[Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents Volume 33, Number 21 (Monday, May 26, 1997)]
[Pages 744-748]
[Online from the Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]

<R04>
Remarks Launching the Welfare to Work Partnership

May 20, 1997

    Thank you, George Stinson, for your wonderful introduction, your 
remarks, and most importantly, for your very, very powerful example. I 
thank the Governors, Tom Carper and Tommy Thompson, my former colleagues 
and friends, for being here and for the power of their example. I thank 
the Members of Congress, and most of all, I thank all the business 
leaders who are here, Gerry Greenwald and the leaders of the other 
companies that were with us when we just had 5, and all of you who are 
part of our first 105--thank you all.
    And I want to say a special word of thanks to my friend Eli Segal. 
He'd be a lot richer man if he'd never met me. [Laughter] I have--but I 
have made him America's reigning expert in public startups. [Laughter] 
He is truly the father of AmeriCorps, the national service program that 
I love. And I can say, as I've been around the country now for nearly 
4\1/2\ years, more people have come up to me and said of AmeriCorps, 
that changed my life for the better than anything I have done as 
President, except now this will be more numerous.
    Because now--you know, Eli and I were just sitting around talking 
one day, and he said, ``Now, what can I do for you now?'' And I said, 
``Well, we passed this welfare reform law,'' and I said, ``I really 
believe in it, but I mean, you know, there's no way in the world we're 
going to get there. We've got the deficit, we've got to balance the 
budget, and we can't possibly meet the hiring targets of the welfare 
reform law unless we can organize the private sector and maximize in 
every State all the options to give people incentives to hire people in 
the private sector to move people from welfare to work. Oh, we can get a 
little money to put into the very high unemployment areas for the 
community service jobs and Congress has agreed to do that, but we've got 
to have the private sector.'' And he said, ``We can do that.'' Then he 
found Gerry and the other first 4 that were here, who are here in the 
audience, and then there were 100, and soon there will be 1,000. And I 
thank you all very much.
    I would like to talk about this today, a little bit, from my 
perspective as President, but first let me say that I respect the fact 
that those of you who come here, come here as Americans. You come here 
primarily as business people. Some of you are Republicans;

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some of you are Democrats; some of you probably wish you had never met a 
politician. [Laughter] But you all recognize that this is not a partisan 
issue, that it is a moral obligation for our country. It is America's 
business, and therefore, it must be the work of American business.
    How did we get this goal of moving a million people from welfare to 
work by the year 2000? How did you get here, to make a difference, as 
you can, as you saw from the young women who have been introduced here, 
to help people to move from a lifetime of dependence to one of 
independence, to move from burdening their children with a legacy of 
despair to leaving their children with an inheritance of hope? Well, it 
all goes back to the effort we have made now as a nation. Some of us, as 
you heard the Governors talking, have been involved with this welfare 
reform issue a long time.
    But when I became President, I was convinced that we had to change 
both the economic policy and the social policy of the country if we 
wanted America to work again for everyone; that we had to do something 
to get the deficit down and expand trade and, at the same time, invest 
more money in education and science and technology and research and the 
things that would grow the economy; but that we had to prove that 
America could work again in a fundamental human way. So we had to deal 
with crime. We had to deal with our great diversity and get people to 
come together across the lines that divide us and a stronger community. 
We had to deal with the conflicts people feel with family and work, that 
working people are having trouble raising their kids too and meeting 
their obligations at work.
    And a big part of this mosaic was to change the culture of 
dependency that had arisen around our welfare system. There was lots of 
evidence that nobody really liked the welfare system very much, 
especially the people that were on it. There was also, frankly, a lot of 
evidence that, for about half the people that were on it, it worked 
reasonably well, just because, for those people, you'd have to 
practically throw them up against a wall to stop them from doing all 
right in life--people that hit a rough patch in life, and they'd be on 
public assistance and they'd go on. But increasingly, to the point where 
we wound up with slightly more than half of people on welfare were long-
term dependents who felt literally unable to come back into the 
mainstream of American life.
    Well, we've seen a lot of progress in the last few years, and a lot 
of it's been helped by the fact that we've got the lowest unemployment 
rate in 24 years, and for the first time ever, our economy produced 
about 12 million jobs in a 4 year administration period. In that time, 
the welfare rolls had their biggest reduction ever in that short a 
period of time. And so I began to think, well, maybe we can make the 
welfare reform targets. And then I realized--I asked the Council of 
Economic Advisers to study this, and I said ``How much of this welfare 
decline is due to the economy doing better, and how much of it is due to 
the fact that most States now are really working hard on welfare reform 
with us? They've gotten waivers from the Federal Government to get out 
from under rules and regulations and move people to work.''
    And the study indicated that about 40 percent--a little more--of the 
people moved from welfare to work because the economy got better and 
just--the labor markets got tighter. About over a third, more or less, 
got there because most States were aggressively working with us either 
statewide or in parts of their States on welfare reform, and about a 
quarter got there for some other reason. But one of the reasons was that 
child support collections were increased by 50 percent in the last 4 
years.
    So then we said, ``Okay, let's change. Let's go another step. Let's 
tell people that if they're able-bodied, they can only have 5 years of 
welfare over the course of a lifetime and no more than 2 years at one 
time, and let's give the States responsibility and the power and the 
money to design State by State a welfare reform system that will work 
and, in effect, will have to be designed community by community.'' That 
was the import of the welfare reform law. And in that law, as the 
Congressman here will tell you, they set up very strict targets. But 
essentially, about 40 percent of the population has to be fully into 
this law over the next 4 years. That's how we got to this burden you're 
undertaking, be

