    [Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: William J. Clinton (1995, Book II)]
    [July 31, 1995]
    [Pages 1179-1185]
    [From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]

    Remarks to the National Governors' Association in Burlington, Vermont
    July 31, 1995

        Thank you very much, Governor Dean. And thank you for the gift of
    those proceedings. I discovered two things looking through that book
    very quickly, which will be interesting perhaps to some of you. One is
    that the first Governors' conference--one thing I knew and one I
    didn't--the first Governors' conference was called by President Theodore
    Roosevelt to bring all the Governors together to develop a plan to
    conserve our Nation's resources. It was an environmental Governors'
    conference.
        The second thing was that they really set the tone of bipartisanship
    which has endured through all these years--something I didn't know--I
    saw that the two special guests at the Governors' conference were
    William Jennings Bryan and Andrew Carnegie. So they were spanning the
    waterfront even then.
        I really look forward to this, but I kind of got my feelings hurt. I
    understand Senator Dole came in here and told you that my cholesterol
    was higher than his. [Laughter] I came to Vermont determined to get my
    cholesterol down with low-fat Ben & Jerry's Cherry Garcia. [Laughter] I
    do want you to know that my standing heart rate, however--pulse rate--is
    much lower than Senator Dole's. But that's really not his fault; I don't
    have to deal with Phil Gramm every day. [Laughter] I think on matters of
    health, age, and political anxiety, we have come to a draw.
        I thank you very much for having me here. I love looking around the
    table and seeing old friends and new faces. I thank Governor Dean for
    his leadership of the Governors' conference. And Governor Thompson, I
    wish you well, and I thank you for the work that we have done together
    over so many years. I thank all the State officials from Vermont who
    came out to the airport to say hello and the mayor here of Burlington. I
    know that your former Governor, Madeleine Kunin, is here, the Deputy
    Secretary of Education. She has done a very great job for us, and I
    thank her for that.
        I want to talk to you today primarily about welfare reform. But I'd
    like to put it in the context of the other things that we are attempting
    to do in Washington. I see Senator Leahy and Congressman Sanders back
    there; Senator Jeffords may be here. I think I'm taking him back to
    Washington in a couple of hours.
        I ran for President because I was genuinely concerned about whether
    our country was ready for the 21st century, because of the slow rate of
    job growth, 20 years of stagnant incomes, 30 years of social problems. I
    knew that we were still better than any other country in the world at so
    many things, but we seemed to be coming apart when, clearly, we've
    always done better when we went forward together as a nation.

    [[Page 1180]]

