[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

[[Page 1182]]

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

[[Page 1183]]

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

[[Page 1184]]

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

[[Page 1185]]

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.