Clinton press statement announcing he will sign welfare reform: transcript

Key points

• Clinton says he will sign the bill because it moves people from welfare to work, though it is far from perfect.
• He objects to deeper food stamp cuts for working families and to cuts in help for legal immigrants, and promises to work to correct them.
• He challenges states to use welfare money for wage subsidies to private employers to create jobs.
• Asked about critics, he says the old system no longer fits today's poverty population and that his advisers disagreed but weighed the merits.
• He says the fixes can be paid for within the budget talks, and he ends by saying the bill is an opportunity to seize.

Chapters

1. 0:10Decision to sign the welfare reform bill
2. 1:48Record on work, child support and welfare rolls
3. 3:50Why this bill is better than the vetoed ones
4. 7:12Problems: food stamp cuts and legal immigrants
5. 10:31Challenge to states and the business community
6. 12:56Q&A: how the decision was made and critics' concerns
7. 15:43Q&A: politics, credit and fixing the budget
8. 20:29Q&A: Democratic legacy and Senator Moynihan
9. 23:44Closing remarks on humility and opportunity

Full transcript

0:10Good afternoon. When I ran for president four years ago, I pledged to end welfare as we know it. I have worked very hard for four 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.

0:44to draw 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 work 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.

1:48Today, 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 three and a half 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've also required teen mothers to stay in school, required federal employees to pay their child support, crack down on people who owe child support, and cross state lines. As a result, child support collections are up 40 percent to 11 billion dollars and there are 1.3 million fewer people on welfare today.

2:40than 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.

3:12It 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 from mothers simply because they were poor, young, and unmarried.

3:50Last 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 health 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.

4:24First, 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 daycare. 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.

4:57And 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 two years ago, the most sweeping crackdown on deadbeat parents in history. If every parent paid

6:01the 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 if 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.

6:38Second, 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.

7:12First, 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. However, the congressional majority insisted on another cut we did not agree to, repealing a reform adopted four years ago in Congress, which was to go into effect next year. It's called the excess shelter reduction, which helped some of our hardest-pressed working families.

7:56Finally, we were going to treat working families with children the same way we would 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.

8:34This 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.

9:05You see that in the debate in the immigration bill, for example, over the Gallagher 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 illegal, of legal immigrants, 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.

9:50I am convinced this would never have passed the loan, 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 genuinely in need through no fault of their own.

10:31This bill must also not let anyone off the hook. The states ask 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.

11:19All 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'm pleased that congressional efforts to gut this tax cut for the hardest-pressed working people have been blocked.

12:04This 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 anti-poverty program is still a job. I want to congratulate the members of Congress and both parties who work 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.

12:56Mr. President, some civil rights groups and children's advocacy groups still say that they believe 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 in the mood in the White House? 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, oh, about 11 o'clock. And we simply, we got everybody in who had an interest in this and we went through every provision.

13:53of 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 our what their views were what our options were and as soon as we finished the meeting I went and had a brief talk with the vice president and with the mr. Panetta and I told them that I had decided on balance I should sign the bill and then we call this press conference I would say to them that if that there are some groups who basically have never agreed with me on this who never agreed that we should do anything they were to give the states much greater flexibility on this if it meant Uh, 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 a $187 a month to a high of $655 a month for a family of three or four. Um, and I think that the system we have is not working.

15:08It 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.

15:43Yes, sir. It seems like 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 on to a Republican initiative? No. First of all, because I don't, you know, if we're doing the right thing, there'll be enough credit to go along, go around, and if we're doing the wrong thing, there'll be enough blame to go around. I'm not worried about that. I've always wanted to work with Senator Dole and others, you know, before he left the Senate, I asked them not to leave the budget negotiations, so I'm not worried about that.

16:27But 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's looked at the evidence that we affected what the New York Times called a quiet revolution in welfare. And we had 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.

16:59And 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 private sector to actually create jobs. You can't tell people to go to work if there's no job out there.

17:29So 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. Yes. 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 spending expenditures is politically impossible.

17:59How would you respond to that? Well I would, 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 dollars less than it was the last time we did our budget calculations. So we've already we've lowered that base 23 billion dollars 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. This I had 41 42 billion dollars in savings this bill has about 57 billion dollars in savings. You could correct all this these problems that I mentioned with money to spare in the gap there.

18:42So, it will, 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 could stand marginally smaller tax cuts, for example, or cuts somewhere else to cure this, the problems of immigrants and children, to cure the nutritional problems. We're not talking about vast amounts of money over a six-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. Yes? In the last couple of 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?

19:17No, I would say there was, I would say that there was, first of all, it was one of, 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 advisors about whether this bill should be signed or vetoed. but 100% of them recognized the power of the arguments on the other side. It was a very moving thing. And today, the conversation was almost 100% about the merits of the bill and not...

19:56The political implications of it, because I think those things are very hard to calculate anyway. I think they're virtually impossible. And 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.

20:29The 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, when I'm convinced, is our last best chance to fundamentally change the system. Jill, go ahead. 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 really cause that overarching question? 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.

21:10But as he has pointed out repeatedly, when welfare was created, the typical welfare recipient was a minor'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. done. 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've 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.

22:10But the nature of the poverty population is so different now that I am convinced we have got 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 suggest. One last question. Yes, sir. Mr. President, you've 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?

22:44Well, I talked to him as recently, I think it was about a week ago. When we went up to the TWA to meet with the TWA families, we talked about it again. but 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 and I'll just have to hope that in in this one case I'm right and he's wrong but 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 but I 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 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.

23:44I 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 three and a half 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 two-and-a-half-hour discussion with my advisors today, and we'd all have a lot more answers than we do.

24:16But 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 Question, Mr. President, please. How do you feel about Japanese trade talks? Your deadline is up today.

Source and licence

Recording: File:President Clinton's Press Statement on Welfare Reform.webm by clintonlibrary42 (Taken on 31 July 1996), via Wikimedia Commons. Licence: Public domain.

The transcript is machine speech-to-text by the TidyTools Audio & video transcriber; the summary, key points and chapters were written by Claude from that transcript. Both may contain errors: check the recording before quoting it.