        I have this vision of what our country will look like 20 or 30 or 40
    years from now. I want America to be a high-opportunity, smart-work
    country, not a hard-work, low-wage country. I want America to be a
    country with strong families and strong communities, where people have
    the ability to make the most of their own lives and families and
    communities have the ability to solve their own problems, where we have
    good schools and a clean environment and decent health care and safe
    streets.
        I think the strategy to achieve that is clear. We have to create
    more opportunity and demand more responsibility from our people, and we
    have to do it together. I have concluded, having worked at this job now
    for 2\1/2\ years, that we cannot achieve the specific strategies of
    creating opportunity or providing for more responsibility unless we find
    a way to do more together.
        In the last 2\1/2\ years, as Governor Dean said, I have spent most
    of my time working on trying to make sure we had a sound economic
    policy, to bring the deficit down and increase trade and investment in
    technology and research and development and education, to open up new
    educational opportunities, and to work with you to achieve standards of
    excellence with less direction from the National Government.
        We also have tried to put some more specific responsibilities into
    the programs that benefit the American people. That's what the national
    service program was all about. We'll help you go to college, but you
    need to serve your country at the grassroots level. We reformed the
    college loan program to cut the cost and make the repayment terms
    better, but we toughened dramatically the collection of delinquent
    college loans so that the taxpayers wouldn't be out more money. We
    passed the family leave law, but we've also tried to strengthen child
    support enforcement, as so many of you have.
        I want to help people on welfare, but I also want to reward people
    who, on their own, are off of welfare, on modest incomes, which is why
    we have dramatically expanded the earned-income tax credit, the program
    that President Reagan said was the most pro-family, pro-work initiative
    undertaken by the United States in the last generation. Now, this year,
    families with children with incomes of under $28,000 will pay about
    $1,300 less in income tax than they would have if the laws hadn't been
    changed in 1993.
        We also tried to change the way the Government works. It's smaller
    than it used to be. There are 150,000 fewer people working for the
    Federal Government than there were the day I became President. We have
    dramatically reduced Government regulations in many areas. We're on the
    way to reducing the regulatory burden of the Department of Education by
    40 percent, the Small Business Administration by 50 percent. We are
    reducing this year the time it takes to comply with the EPA rules and
    regulations by 25 percent and establishing a program in which anybody,
    any small business person who calls the EPA and honestly asks for help
    in dealing with a problem cannot be fined as a result of any discovery
    arising from the phone call while the person is trying to meet the
    requirements of Federal law.
        We have also tried to solve problems that have been ignored. We
    reformed the pension system in the country to save 8\1/2\ million
    troubled pensions and stabilize 40 million more. Secretary Cisneros has
    formed an unbelievable partnership to expand home ownership with no new
    tax dollars, which will get us by the end of this decade more than two-
    thirds of Americans in their own homes for the first time in the history
    of the Republic.
        The results of all this are overwhelmingly positive but still
    somewhat troubling. On the economic front, we have 7 million more jobs,
    1\1/2\ million more small businesses--the largest rate of small business
    formation in history--2.4 million new homeowners, record stock markets,
    low inflation, record profits. And yet--and a record number of new
    millionaires, which is something to be proud of in this country, people
    who've worked their way into becoming millionaires; they didn't inherit
    the money. But still, the median income is about where it was 2\1/2\
    years ago, which means most wage-earning Americans are still working
    harder for the same or lower wages. And the level of anxiety is quite
    high.
        On the social front, you see the same things. The number of people
    on food stamps is down. The number of people on welfare is down. The
    divorce rate is down. The crime rate is down in almost every major
    metropolitan area in the country. The rate of serious drug use is down.
    But the rate of random violence among very young people is up. The
    continuing, gnawing sense of insecurity is up. The rate of casual

    [[Page 1181]]

