    [Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: William J. Clinton (1996, Book II)]
    [August 22, 1996]
    [Pages 1325-1328]
    [From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]

    Remarks on Signing the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity
    Reconciliation Act of 1996 and an Exchange With Reporters
    August 22, 1996

        The President. Thank you very much. Lillie, thank you. Thank you,
    Mr. Vice President; to the members of the Cabinet; all of the Members of
    Congress who are here, thank you very much.
        I'd like to say to Congressman Castle, I'm especially glad to see
    you here because 8 years ago about this time, when you were the Governor
    of Delaware and Governor Carper was the Congressman from Delaware, you
    and I were together at a signing like this.
        Thank you, Senator Long, for coming here. Thank you, Governors
    Romer, Carper, Miller, and Caperton.
        I'd also like to thank Penelope Howard and Janet Ferrel for coming
    here. They, too, have worked their way from welfare to independence, and
    we're honored to have them here.
        I'd like to thank all of the people who worked on this bill who have
    been introduced from our staff and Cabinet, but I'd also like to
    especially thank Bruce Reed, who had a lot to do with working on the
    final compromises of this bill; I thank him.
        Lillie Harden was up there talking, and I want to tell you how she
    happens to be here today. Ten years ago, Governor Castle and I were
    asked to cochair a Governors' task force on welfare reform, and we were
    asked to work together on it. And when we met at Hilton Head in South
    Carolina, we had a little panel, and 41 Governors showed up to listen to
    people who were on welfare from several States. So I asked Carol Rasco
    to find me somebody from our State who had been in one of our welfare
    reform programs and had gone to work. She found Lillie Harden, and
    Lillie showed up at the program.
        And I was conducting this meeting, and I committed a mistake that
    they always tell lawyers never to do: Never ask a question you do not
    know the answer to. [Laughter] But she was doing so well talking about
    it, as you saw how well-spoken she was today, and I said, ``Lillie,
    what's the best thing about being off welfare?'' And she looked me
    straight in the eye and said, ``When my boy goes to school, and they say
    what does your mama do for a living, he can give an answer.'' I have
    never forgotten that. And when I saw the success of all of her children
    and the success that she's had in the past 10 years--I can tell you,
    you've had a bigger impact on me than I've had on you. And I thank you
    for the power of your example, for your family's. And for all of
    America, thank you very much.
        What we are trying to do today is to overcome the flaws of the
    welfare system for the people who are trapped on it. We all know that
    the typical family on welfare today is very different from the one that
    welfare was designed to deal with 60 years ago. We all know that there
    are a lot of good people on welfare who just get off of it in the
    ordinary course of business but that a significant number of people are
    trapped on welfare for a very long time, exiling them from the entire
    community of work that gives structure to our lives.
        Nearly 30 years ago, Robert Kennedy said, ``Work is the meaning of
    what this country is all about. We need it as individuals, we need to
    sense it in our fellow citizens, and we need it as a society and as a
    people.'' He was right then, and it's right now. From now on, our
    Nation's answer to this great social challenge will no longer be a
    never-ending cycle of welfare, it will be the dignity, the power, and
    the ethic of work. Today we are taking an historic chance to make
    welfare what it was meant to be: a second chance, not a way of life.
        The bill I'm about to sign, as I have said many times, is far from
    perfect, but it has come a very long way. Congress sent me two previous
    bills that I strongly believe failed to protect our children and did too
    little to move people from

    [[Page 1326]]

