    [Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: William J. Clinton (1996, Book II)]
    [July 31, 1996]
    [Pages 1233-1238]
    [From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]

    Remarks on Welfare Reform Legislation and an Exchange With Reporters
    July 31, 1996

        The President. Good afternoon. When I ran for President 4 years ago,
    I pledged to end welfare as we know it. I have worked very hard for 4
    years to do just that. Today the Congress will vote on legislation that
    gives us a chance to live up to that promise: to transform a broken
    system that traps too many people in a cycle of dependence to one that
    emphasizes work and independence, to give people on welfare a chance to
    draw a paycheck, not a welfare check. It gives us a better chance to
    give those on welfare what we want for all families in America, the
    opportunity to succeed at home and at work. For those reasons I will
    sign it into law. The legislation is, however, far from perfect. There
    are parts of it that are wrong, and I will address those parts in a
    moment. But on balance, this bill is a real step forward for our
    country, our values, and for people who are on welfare.
        For 15 years, I have worked on this problem, as Governor and as a
    President. I've spent time in welfare offices. I have talked to mothers
    on welfare who desperately want the chance to work and support their
    families independently. A long time ago I concluded that the current
    welfare system undermines the basic values of work, responsibility, and
    family, trapping generation after generation in dependency and hurting
    the very people it was designed to help.
        Today we have an historic opportunity to make welfare what it was
    meant to be, a second chance, not a way of life. And even though the
    bill has serious flaws that are unrelated to welfare reform, I believe
    we have a duty to seize the opportunity it gives us to end welfare as we
    know it.
        Over the past 3\1/2\ years, I have done everything in my power as
    President to promote work and responsibility, working with 41 States to
    give them 69 welfare reform experiments. We have also required teen
    mothers to stay in school, required Federal employees to pay their child
    support, cracked down on people who owe child support and crossed State
    lines. As a result,

    [[Page 1234]]

    child support collections are up 40 percent, to $11 billion, and there
    are 1.3 million fewer people on welfare today than there were when I
    took office.
        From the outset, however, I have also worked with Members of both
    parties in Congress to achieve a national welfare reform bill that will
    make work and responsibility the law of the land. I made my principles
    for real welfare reform very clear from the beginning. First and
    foremost, it should be about moving people from welfare to work. It
    should impose time limits on welfare. It should give people the child
    care and the health care they need to move from welfare to work without
    hurting their children. It should crack down on child support
    enforcement, and it should protect our children.
        This legislation meets these principles. It gives us a chance we
    haven't had before to break the cycle of dependency that has existed for
    millions and millions of our fellow citizens, exiling them from the
    world of work that gives structure, meaning, and dignity to most of our
    lives.
        We've come a long way in this debate. It's important to remember
    that not so very long ago, at the beginning of this very Congress, some
    wanted to put poor children in orphanages and take away all help for
    mothers simply because they were poor, young, and unmarried. Last year
    the Republican majority in Congress sent me legislation that had its
    priorities backward. It was soft on work and tough on children. It
    failed to provide child care and health care. It imposed deep and
    unacceptable cuts in school lunches, child welfare, and help for
    disabled children. The bill came to me twice, and I vetoed it twice.
        The bipartisan legislation before the Congress today is
    significantly better than the bills I vetoed. Many of the worst elements
    I objected to are out of it, and many of the improvements I asked for
    are included. First, the new bill is strong on work. It provides $4
    billion more for child care so that mothers can move from welfare to
    work and protects their children by maintaining health and safety
    standards for day care. These things are very important. You cannot ask
    somebody on welfare to go to work if they're going to neglect their
    children in doing it.
        It gives States powerful performance incentives to place people in
    jobs. It requires States to hold up their end of the bargain by
    maintaining their own spending on welfare. And it gives States the
    capacity to create jobs by taking money now used for welfare checks and
    giving it to employers as income subsidies as an incentive to hire
    people or being used to create community service jobs.
        Second, this new bill is better for children than the two I vetoed.
    It keeps the national nutritional safety net intact by eliminating the
    food stamp cap and the optional block grant. It drops the deep cuts and
    devastating changes in school lunch, child welfare, and help for
    disabled children. It allows States to use Federal money to provide
    vouchers to children whose parents can't find work after the time limits
    expire. And it preserves the national guarantee of health care for poor
    children, the disabled, pregnant women, the elderly, and people on
    welfare.
        Just as important, this bill continues to include the child support
    enforcement measures I proposed 2 years ago, the most sweeping crackdown
    on deadbeat parents in history. If every parent paid the child support
    they should, we could move 800,000 women and children off welfare
    immediately. With this bill we say to parents, if you don't pay the
    child support you owe, we will garnish your wages, take away your
    driver's license, track you across State lines and, as necessary, make
    you work off what you owe. It is a very important advance that could
    only be achieved in legislation. I did not have the executive authority
    to do this without a bill.
        So I will sign this bill, first and foremost because the current
    system is broken; second, because Congress has made many of the changes
    I sought; and third, because even though serious problems remain in the
    non-welfare-reform provisions of the bill, this is the best chance we
    will have for a long, long time to complete the work of ending welfare
    as we know it by moving people from welfare to work, demanding
    responsibility, and doing better by children.
        However, I want to be very clear. Some parts of this bill still go
    too far, and I am determined to see that those areas are corrected.
    First, I am concerned that although we have made great strides to
    maintain the national nutritional safety net, this bill still cuts
    deeper than it should in nutritional assistance, mostly for working
    families with children. In the budget talks, we reached a tentative
    agreement on $21 billion in food stamp savings over the next several
    years. They are included in this bill.