    marijuana smoking among very young people is up, even as serious drug
    use goes down.
        So, what we have is a sense in America that we're kind of drifting
    apart. And this future that I visualize, that I think all of you share,
    is being rapidly embraced by tens of millions of Americans and achieved
    with stunning success. But we are still being held back in fulfilling
    our real destiny as a country because so many people are kind of shut
    off from that American dream.
        I am convinced that the American people want us to go forward
    together. I am convinced that there really is a common ground out there
    on most of these issues that seem so divisive when we read about them in
    the newspaper or see them on the evening news. I think if just ordinary
    Americans could get in a room like this and sit around a table, two-
    thirds of them or more would come to the same answer on most of these
    questions. And I believe that we cannot bring the country together and
    move the country forward unless we deal with some issues that we still
    haven't faced.
        I've tried to find a way to talk about really controversial issues
    in a way that would promote a discussion instead of another word combat.
    I've given talks in the last few days about family and media, about
    affirmative action, about the relationship of religion and prayer to
    schools in the hope that we could have genuine conversations about these
    things.
        But I am convinced that almost more than any other issue in American
    life, this welfare issue sort of stands as a symbol of what divides us,
    because most Americans know that there are people who are trapped in a
    cycle of dependency that takes their tax dollars but doesn't achieve the
    goals designed that they have, which is to have people on welfare become
    successful parents and successful workers and to have parents who can
    pay, pay for their children so the taxpayers don't have to do it. I am
    convinced that unless we do this, and until we do it, there will still
    be a sort of wedge that will be very hard to get out of the spirit and
    the life of America.
        There is here--maybe more than on any other issue that we're dealing
    with that's controversial--a huge common ground in America, maybe not in
    Washington yet, but out in the country there is a common ground. Not so
    very long ago there were liberals who opposed requiring all people on
    welfare to go to work. But now, almost nobody does. And as far as I
    know, every Democrat in both Houses of Congress has signed on to one
    version of a bill or another that would do exactly that.
        Not so long ago there were conservatives who thought the Government
    shouldn't spend money on child care to give welfare mothers a chance to
    go to work. But now nearly everybody recognizes that the single most
    significant failure of the Welfare Reform Act of '88, which I worked
    very hard on and which I missed, was that when we decided we couldn't
    fund it all, we should have put more money into child care even if it
    meant less money in job training, because there were States that had
    programs for that, and that you can't expect someone to leave their
    children and go to work if they have to worry about the safety of the
    children or if they'll actually fall behind economically for doing it
    because they don't have child care. We now have a broad consensus on
    that.
        When Governor Thompson and Governor Dean and others came to the
    White House to the Welfare Reform Conference in January, I was very
    moved at the broad consensus that while we needed more State
    flexibility, in one area we had to have more national action and that
    was on standards for child support enforcement, for the simple reason
    that over a third of all delinquent child support cases are multi-State
    cases and there is no practical way to resolve that in the absence of
    having some national standards. If everybody who could pay their child
    support and who is under an order to do it, did it, we could lift
    800,000 people off the welfare rolls tomorrow. That is still our
    greatest short-term opportunity, and we all need to do what we can to
    seize it.
        There's also a pretty good consensus on what we shouldn't do. I
    think most Americans believe that while we should promote work and we
    should fight premature and certainly fight out-of-wedlock pregnancy, it
    is a mistake to deny people benefits--children benefits--because their
    parents are under age and unmarried, just for example. And I think most
    Americans are concerned that the long-term trend in America, that's now
    about 10 years long, toward dramatic decline in the abortion rate might
    turn around and go up again, at least among some classes of people, if
    we pass that kind of rule everywhere in the country.
        So I think there is a common ground to be had on welfare reform. I
    proposed a welfare

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    reform bill in 1994 which I thought achieved the objectives we all
    needed. I thought it would do what the States need to do. I though it
    would set up time limits. It would have requirements for responsible
    behavior for young people, requiring them to stay at home and stay in
    school. It would have supported the efforts of States through greater
    investments in child care and would have given much greater flexibility.
    It didn't pass.
        In the State of the Union this year I asked the new Congress to join
    me in passing a welfare reform bill. It still hasn't passed because,
    unfortunately, in 1995 there have been ideological and political in-
    fights that have stalled progress on welfare reform and have prevented
    the majority, particularly in the Senate, from taking a position on it.
        Some of the people on the extreme right wing of the Republican
    majority have held this issue hostage because they want to force the
    States to implement requirements that would deny benefits to young,
    unmarried mothers and their children. But I believe it's better to
    require young people to stay at home, stay in school, and turn their
    lives around, because the objective is to make good workers, good
    parents, good citizens, and successful children. That's what we're all
    trying to do.
        So I'm against giving the States more mandates and less money,
    whether the mandates come from the right or the left. I'm also opposed
    to the efforts in Congress now to cut child care because, I say again,
    the biggest mistake we made in the Welfare Reform Act of '88 was not
    doing more in child care. We would have had far greater success if we
    had invested more money then in child care for people on welfare.
        Now, I believe that it would be a mistake--if we cut child care and
    do all this other stuff, we could have more latchkey children, we could
    have more neglected children. And there are all kinds of new studies
    coming out again saying that the worst thing in the world we can do is
    not to take the first 4 years of a child's life and make sure that those
    years are spent in personal contact with caring adults, where children
    can develop the kind of capacities they need. So this is a very big
    issue if your objective for welfare reform is independence, work, good
    parenting, and successful children.
        Now, you know I believe all this. That's why we worked so hard to
    grant all these waivers, more in 2\1/2\ years than in the past 12 years
    combined. But I also have to tell you that I'm opposed to welfare reform
    that is really just a mask for congressional budget cutting, which would
    send you a check with no incentives or requirements on States to
    maintain your own funding support for poor children and child care and
    work.
        And I do believe honestly that there is a danger that some States
    will get involved in a race to the bottom, but not, as some have
    implied, because I don't have confidence in you, not because I think you
    want to do that, not because I think you would do it in any way if you
    could avoid it, but because I have been a Governor for 12 years in all
    different kinds of times and I know what kinds of decisions you are
    about to face if the range of alternatives I see coming toward you
    develop.
        I know, with the big cuts now being talked about in Congress in
    Medicaid, in other health and human services areas, in education, in the
    environment, that you will have a lot of pressure in the first
    legislative session after this budget comes down. And I know that
    somewhere down the road, in the next few years, we'll have another
    recession again.
        And it's all right to have a fund set aside for the high-growth
    States. I like that; it's a good idea. But what happens when we're not
    all growing like we are now and we were last year? What happens the next
    time a recession comes down? How would you deal with the interplay in
    your own legislature if you just get a block grant for welfare, with no
    requirement to do anything on your own, and the people representing the
    good folks in nursing homes show up and the people representing the
    teachers show up and the people representing the colleges and
    universities show up and the people representing the cities and counties
    who've lost money they used to get for environmental investments show
    up?
        I don't know what your experience is, but my experience is that the
    poor children's lobby is a poor match for most of those forces in most
    State legislatures in the country, not because anybody wants to do the
    wrong thing but because those people are deserving, too, and they will
    have a very strong case to make. They will have a very strong case to
    make.
        So I believe we ought to have a continuing partnership, not for the
    Federal Government to tell you how to do welfare reform but because