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cause I want all of you who signed on to understand what is at stake 
here.
    Now, what that means, bottom line, is that we have to move about 
another 900,000 to one million people in the work force in the next 4 
years to meet the requirements of the law, which will move about 2.5 
million people off welfare, because the average welfare family is about 
2.5, 2.6 million, something like that.
    Now, if we produce another 12 million jobs, we'll get close anyway. 
But it would be the first time in history that we ever did it 8 years in 
a row, since we've only done it once 4 years in a row, and we just came 
out of that. Maybe we can do it. And I'd be the last to say we couldn't. 
But even if we did that--here's the point I want to make--even if we did 
that, if we don't have people like this man and like all of you, the 
people who would come off would be those who might make it off under any 
circumstances. And what we are trying to do here, the import of the 
reform welfare law, was to change, challenge, and end the culture of 
poverty, which means you have to find people who don't think they can 
make it, who have no idea what a resume is, who never had to show up on 
time before.
    There are people in this audience today have helped find people like 
that before, and I wish all of you who have actually hired people from 
welfare to work were up here speaking today. But what this is about is 
saying that we are going to go beyond what the normal economy would 
produce; we're going to make an extra effort. And the Government will do 
its part, but it has to be led by the private sector.
    Now, in April, the Vice President and I announced that we would hire 
at least 10,000 welfare recipients in the next 4 years without replacing 
anybody, just through job turnover, in an area where we will expand 
employment, which I think is a pretty good thing in a Federal Government 
that's 300,000 people smaller than it was 4 years ago when I took 
office. We'll do 10,000. And with the help of Secretary Slater and some 
of our other Cabinet Secretaries, we're going to work with our private 
contractors, the people that do direct business with us, to hire 10,000 
more. And we believe we can do that.
    When we reached the budget agreement--historic budget agreement with 
the leaders of Congress to balance the budget, it not only will give us 
the first balanced budget in almost 30 years, it contains the elements 
that we agree jointly should be a part of our contribution to your 
welfare reform effort. So let me mention them.
    First, it provides, as I said earlier, $3 billion to help cities and 
States to create jobs and subsidize jobs, either community service jobs 
or subsidized private sector jobs. That money will be targeted to very 
high unemployment areas where you cannot reasonably expect any effort to 
deal with the time deadlines.
    Second, it encourages employers to hire and retain welfare 
recipients by giving a 50 percent tax credit over 2 years for up to 
$10,000 in wages for every long-term welfare recipient hired that does 
not displace someone else.
    Now, these two things will help. But in addition to that, we have 
other big problems. One of the biggest problems that we think we need to 
get more help on is transportation. You heard Governor Carper talking 
about child care. There's $4 billion more in the welfare reform bill for 
child care. But there was a study that came out of Georgia recently 
which said that of the entry-level jobs in the inner city in fast food 
establishments, for example, something like, I don't know, 80 percent of 
the jobs were held by people who were low-income adults. In the suburbs, 
just a little more than half of those jobs were held by people who were 
low-income adults. The transportation barrier kept them from maximizing 
their ability to move from dependence to independence.
    So since two out of three new jobs are created in the suburbs and a 
significant percentage of people on welfare live in urban centers, it is 
very important that we do more on that. Today, we're awarding seed 
grants to 24 States to develop transportation schemes to help people go 
and get the jobs where the jobs are. And the legislation that we 
proposed in the new transportation bill would provide $600 million to 
help States and local communities put these plans into action. It also 
was approved in the budget agreement, so that's a very, very good thing.