    [[Page 1235]]

        However, the congressional majority insisted on another cut we did
    not agree to, repealing a reform adopted 4 years ago in Congress which
    was to go into effect next year. It's called the excess shelter
    reduction, which helps some of our hardest pressed working families.
    Finally we were going to treat working families with children the same
    way we treat senior citizens who draw food stamps today. Now, blocking
    this change, I believe--I know--will make it harder for some of our
    hardest pressed working families with children. This provision is a
    mistake, and I will work to correct it.
        Second, I am deeply disappointed that the congressional leadership
    insisted on attaching to this extraordinarily important bill a provision
    that will hurt legal immigrants in America, people who work hard for
    their families, pay taxes, serve in our military. This provision has
    nothing to do with welfare reform. It is simply a budget-saving measure,
    and it is not right.
        These immigrant families with children who fall on hard times
    through no fault of their own--for example, because they face the same
    risks the rest of us do from accidents, from criminal assaults, from
    serious illnesses--they should be eligible for medical and other help
    when they need it. The Republican majority could never have passed such
    a provision standing alone. You see that in the debate in the
    immigration bill, for example, over the Gallegly amendment, and the
    question of education of undocumented and illegal immigrant children.
        This provision will cause great stress for States, for localities,
    for medical facilities that have to serve large numbers of legal
    immigrants. It is just wrong to say to people, we'll let you work here,
    you're helping our country, you'll pay taxes, you serve in our military,
    you may get killed defending America, but if somebody mugs you on a
    street corner or you get cancer or you get hit by a car or the same
    thing happens to your children, we're not going to give you assistance
    anymore. I am convinced this would never have passed alone, and I am
    convinced when we send legislation to Congress to correct it, it will be
    corrected.
        In the meantime, let me also say that I intend to take further
    executive action directing the INS to continue to work to remove the
    bureaucratic roadblocks to citizenship to all eligible legal immigrants.
    I will do everything in my power, in other words, to make sure that this
    bill lifts people up and does not become an excuse for anyone to turn
    their backs on this problem or on people who are generally in need
    through no fault of their own. This bill must also not let anyone off
    the hook. The States asked for this responsibility; now they have to
    shoulder it and not run away from it. We have to make sure that in the
    coming years reform and change actually result in moving people from
    welfare to work.
        The business community must provide greater private-sector jobs that
    people on welfare need to build good lives and strong families. I
    challenge every State to adopt the reforms that Wisconsin, Oregon,
    Missouri, and other States are proposing to do, to take the money that
    used to be available for welfare checks and offer it to the private
    sector as wage subsidies to begin to hire these people, to give them a
    chance to build their families and build their lives. All of us have to
    rise to this challenge and see that--this reform not as a chance to
    demonize or demean anyone but instead as an opportunity to bring
    everyone fully into the mainstream of American life, to give them a
    chance to share in the prosperity and the promise that most of our
    people are enjoying today.
        And we here in Washington must continue to do everything in our
    power to reward work and to expand opportunity for all people. The
    earned-income tax credit, which we expanded in 1993 dramatically, is now
    rewarding the work of 15 million working families. I am pleased that
    congressional efforts to gut this tax cut for the hardest pressed
    working people have been blocked. This legislation preserves the EITC
    and its benefits for working families. Now we must increase the minimum
    wage, which also will benefit millions of working people with families
    and help them to offset the impact of some of the nutritional cuts in
    this bill. Through these efforts, we all have to recognize, as I said in
    1992, the best antipoverty program is still a job.
        I want to congratulate the Members of Congress in both parties who
    worked together on this welfare reform legislation. I want to challenge
    them to put politics aside and continue to work together to meet our
    other challenges and to correct the problems that are still there with
    this legislation. I am convinced that it does present an historic
    opportunity to finish the work of ending welfare as we know it, and that
    is why I have decided to sign it.
        Q. Mr. President, some civil rights groups and children's advocacy
    groups still say that they be-