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    any money we wind up saving through today's neglect will cost us a ton
    more in tomorrow's consequences. And this partnership permits you to
    say, at least as a first line of defense, we must do this for the poor
    children of our State.
        I also believe there is a better way to deal with this. And I'd like
    to say today, I come to you with essentially two messages, one I hope we
    will all do with Congress and one that we can do without regard to
    Congress.
        First, we do need to pass a welfare reform bill that demands work
    and responsibilities and gives you the tools you need to succeed: tough
    child support enforcement, time limits in work requirements, child care,
    requiring young mothers to live at home and stay in school, and greater
    State flexibility.
        The work plan proposed by Senators Daschle, Breaux, and Mikulski
    ends the current welfare system as we know it and replaces it with a
    work-based system. I will say again, the biggest shortcoming, I believe,
    of the bill that I helped write, the Family Support Act of 1988--on your
    behalf or your predecessors--was that we did not do enough in the child
    care area. The work first bill gives States the resources to provide
    child care for people who go to work and stay there. It rewards States
    for moving people from welfare to work, not simply for cutting people
    off welfare rolls. It is in that sense real welfare reform.
        I know a lot of you think it has too many prescriptions, and I want
    to give you the maximum amount of flexibility, but it certainly is a
    good place to start to work on bipartisan efforts to solve this problem.
    And I will say again, to get the job done, we've got to have a
    bipartisan effort to do it.
        I want to compliment Senator Dole for what he said here today. I
    made a personal plea to Senator Dole not very long ago to try to find a
    way to make a break from those who were trying to hold the Republican
    conference in the Senate hostage on this welfare reform issue so that we
    could work together. And today, if I understand his remarks--and I've
    read the best account of them I can--he proposed getting rid of
    ideological strings in requirements on States and giving States more say
    in their programs. And that is a very good start for us to work
    together.
        Some of you may agree with him instead of me on that, but as I
    understand it, he also proposes a flat block grant with no requirement
    for States maintaining their present level of effort or no maintenance
    of effort requirement of any kind. As I said, maybe it's just because I
    have been a Governor, I think this is a very bad idea. I don't think we
    should do this, because this program, after all, is called Aid to
    Families with Dependent Children, not aid to States with terrible budget
    problems created by Congress. [Laughter]
        But while we have differences, Senator Dole's speech today, given
    what's been going on up there, offers real hope that the Congress can go
    beyond partisan and ideological bickering and pass a strong bipartisan
    welfare reform bill. The American people have waited for it long enough.
    We ought to do it. I am ready to go to work on it. And I consider this a
    very positive opening step.
        I hope, again I will say, that you will consider the great strengths
    of the Daschle-Breaux-Mikulski bill, which I also believe is a very
    positive opening step and shows you where the entire Democratic caucus
    in the Senate is. They presently all support that.
        My second message to you is, we don't have to wait for Congress to
    go a long way toward ending welfare as we know it; we can build on what
    we've already done. Already you are and we are collecting child support
    at record levels. Earlier this year, I signed an Executive order to
    crack down on Federal employee delinquency in child support, and it is
    beginning to be felt. Already in the last 2\1/2\ years, our
    administration has approved waivers for 29 States to reform welfare your
    way. The first experiment we approved was for Governor Dean to make it
    clear that welfare in Vermont would become a second chance, not a way of
    life. Governor Thompson's aggressive efforts in Wisconsin, which have
    been widely noted, send the same strong message.
        Now, we can and we should do more, and we shouldn't just wait around
    for the congressional process to work its way through. We can do more
    based on what States already know will work to promote work and to
    protect children. Therefore today I am directing the Secretary of Health
    and Human Services to approve reforms for any State on a fast track that
    incorporate one or more of the following five strategies.
        First, requiring people on welfare to work and providing adequate
    child care to permit them to do it. Delaware recently got an approval