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    And let me just say one other thing since we've got two very 
innovative Governors here, and Governor Thompson, you've seen, they've 
had a huge drop in Wisconsin and a sizeable drop in Delaware. If you 
look around the country, there's still a lot of unevenness in how much 
the welfare rolls have dropped. Part of it is due to underlying economic 
conditions. But part of it is due to how comprehensive the efforts are.
    One of the things that I think is important is that the States 
really do get together and steal the best ideas from each other. You 
should know that among other things, the States now have the power under 
this new law to take what was the welfare check and give all or part of 
it to an employer for a period of time as an employment or training 
subsidy. And a lot of States are doing that as well. There are lots of 
options out there.
    So I want to say to all of you who are part of this first hundred, 
you have to work with the Governors and with the State legislators, too, 
and with the mayors and the community-based operators. We've got to have 
a system here that's community-based.
    Finally, let me say that if you look at the numbers, a million 
people sounds like a huge amount over 4 years, but in an American 
economy that has well over 100 million people in the work force, that 
produced 12 million new jobs in the last 4 years, with these extra 
incentives around the edges, with committed private sector employers, 
small, medium, and large businesses, this is not a problem. This is a 
startup enterprise that can be stunningly successful. But as far as I 
know, there is no exact precedent for it in our history. There has never 
been anything quite like this, and this is something we're trying to do 
together. I will do my best to do my part, but I thank all of you from 
the bottom of my heart, starting with Eli and Gerry and encompassing all 
of you, for doing your part.
    You know, I've tried to learn about what a lot of you are doing. And 
Mr. Marriott here has this Pathways to Independence program that 
supports the transition from welfare to work. I've seen that. Then I 
meet a man with a small business, and more than half his employees are 
people who were on welfare. We were in Kansas City not very long ago, 
and I met a man who stores data for the Federal Government, way out in 
Kansas City--that's what computers do for you these days--and he had 25 
people in his business, in this data storage business, and 5 of them 
were people that he had hired from the welfare rolls. Every time he 
expands now, he tries to hire somebody from welfare.
    I know we can do this. I just want to say to you, when you leave 
here today I want you to imagine what it is you would like your country 
to look like when we enter the 21st century. There will always be people 
who, for one reason or another, are out of work. There will always be 
people who, for one reason or another, have a rough spot in life. And as 
long as we're a nation of immigrants, there will always be people who 
start out below whatever the Federally established poverty line is. But 
we do not have to have a country with an intolerable crime rate, with an 
intolerable failure rate among young people in poverty and addiction and 
violence. And we do not have to have a country with a permanent culture 
of dependence. We do not have to have that.
    We just had this service summit in Philadelphia where we said, 
``We're all going to get together, without regard to party, try to give 
every child in America five things, a healthy start in life, a safe 
place to grow up, a decent education, a mentor with a caring adult, and 
a chance to serve and give something back, no matter how modest the 
child's resources are.''
    I'll tell you, we could do more to get that done by liberating their 
parents from the culture of dependence than anything else. You are 
making the America we ought to have for the 21st century. And I hope 
when you leave here today, you'll be even more dedicated to it because 
the future of our children is riding on it.
    Thank you, and God bless you.

Note: The President spoke at 2:50 p.m. in the East Room at the White 
House. In his remarks, he referred to George R. Stinson, chairman and 
president, General Converters and Assemblers, Inc.; Gov. Tom Carper of 
Delaware; Gov. Tommy G. Thompson of Wisconsin; Gerald Greenwald, chief 
executive officer, United Airlines; Eli Segal, president, Welfare to 
Work Partnership; J.W.

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Marriott, Jr., chairman, president, and chief executive officer, 
Marriott International, Inc.