    [[Page 1236]]

    lieve that this is going to hurt children. I wonder what your response
    is to that. And also, it took you a little while to decide whether you
    would go along with this bill or not. Can you give us some sense of what
    you and your advisers kind of talked about and the mood in the White
    House over this?
        The President. Sure. Well, first of all, the conference was not
    completed until late last evening, and there were changes being made in
    the bill right up to the very end. So when I went to bed last night, I
    didn't know what the bill said. And this was supposed to be a day off
    for me, and when I got up and I realized that the conference had
    completed its work late last night and that the bill was scheduled for a
    vote late this afternoon, after I did a little work around the house
    this morning, I came in and we went to work, I think, about 11 o'clock.
        And we simply--we got everybody in who had an interest in this, and
    we went through every provision of the bill, line by line, so that I
    made sure that I understood exactly what had come out of the conference.
    And then I gave everybody in the administration who was there a chance
    to voice their opinion on it and to explore what their views were and
    what our options were. And as soon as we finished the meeting, I went in
    and had a brief talk with the Vice President and with Mr. Panetta, and I
    told them that I had decided that, on balance, I should sign the bill.
    And then we called this press conference.
        Q. And what about the civil rights groups--[inaudible].
        The President. I would say to them that there are some groups who
    basically have never agreed with me on this, who never agreed that we
    should do anything to give the States much greater flexibility on this
    if it meant doing away with the individual entitlement to the welfare
    check. And that is still, I think, the central objection to most of the
    groups.
        My view about that is that for a very long time it's hard to say
    that we've had anything that approaches a uniform AFDC system when the
    benefits range from a low of $187 a month to a high of $655 a month for
    a family of 3 or 4. And I think that the system we have is not working.
    It works for half the people who just use it for a little while and get
    off. It will continue to work for them. I think the States will continue
    to provide for them.
        For the other half of the people who are trapped on it, it is not
    working. And I believe that the child support provisions here, the child
    care provisions here, the protection of the medical benefits, indeed,
    the expansion of the medical guarantee now from 1998 to 2002, mean that
    on balance these families will be better off. I think the problems in
    this bill are in the non-welfare-reform provisions, in the nutritional
    provisions that I mentioned, and especially in the legal immigrant
    provisions that I mentioned.
        Q. Mr. President, it seems likely there will be a kind of political
    contest to see who gets the credit or the blame on this measure. Senator
    Dole is out with a statement saying that you've been brought along to
    sign his bill. Are you concerned at all that you will be seen as having
    been kind of dragged into going along with something that you originally
    promised to do and that this will look like you signing onto a
    Republican initiative?
        The President. No. First of all, because I don't--you know, if we're
    doing the right thing there will be enough credit to go around. And if
    we're doing the wrong thing there will be enough blame to go around. I'm
    not worried about that. I've always wanted to work with Senator Dole and
    others. And before he left the Senate, I asked him not to leave the
    budget negotiations. So I'm not worried about that.
        But that's a pretty hard case to make, since I vetoed their previous
    bills twice and since while they were talking about it we were doing it.
    It's now generally accepted by everybody who has looked at the evidence
    that we effected what the New York Times called a quiet revolution in
    welfare. There are 1.3 million fewer people on welfare today than there
    were when I took office.
        But there are limits to what we can do with these waivers. We
    couldn't get the child support enforcement. We couldn't get the extra
    child care. Those are two things that we had to have legislation to do.
    And the third thing is we needed to put all the States in a position
    where they had to move right now to try to create more jobs. So far--I
    know that we had Wisconsin and, earlier, Oregon and I believe Missouri.
    And I think those are the only three States, for example, that had taken
    up the challenge that I gave to the Governors in Vermont a couple of
    years ago to start taking the welfare payments and use it for wage
    subsidies to the pri-