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    to do this; so have several other States. Why not all 50?
        Second, limiting welfare to a set number of years and cutting people
    off if they turn down jobs. Florida got approval to limit welfare,
    provide a job for those who can't find one, and cut off those who refuse
    to work; so did 14 other States. Why not all 50?
        Third, requiring fathers to pay child support or go to work to pay
    off what they owe. Michigan got approval to do this; so did 13 other
    States. Taxpayers should not pay what fathers owe and can pay. Why not
    all 50 States?
        Fourth, requiring underage mothers to live at home and stay in
    school. Teen motherhood should not lead to premature independence unless
    the home is a destructive and dangerous environment. The baby should not
    bring the right and the money to leave school, stop working, set up a
    new household, and lengthen the period of dependence, instead of
    shortening it. Vermont got approval to stop doing this; so did five
    other States. Why not all 50?
        And finally, permitting States to pay the cash value of welfare and
    food stamps to private employers as wage subsidies when they hire people
    to leave welfare and go to work. Oregon just got approval to do this; so
    did Ohio and Mississippi. Arizona and Virginia can do it as well. Why
    not all 50 States? This so-called privatizing of welfare reform helps
    businesses to create jobs, saves taxpayers money, moves people from
    welfare to work, and recognizes that in the real world of this deficit
    we're not going to be able to have a lot of public service jobs to
    people who can't go to work when their time limits run out. I think this
    has real promise.
        So I say to you today, if you pass laws like these or come up with
    plans like these that require people on welfare to work, that cut off
    benefits after a time certain for those who won't work, that make teen
    mothers stay at home and stay in school, that make parents pay child
    support or go to work to earn the money to do it or that use welfare
    benefits as a wage supplement for private employers who give jobs to
    people on welfare, if you do that, you sign them, you send them to me,
    and we will approve them within 30 days. Then we will have real welfare
    reform even as Congress considers it.
        To further support your actions, I am directing the Office of
    Management and Budget to approve a change in Federal regulations so that
    States can impose tougher sanctions on people who refuse to work. Right
    now, when a State reduces someone's welfare check for failing to hold up
    their end of the bargain, the person's food stamp benefit goes up. So it
    turns out not to be much of a sanction. We're going to change that. If
    your welfare check goes down for refusal to work, your food stamp
    payment won't go up anymore.
        Finally, as another downpayment on our commitment to our partnership
    with you on welfare reform, today our administration has reached
    agreement on welfare reform experiments for West Virginia, Utah, Texas,
    and California. Massachusetts has a sweeping proposal on which agreement
    has been reached on every issue but one--as I understand it, we're
    getting much closer there. The West Virginia proposal helps two-parent
    families go to work. Utah provides greater work incentives but tougher
    sanctions for those who turn down work. California has adopted the New
    Jersey system of the family cap. Texas has a very interesting proposal
    to require parents on welfare to prove that their children have been
    immunized to continue to draw the benefits.
        And I would say, just in response to this, this will now, obviously,
    bring us to 32 States, and I think soon to be 33 States, with these
    kinds of experiments. We also are announcing food stamps experiments
    today as applied for by Delaware and Virginia.
        All of these are designed to promote work and responsibility without
    being stifled by Washington's one-size-fits-all rule. But I think we
    need to accelerate this process. I don't like the so-called Mother-may-I
    aspect of the waiver system, either. That's why I say, if you act in
    these five areas, under the law you have to file an application for an
    experiment, but it will be approved within 30 days.
        And I want to identify other areas like this. This Texas
    immunization idea is very important. We have lower immunization rates
    than any advanced country in the world. We are moving hard at the
    national level to make sure that the vaccines are affordable. Texas was
    the first State to use national service workers, AmeriCorps volunteers,
    in the summer of '93, to immunize over 100,000 children. And since then
    they've immunized another 50,000. But if you were to require it of
    people on public assistance, it would have a big impact on getting those
    numbers up, I believe. So, as we begin to get more information about
    this and other