    welfare to work. I vetoed both of them. This bill had broad bipartisan
    support and is much, much better on both counts.
        The new bill restores America's basic bargain of providing
    opportunity and demanding, in return, responsibility. It provides $14
    billion for child care, $4 billion more than the present law does. It is
    good because without the assurance of child care it's all but impossible
    for a mother with young children to go to work. It requires States to
    maintain their own spending on welfare reform and gives them powerful
    performance incentives to place more people on welfare in jobs. It gives
    States the capacity to create jobs by taking money now used for welfare
    checks and giving it to employers as subsidies as incentives to hire
    people. This bill will help people to go to work so they can stop
    drawing a welfare check and start drawing a paycheck.
        It's also better for children. It preserves the national safety net
    of food stamps and school lunches. It drops the deep cuts and the
    devastating changes in child protection, adoption, and help for disabled
    children. It preserves the national guarantee of health care for poor
    children, the disabled, the elderly, and people on welfare--the most
    important preservation of all.
        It includes the tough child support enforcement measures that, as
    far as I know, every Member of Congress and everybody in the
    administration and every thinking person in the country has supported
    for more than 2 years now. It's the most sweeping crackdown on deadbeat
    parents in history. We have succeeded in increasing child support
    collection 40 percent, but over a third of the cases where there's
    delinquencies involve people who cross State lines. For a lot of women
    and children, the only reason they're on welfare today--the only
    reason--is that the father up and walked away when he could have made a
    contribution to the welfare of the children. That is wrong. If every
    parent paid the child support that he or she owes legally today, we
    could move 800,000 women and children off welfare immediately.
        With this bill we say, if you don't pay the child support you owe,
    we'll garnish your wages, take away your driver's license, track you
    across State lines, if necessary, make you work off what you pay--what
    you owe. It is a good thing, and it will help dramatically to reduce
    welfare, increase independence, and reinforce parental responsibility.
        As the Vice President said, we strongly disagree with a couple of
    provisions of this bill. We believe that the nutritional cuts are too
    deep, especially as they affect low-income working people and children.
    We should not be punishing people who are working for a living already;
    we should do everything we can to lift them up and keep them at work and
    help them to support their children. We also believe that the
    congressional leadership insisted on cuts in programs for legal
    immigrants that are far too deep.
        These cuts, however, have nothing to do with the fundamental purpose
    of welfare reform. I signed this bill because this is an historic
    chance, where Republicans and Democrats got together and said, we're
    going to take this historic chance to try to re-create the Nation's
    social bargain with the poor. We're going to try to change the
    parameters of the debate. We're going to make it all new again and see
    if we can't create a system of incentives which reinforce work and
    family and independence. We can change what is wrong. We should not have
    passed this historic opportunity to do what is right.
        And so I want to ask all of you, without regard to party, to think
    through the implications of these other nonwelfare issues on the
    American people, and let's work together in good spirits and good faith
    to remedy what is wrong. We can balance the budget without these cuts.
    But let's not obscure the fundamental purpose of the welfare provisions
    of this legislation, which are good and solid and which can give us at
    least the chance to end the terrible, almost physical isolation of huge
    numbers of poor people and their children from the rest of mainstream
    America. We have to do that.
        Let me also say that there's something really good about this
    legislation. When I sign it, we all have to start again, and this
    becomes everybody's responsibility. After I sign my name to this bill,
    welfare will no longer be a political issue. The two parties cannot
    attack each other over it. Politicians cannot attack poor people over
    it. There are no encrusted habits, systems, and failures that can be
    laid at the foot of someone else. We have to begin again. This is not
    the end of welfare reform, this is the beginning. And we have to all
    assume responsibility. Now that we are saying with this bill we expect
    work, we have to make sure the people have a chance to go to work. If we
    really value work, everybody in this society--businesses, nonprofits,
    religious

    [[Page 1327]]