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    vate sector to actually create jobs. You can't tell people to go to work
    if there is no job out there.
        So now they all have the power, and they have financial incentives
    to create jobs, plus we've got the child care locked in and the medical
    care locked in and the child support enforcement locked in. None of this
    could have happened without legislation. That's why I thought this
    legislation was important.
        Q. Mr. President, some of the critics of this bill say that the
    flaws will be very hard to fix because that will involve adding to the
    budget and in the current political climate adding to the expenditures
    is politically impossible. How would you respond to that?
        The President. Well, it just depends on what your priorities are.
    For one thing, it will be somewhat easier to balance the budget now in
    the time period because the deficit this year is $23 billion less than
    it was the last time we did our budget calculations. So we've lowered
    that base $23 billion this year. Now, in the out years it still comes
    up, but there's some savings there that we could turn around and put
    back into this.
        Next, if you look at--my budget corrects it right now. I had $42
    billion in savings; this bill has about $57 billion in savings. You
    could correct all these problems that I mentioned with money to spare in
    the gap there. So when we get down to the budget negotiations either at
    the end of this year or at the beginning of next year, I think the
    American people will say, we can stand marginally smaller tax cuts, for
    example, or cut somewhere else to cure this problem of immigrants and
    children, to cure the nutritional problems. We're not talking about vast
    amounts of money over a 6-year period. It's not a big budget number, and
    I think it can easily be fixed given where we are in the budget
    negotiations.
        Q. The last couple days in these meetings among your staff and this
    morning, would you say there was no disagreement among people in the
    administration about what you should do? Some disagreement? A lot of
    disagreement?
        The President. No, I would say that there was--first of all, I have
    rarely been as impressed with the people who work in this administration
    on any issue as I have been on this. There was significant disagreement
    among my advisers about whether this bill should be signed or vetoed,
    but 100 percent of them recognized the power of the arguments on the
    other side. It was a very moving thing. Today the conversation was
    almost 100 percent about the merits of the bill and not the political
    implications of it, because I think those things are very hard to
    calculate anyway. I think they're virtually impossible.
        I have tried to thank all of them personally, including those who
    are here in the room and those who are not here, because they did have
    differences of opinion about whether we should sign or veto, but each
    side recognized the power of the arguments on the other side. And 100
    percent of them, just like 100 percent of the Congress, recognized that
    we needed to change fundamentally the framework within which welfare
    operates in this country. The only question was whether the problems in
    the non-welfare-reform provisions were so great that they would justify
    a veto and giving up what might be--what I'm convinced is our last best
    chance to fundamentally change the system.
        Q. Mr. President, even in spite of all the details of this, you as a
    Democrat are actually helping to dismantle something that was put in
    place by Democrats 60 years ago. Did that give you pause, that
    overarching question?
        The President. No. No, because it was put in place 60 years ago when
    the poverty population of America was fundamentally different than it is
    now. As Senator Moynihan--you know, Senator Moynihan strongly disagrees
    with me on this, but as he has pointed out repeatedly, when welfare was
    created the typical welfare recipient was a miner's widow with no
    education, small children, husband dies in the mine, no expectation that
    there was a job for the widow to do or that she ever could do it--very
    few out-of-wedlock pregnancies and births. The whole dynamics were
    different then.
        So I have always thought that the Democratic Party should be on the
    side of creating opportunity and promoting empowerment and
    responsibility for people, and a system that was in place 60 years ago
    that worked for the poverty population then is not the one we need now.
    But that's why I have worked so hard, too, to veto previous bills. That
    does not mean I think we can walk away from the guarantee that our party
    gave on Medicaid, the guarantee our party gave on nutrition, the
    guarantee our party gave in school lunches, because that has not
    changed. But the nature of the poverty population is so different now
    that I am convinced we have got