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    things, we will be issuing other reforms that if you just ask for them,
    we'll say yes within 30 days. This is very important.
        Now, let me be clear. Congress still does need to pass national
    legislation. Why? Because I don't think you ought to have to file for
    permission every time you do something that we already know has worked
    and that other States are doing. Because we do need national child
    support standards, time limits, work requirements, and protections for
    children. And we do need more national support for child care.
        I hope these efforts that I'm announcing today will spur the
    Congress to act. But we don't have to wait for them, and we shouldn't.
    We can do much more. If every State did the five things that I mentioned
    here today, every State, we would change welfare fundamentally and for
    the better. And we ought to begin it, and we shouldn't wait for Congress
    to pass a law.
        There is common ground on welfare. We want something that's good for
    children, that's good for the welfare recipients, that's good for the
    taxpayers, and that's good for America. We have got to grow the middle
    class and shrink the under class in this country. We cannot permit this
    country to split apart. We cannot permit these income trends which are
    developing to continue. We have to change it. You will not recognize
    this country in another generation if we have 50 years, instead of 20
    years, in which half of the middle class never gets a raise and most of
    the poor people are young folks and their little kids. We have to change
    it. And we can do it.
        But we have to remember what we're trying to do. We're trying to
    make the people on welfare really successful as workers and parents. And
    most important, we're trying to make sure this new generation of
    children does better.
        A few months ago I was down in Dallas, visiting one of our
    AmeriCorps projects. And I saw two pictures that illustrate why I think
    this issue is so important. One, I was walking with a young woman who
    was my tour guide on this project. She was a teen mother, had a child
    out of wedlock, thought she had done the wrong thing, went back and got
    her GED, and was in the AmeriCorps program because she wanted to work in
    this poor community to help them and earn money to go to college. But
    the second person I met was the real reason we ought to be working for
    welfare reform. I met a young woman who was very well-spoken. She told
    me she had just graduated from a university in the Southeast. But she
    was working on this anyway, even though she really didn't have to go on
    to college anymore. And I said, ``Why are you doing this?'' She said,
    ``Because I was born into a family of a welfare mother. But I had a
    chance to get a good education; I got a college degree. And I want these
    young people to come out like I did.''
        Now, that's the kind of citizen we want in this country. Those are
    the kind of people that will turn these disturbing trends around. Those
    are the kind of people that will enable us to come together and go
    forward into the future.
        We owe them that. And we can do it. You and I can do it now.
    Congress can do it this year. And every one of us ought to do our part.
        Thank you, and God bless you.

    Note: The President spoke at 2:45 p.m. by satellite at the Sheraton
    Burlington Hotel. In his remarks, he referred to Gov. Howard Dean of
    Vermont, chair, and Gov. Tommy Thompson of Wisconsin, vice-chair,
    National Governors' Association; and Mayor Peter C. Brownell of
    Burlington, VT.