and children wishing to 
     be adopted.
       One problem is that many social workers apparently are 
     simply ignorant of the evidence showing the benefits of 
     adoption over institutionalization, and therefore err on the 
     side of not releasing a child to a couple. A related problem, 
     particularly in placing black children with black couples, is 
     that social workers mistakenly place a much higher importance 
     on the financial resources of the adopting couple than on 
     more important factors. Thus a police sergeant and his 
     teacher wife of fifteen years, who are regular churchgoers, 
     might be deemed inappropriate parents because they have only 
     a modest income and live in the ``wrong'' part of town. And a 
     further, more insidious, problem is that the huge government 
     payments made to foster care institutions to house children 
     create an equally huge incentive for these institutions to 
     oppose adoption. Increasing the rate of adoption in America 
     would do far more to provide a safety net for the children 
     than any amount of new federal spending.
       (4) Make it easier for faith-based organizations to tackle 
     problems. Many of the barriers against faith-based approaches 
     are unlikely to be removed until the U.S. Supreme Court 
     issues more sensible rulings on the matter. Still, many 
     bureaucratic hurdles at the state level can be streamlined or 
     eliminated. Furthermore, the federal government could help 
     boost private support for faith-based approaches through the 
     tax system, without any hint of violating the Constitution. 
     For example, Representatives J.C. Watts (R-OK) and Jim Talent 
     (R-MO) have authored legislation that would provide Americans 
     with a 75 per cent tax credit for contributions to private 
     charities that deliver services to the poor. This credit 
     would encourage more financial support to those private 
     organizations, including church-based groups, that have 
     proved their effectiveness to ordinary Americans, rather than 
     merely complied with the minutiae of federal contract rules.


                               conclusion

       Equating the social safety net with a set of government 
     programs, and measuring compassion with one's support for 
     these programs, is a profound mistake perpetuated by the 
     media and by liberals in Congress. The real safety net is the 
     system of social institutions that has stood the test of 
     time. Scholarly studies underscore the effectiveness of these 
     institutions, in particular the institutions of family and 
     church. Unfortunately, the unintended effect of attempts to 
     create a government safety net has been to weaken these 
     institutions. It is time to recognize and strengthen them.

                          ____________________