    institutions, individuals, those in government--all have a
    responsibility to make sure the jobs are there.
        These three women have great stories. Almost everybody on welfare
    would like to have a story like that. And the rest of us now have a
    responsibility to give them that story. We cannot blame the system for
    the jobs they don't have anymore. If it doesn't work now, it's
    everybody's fault: mine, yours, and everybody else. There is no longer a
    system in the way.
        I've worked hard over the past 4 years to create jobs and to steer
    investment into places where there are large numbers of people on
    welfare because there's been no economic recovery. That's what the
    empowerment zone program was all about. That's what the community
    development bank initiative was all about. That's what our urban
    brownfield cleanup initiative was all about, trying to give people the
    means to make a living in areas that had been left behind.
        I think we have to do more here in Washington to do that, and I'll
    have more to say about that later. But let me say again, we have to
    build a new work and family system. And this is everybody's
    responsibility now. The people on welfare are people just like these
    three people we honor here today and their families. They are human
    beings. And we owe it to all of them to give them a chance to come back.
        I talked the other day when the Vice President and I went down to
    Tennessee, and we were working with Congressman Tanner's district; we
    were working on a church that had burned. And there was a pastor there
    from a church in North Carolina that brought a group of his people in to
    work. And he started asking me about welfare reform, and I started
    telling him about it. And I said, ``You know what you ought to do? You
    ought to go tell Governor Hunt that you would hire somebody on welfare
    to work in your church if he would give you the welfare check as a wage
    supplement. You'd double their pay, and you'd keep them employed for a
    year or so and see if you couldn't train them and help their families
    and see if their kids were all right.'' I said, ``Would you do that?''
    He said, ``In a heartbeat.''
        I think there are people all over America like that. I think there
    are people all over America like that. That's what I want all of you to
    be thinking about today: What are we going to do now? This is not over,
    this is just beginning. The Congress deserves our thanks for creating a
    new reality, but we have to fill in the blanks. The Governors asked for
    this responsibility, now they've got to live up to it. There are mayors
    that have responsibilities, county officials that have responsibilities.
    Every employer in this country that ever made a disparaging remark about
    the welfare system needs to think about whether he or she should now
    hire somebody from welfare and go to work, go to the State and say,
    ``Okay, you give me the check. I'll use it as an income supplement. I'll
    train these people. I'll help them to start their lives, and we'll go
    forward from here.''
        Every single person needs to be thinking--every person in America
    tonight who sees a report of this who has ever said a disparaging word
    about the welfare system should now say, ``Okay, that's gone. What is my
    responsibility to make it better?''
        Two days ago we signed a bill increasing the minimum wage here and
    making it easier for people in small businesses to get and keep
    pensions. Yesterday we signed the Kassebaum-Kennedy bill which makes
    health care available to up to 25 million Americans, many of them in
    lower income jobs where they're more vulnerable. The bill I'm signing
    today preserves the increases in the earned-income tax credit for
    working families. It is now clearly better to go to work than to stay on
    welfare--clearly better. Because of actions taken by the Congress in
    this session, it is clearly better. And what we have to do now is to
    make that work a reality.
        I've said this many times, but, you know, most American families
    find that the greatest challenge of their lives is how to do a good job
    raising their kids and do a good job at work. Trying to balance work and
    family is the challenge that most Americans in the workplace face.
    Thankfully, that's the challenge Lillie Harden's had to face for the
    last 10 years. That's just what we want for everybody. We want at least
    the chance to strike the right balance for everybody.
        Today we are ending welfare as we know it. But I hope this day will
    be remembered not for what it ended but for what it began: a new day
    that offers hope, honors responsibility, rewards work, and changes the
    terms of the debate so that no one in America ever feels again the need
    to criticize people who are poor on welfare but instead feels the
    responsibility to reach out to men and women and children who are
    isolated, who need opportunity, and

    [[Page 1328]]

    who are willing to assume responsibility, and give them the opportunity
    and the terms of responsibility.
        Now, I'd like to ask Penelope Howard, Janet Ferrel, Lillie Harden,
    the Governors, and the Members of Congress from both parties who are
    here to come up and join me as I sign the welfare reform bill.

    Tobacco Regulation

        Q. Mr. President, before you sign the bill, could you tell us
    whether you think it's right to regulate tobacco or nicotine as a drug?
        The President. You know, Wolf [Wolf Blitzer, CNN], under the law, I
    have to wait until the OMB makes a recommendation to me. I think we have
    to anticipate things. I can't say more than that right now.

    [At this point, the President signed the legislation.]

    Welfare Reform

        Q. Mr. President, some of your core constituencies are furious with
    you for signing this bill. What do you say to them?
        The President. Just what I said up there. We saved medical care. We
    saved food stamps. We saved child care. We saved the aid to disabled
    children. We saved the school lunch program. We saved the framework of
    support. What we did was to tell the States, now you have to create a
    system to give everyone a chance to go to work who is able-bodied, give
    everyone a chance to be independent. And we did--that is the right thing
    to do. And now welfare is no longer a political football to be kicked
    around. It's a personal responsibility of every American who ever
    criticized the welfare system to help the poor people now to move from
    welfare to work. That's what I say.
        This is going to be a good thing for the country. We're going to
    monitor it, and we're going to fix whatever is wrong with it.
        Q. What guarantees are there that these things will be fixed, Mr.
    President, especially if Republicans remain in control of Congress?
        The President. That's what we have elections for.

    Note: The President spoke at 11:15 a.m. in the Rose Garden at the White
    House. In his remarks, he referred to the following Governors: Tom
    Carper of Delaware, Roy Romer of Colorado, Bob Miller of Nevada, Gaston
    Caperton of West Virginia, and James B. Hunt, Jr., of North Carolina.
    The President also referred to former Senator Russell B. Long and Carol
    H. Rasco, Assistant to the President for Domestic Policy, who was senior
    executive assistant to the Governor when President Clinton was Governor
    of Arkansas. A portion of these remarks could not be verified because
    the tape was incomplete. H.R. 3734, approved August 22, was assigned
    Public Law No. 104-193.