    [[Page 1238]]

    to be willing to experiment, to try to work to find ways to break the
    cycle of dependency that keeps dragging folks down.
        And I think the States are going to find out pretty quickly that
    they're going to have to be willing to invest something in these people
    to make sure that they can go to work in the ways that I suggested.
        Yes, one last question.
        Q. Mr. President, you mentioned Senator Moynihan. Have you spoken to
    him or other congressional leaders, especially congressional Democrats?
    And what was the conversation and the reaction to your indication?
        The President. Well, I talked to him as recently, I think, as about
    a week ago. When we went up to meet with the TWA families, we talked
    about it again. And you know, I have an enormous amount of respect for
    him. And he has been a powerful and cogent critic of this whole move.
    I'll just have to hope that in this one case I'm right and he's wrong,
    because I have an enormous regard for him. And I've spoken to a number
    of other Democrats, and some think I'm right and some don't.
        This is a case where, you know, I have been working with this issue
    for such a long time, a long time before it became--to go back to Mr.
    Hume's [Brit Hume, ABC News] question--a long time before it became a
    cause celebre in Washington or anyone tried to make it a partisan
    political issue. It wasn't much of a political hot potato when I first
    started working on it. I just was concerned that the system didn't seem
    to be working. And I was most concerned about those who were trapped on
    it and their children and the prospect that their children would be
    trapped on it.
        I think we all have to admit here--we all need a certain level of
    humility today. We are trying to continue a process that I've been
    pushing for 3\1/2\ years. We're trying to get the legal changes we need
    in Federal law that will work to move these folks to a position of
    independence where they can support their children and their lives as
    workers and in families will be stronger.
        But if this were an easy question, we wouldn't have had the 2\1/2\-
    hour discussion with my advisers today and we'd all have a lot more
    answers than we do. But I'm convinced that we're moving in the right
    direction. I'm convinced it's an opportunity we should seize. I'm
    convinced that we have to change the two problems in this bill that are
    not related to welfare reform, that were just sort of put under the big
    shade of the tree here, that are part of this budget strategy with which
    I disagree. And I'm convinced when we bring those things out into the
    light of day we will be able to do it. And I think some Republicans will
    agree with us, and we'll be able to get what we need to do to change it.
        Thank you.

    Note: The President spoke at 2:27 p.m. in the Briefing Room at the White
    House.